 
Robert Maschka: Mozart's Idomeneo - 'given birth to in Salzburg'
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Mozart's Idomeneo: "An opera overloaded with accompagnato" and given birth to in Salzburg
The premiere of Mozart's Idomeneo took place on 29th January, 1781, in the Residenztheater in Munich, which had been built by François Cuvilliés. The public at large were given notice of the event three days later in a single, cryptic comment in the newspaper Münchner Staats-, gelehrten und vermischten Nachrichten, which somewhat derogatorily reported that the "concept" (what was meant was the libretto), "music and translation were brought forth Salzburg". Neither the composer nor the librettist (Giambattista Varesco, 1735-1805, court poet and chaplain in Salzburg) are mentioned by name. Five years later Mozart produced his revised version of Idomeneo in Vienna in private circles and in concert performance. Again it was poorly received and earned negative criticism. The Salzburg-Vienna paper Pfeffer und Salz commented laconically on 5th April, 1786, that "Mozart's opera was overloaded with accompagnato... and did not receive the applause which his works otherwise deserve".
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| Karl-Ernest Herrmann's costume design for Idamantes |
Too much music
Too much music: for later generations this weakness remained the predominant characteristic of the work. If one just considered the libretto, an adaptation by Varesco of Antoine Danchet's tragédie lyrique Idomenée (which had been set to music by André Campra in 1712), the work would scarcely command any attention today. For although the dramatic knot around the vow sworn by Idomeneo as he is shipwrecked on his way home from the Trojan War is skilfully constructed - the King of Crete promises to sacrifice a human victim to the sea-god Neptune if he is saved and, to his horror, the victim turns out to be his own son, Idamantes - the plot nevertheless reflects the dramaturgical weakness of the work on which the libretto is based. As, in the last analysis, it is only the favour of the gods can bring about a denouement of the hopeless situation, the protagonists are either meaninglessly engaged for three acts in alibi activities or forced simply to react. Nonetheless Mozart, despite the fact that he had had to revise innumerable details, was not dissatisfied with the libretto. In one of his letters to his father he praised the third act thus: "There is hardly a scene in it that isn't extremely interesting".
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| Karl-Ernst Herrmann: sketch |
Grief and rebellion
The protagonists in the work are under constraint and are not in a position to act freely. This gives Mozart greater liberty to concentrate musically on their inner life. The powerless rebellion of the king against the raging Neptune is only made credible through the power of the music. The same applies to the grief of Idamantes, who is driven to the verge of suicide by the incomprehensible behaviour of his father as the latter tries to keep the horrible truth secret. And the same also applies to the despair that drives Electra almost to madness as she is forced to accept the hopelessness of her own position when she witnesses the burgeoning love between Idamantes and the Trojan princess, Ilia. And the same applies to Ilia's inner conflict as she experiences her love for the son of a Greek king as a betrayal of her own people. Basically, then, Mozart's music in Idomeneo concentrates on one single theme, viz. the suffering of the individual human being. Paradigmatic thereof is the moving quartet of the third act where Mozart brings the four main characters in the opera together. But as well as that, the sorrow and suffering also weigh upon the common folk as they are helplessly exposed to Neptune's visitations. The predominance of the music that is characteristic of Mozart's Idomeneo is manifest not least in the exciting chorus parts with the colourful deployment of the orchestra. But as all the scenes in the drama have been subjected to such predominantly musical interpretation there occurs, in place of the recitative-and-exit-aria scheme characteristic of the traditional opera seria, a flexible interchange between secco recitative, accompagnato and aria which gives rise to scene sequences that develop out of dramatic/ musical necessity. It was a development that obviously fell on deaf ears in Mozart's time.