Idomeneo: A Special Masterpiece
By Andrew Porter
In a great composer’s oeuvre there is often an early work that seems to catch the first full force of his individual genius—a work to which he brings all the skills he has so far learned, in which his invention seems ablaze as with marvelous technique and impassioned ambition he realizes something he has long dreamed of doing, using “conventions” when they suit his purposes, transcending them in the afflatus of excited composition. With Verdi, such a work is Nabucco. And with Mozart, Idomeneo.
Mozart composed Idomeneo for Munich, in 1780–81, where it was performed two days after his twenty-fifth birthday. The opera was a success in Munich but (unlike Verdi’s Nabucco) did not go on to become an international success. In fact there was only one further production during Mozart’s lifetime, and that was at a private, apparently non-professional performance in Vienna, five years later. Idomeneo was not altogether forgotten. There were sporadic revivals of the opera during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, and a clutch of them in 1931, marking the 150th anniversary of the first performance: Richard Strauss’s performing version was done in Munich (with Elisabeth Schumann as Ilia), Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari’s version was also done in Vienna, and the Italian original was revived in Basel. But only in day has Idomeneo joined the repertory.
Charles Rosen wrote not long ago, “As for Idomeneo, if it could have been saved for the repertory, it would have happened by now.” But it has happened. It happened a few decades ago. There is scarcely an opera company now that has not staged Idomeneo. (San Francisco Opera first played it in 1977, then again in 1989 and 1999.) Early in this century, the Mozart “canon” on the world’s stages was Le Nozze di Fibaro, Don Giovanni, and The Magic Flute. Then Così fan tutte and Die Entführung [aus dem Serail] were rediscovered. (They were rarities, not repertory pieces, in my youth.) Next came the revelation of Idomeneo. And then the long-underrated La Clemenza di Tito, the Prague “festival” opera commissioned for a coronation, in which Mozart could return to the “serious” genre unfavored in his Vienna and, as in Idomeneo ten years before, write another great opera seria fashioned to his personal prescriptions.
Idomeneo, to be sure, had not lacked admirers and champions. Back in 1913, as the First World War loomed—and before Idomeneo had ever been heard in Britain—Edward Dent in his Mozart Operas devoted two eloquent chapters to the work. And Dent’s second edition of the book, dated 1946, ends, “More than ever now, in these times of turmoil and confusion, do we need the professional and noble sincerity of Idomeneo.” David Cairns took up the theme in 1972:
To know Idomeneo is to discover one of the marvels of dramatic music; yet it is only now, two centuries after its composition, that the work’s greatness is beginning to be appreciated . . . Humanity may need, as ever before, the sanity, the profound life-renewing laughter of Mozart’s comedies, to prevent it from taking itself too seriously. But it needs, too, that handful of special masterpieces whose qualities of courage, hope, compassion, and above all honesty of vision make them its natural parables and sacred texts, from which it may learn to see the truth about itself . . . Idomeneo is one of those works.
The story of the opera’s making has often been told. It bears telling again. Many different threads, musical, biographical, practical, came together in its creation. In his youth, Mozart had composed two opera serie for the Teatro Regio Ducale (the predecessor of La Scala) in Milan: Mitridate, Re di Ponto in 1770 and Lucio Silla in 1772. Both of them contain great, powerful music; stirring, beautiful arias. Both have been prominently and successfully revived in our day. Five years later, in August of 1777, Mozart, accompanied by his mother, embarked upon the long tour that proved a turning point in his life. He was twenty-one, unmarried, musically mature, and eager to break free from both the circumscribed musical life of Salzburg and his dominating father. From October to March of the following year he was in Mannheim, where he fell in love with the singer Aloysia Weber and became friendly with the singers and instrumentalists of Elector Carl Theodor’s famous musical establishment. The Elector also maintained a French theatrical troupe; he had a great library, the Biblioteca Palatina, and a celebrated Antiquensaal; Niccolò Jomelli, Tommaso Traetta, and Johann Christian Bach had composed grand tragic operas for his large, splendid theater. When Mozart met the Elector, he said, “My fondest wish is to compose an opera for here.” In February he wrote to his father, “Forget what I said not wanting to write operas. I am eager to write one … but Italian, not German, and seria, not buffa.” Then three days later he wrote, “Writing an opera is now my one burning ambition—but French rather than German, and Italian better than either.”
Chivvied by his father (who required progress reports back to Salzburg every few days, and replied to them with advice, exhortation, and admonishment), Mozart moved on to Paris. Here he was able to witness the greatness of Gluck’s tragic operas, so different both in temper and technique from Italian opera seria unreformed (yet not so far from a great scene in Mozart’s own Lucio Silla). On July 3 his mother died, and in the small hours of the morning, after her five-hour death agony, he wrote the remarkable letter to his father in which he says only that his mother is desperately ill, rattles on at length about his new symphony and its performance, and then talks about his opera plans: “It is very difficult to find a good libretto. The old ones, which are the best, are not adapted to the modern style, and the new ones are all quite useless.” Then on July 31: “I must write a grand opera or none at all”—adding that the Mannheim musical establishment is about to be moved to Munich (where Carl Theodor had succeeded to the Wittelsbach throne), and that Aloysia Weber may become a prima donna there.
In September he left Paris, making his way back to Salzburg in slow stages, by way of Mannheim and Munich. In late December he reached Munich, where he renewed acquaintance with the Mannheim musicians—and learned that Aloysia had jilted him. In January he was back in the Salzburg he detested. The flood of letters ceases, to be resumed only in November of 1780, when Mozart went to Munich to complete Idomeneo and bring it to the stage.
For five years—the longest opera-less period of his career—Mozart had not written an opera. La Finta Giardiniera, an opera buffa that he invested with episodes of keenest psychological poignancy, and Il Re Pastore, a masterly Metastasio setting, had both appeared in 1775; Zaïde, a German Singspiel begun in 1779, was left unfinished. Idomeneo had a long genesis. It was born from Mozart’s discoveries, during those five months in Mannheim and six months in Paris, of what a serious musical drama, composed for and executed by a stable, well-rehearsed company might be; from Gluck’s grandeur (but suffused, dare one say, with Mozart’s more copious invention); from the desire to create for and with the “Mannheimers,” both the singers and the instrumentalists, whom he liked and admired; and from his reluctance to struggle on in what he considered a musically provincial town, an unsatisfactory post in the Archbishop’s service, and, we can surely add, the shadow of a very demanding father.
Sent forth to win fame and honor, he had achieved neither in large measure. He had, at the age of twenty-one, been away from his father for the first time in his life. He had assisted at his mother’s deathbed, far from home. He had fallen in love and been rejected. We might say that he had grown up. The ways of genius are strange. Psycho-biography is often suspect, and psycho-criticism even more so. (Do we know why Verdi was drawn again and again to dramas about father-daugther relationships, or Wagner to brother-sister ones?) But composers do choose their own librettos—or, as Verdi once put it, librettos seem to choose them and to insist on being set. (When composers choose badly, the music usually shows it.) They also shape their chosen material; Mozart did much to shape that of Idomeneo. It would be near-perverse not to discern Mozart’s response to a drama in which a father resolves to sacrifice his son, and the son is prepared to sacrifice himself for his father, but which ends with the father’s resignation of all authority to that son—with, moreover, his chosen bride beside him. That happy ending was Mozart’s own contribution to his source material. In the “old libretto” from which Idomeneo was fashioned, Idamante was slain.
Before embarking on Idomeneo, Mozart had returned to nearly two years of what he must have regarded as servitude in Salzburg. Soon after its performance, he left his Salzburg employment, engaged himself to and then married Aloysia Weber’s sister Constanze, and set up in Vienna as an independent, freelance composer, performer, and teacher. When he and his wife returned to Salzburg to pay their respects to father Leopold, there was a family performance of the quartet from Idomeneo, which begins with the son’s “Andrò, ramingo e solo” (“Alone I’ll go to wander”). Leopold sang the father, Idomeneo; Mozart sang the son, Idamante; his bride Constanze sang Ilia, Idamante’s beloved; and Mozart’s sister, Nannerl, was the Elettra. Nannerl tells us that Mozart “was so overcome that he burst into tears and quitted the chamber, and it was some time before I could console him.” Father-son bonds are not easily broken. Perhaps we should not make too much of this. Yet the changes that were made to the source plot do seem significant.
The source was Antoine Dancher’s Idomenée, a tragédie lyrique set by André Campra in 1712. But in Campra’s opera Idomenée—in a fit of madness, it is true, brought on by the gods at Electre’s request—does kill his son. No Oracle intervenes to save the youth. Ilione (Ilia) does not offer herself as an alternative victim (although she does so later when Idomenée is preparing to kill himself). Mozart’s librettist, the Abbé Gianbattista Varesco, a chaplain of Salzburg Cathedral, followed Danchet’s action for two acts and then provided the new ending. That he worked to Mozart’s prescription, under the young composer’s orders, seems clear enough from the tone of the correspondence that passed between Munich and Salzburg as the opera assumed its final shape. But not only the ending was altered. Generalized Metastasian moralizing was scrapped in favor of personal, passionate statement.
That Idomeneo correspondence, three months of ample and lively exchange of letters between Munich and Salzburg, between Mozart and father Leopold, provides our fullest account of a Mozart opera in the process of composition. As a verbal key to the workings of a composer’s mind it is something to set beside the Verdi-Somma, the Verdi-Boito, and the Strauss-Hofmannsthal exchanges. Mozart’s letters, wonderfully vivid, deal with large matters of construction and small matters of diction (along with such practical cares as sending a pair of socks and getting a suit turned). Trumpet and horn mutes, rather surprisingly unavailable in Munich, are ordered from “provincial” Salzburg. November 23rd, while Mozart is in mid-letter, Domenico de Panzacchi, the Arbace, knocks on the door and enters with the suggestion, made “very meekly,” that the worlds “Se cola” might sing better as “Se la sa” — and his suggestion gets into the score. Anton Raaff, the Idomeneo, is worried by the large number of i’s Varesco has used in his final aria, “Torna la pace”: “rinvigorir” and “viemmi a ringiovinir.” “Signor Raaff is far too pernickety” was Leopold’s reply, but in the revised text of the aria the string of i’s gets written out; “viemmi a ringiovinir” becomes “nuovo vigor gli da,” and Raaff is able to color the phrase with different vowels. But before the first night the whole aria was cut!
So was much else: notably large sections of recitative in the Idomeneo-Idamante first meeting (because, Mozart said, Raaff was a stick and Vincenzo del Prato, the young Idamante, was hopeless onstage); Idomeneo-Arbace recitative at the start of the second act; and in the third act, besides “Torna la pace,” Idamante’s aria “No, la morte,” some powerful accompanied recitative for Ilia as she presents herself as an alternative victim, and—one of Mozart’s cuts that has seldom been observed—Elettra’s great, show-stopping aria “D’Oreste, d’Ajace.” (Mozart thought it dramatically absurd that everyone else should just stand about while Elettra sang the show-stopper.) In addition, the two choral prayers of the third act—magnificent pieces—were reduced each to its opening strophe. The Oracle’s utterance was reduced from 70 to 44, to 31, and eventually to just nine measures. “If the speech of the Ghost in Hamlet were not so long it would be more effective,” Mozart wrote to his father.
The Abbé Varesco’s libretto was printed in full, without Mozart’s cuts, and when Mozart’s Idomeneo was published it included the great music that he had composed but then jettisoned while he brought the opera to performance. Only in 1967 did Daniel Heartz draw attention to another, different Munich libretto, cut down to correspond with what was actually performed at the premiere. As the editor of Idomeneo for the New Mozart Edition, Heartz banished the passages that Mozart cut into an appendix. But not quite all of them: in his main text he left the choral prayers (which Mozart had cut) in full, opining that their abridgement was due to “the special circumstances of the Munich premiere.”
He made a personal judgment. Like many great operas, Idomeneo does not have a fixed, definitive text. (For the Vienna performance, Mozart adjusted Idamante’s castrato role for a tenor, and wrote a new aria for Idamante and a new Ilia-Idamante duet.) Others have not unreasonably concluded that “the special circumstances of the Munich premiere” prompted cuts that might not have been made had the stage-stodgy raff as Idomeneo (“like a statue,” Mozart said) and the inadequate castrato Del Prato, the Idamante, been stronger performers. Most modern performances of Idomeneo include some of the great music that Mozart, reaching a peak in his powers, composed but then omitted in the “special circumstances” of particular performance.
Reactions to opera are personal. Let me be personal for a moment. As a schoolboy, the first three operas I heard were Idomeneo, The Magic Flute, and Gluck’s Iphigenia in Tauris—sung to me in English, directly stirring. They showed what opera could be. Then, as an undergraduate, I was rehearsal accompanist for the Oxford University Opera Club’s production of Idomeneo. Jack Westrup, who as an undergraduate had in 1925 founded the OUOC with the first staging since 1607 of Monteverdi’s Orfeo, returned in 1947 as Oxford’s Heather Professor and conducted an OUOC Idomeneo. Anthony Besch was the director; Denis Stevens the concert-master. The opera caused as much stir as Monteverdi’s Orfeo had done. British critics hailed a masterpiece newly revealed. Idomeneo reappeared soon at Glyndebourne—Birgit Nilsson the Elettra, Sena Jurinac the Ilia, later young Luciano Pavarotti the Idamante of a 1964 revival. And from Glyndebourne Idomeneo swiftly made its way through the world’s theaters.
Mozart chose to set a version of a basic tragic subject. Agamemnon and Iphigenia (Algarotti’s “ideal matter” for serious opera), Jephtha and his daughter, Abraham and Isaac—and Idomeneo and Idamante, protagonists torn between sworn obligation and paternal love. Mozart set the drama with passionate directness, intent upon his own vision of what an opera seria could and should be. Gluck-inspired, and fired too by the prowess of the Mannheim singers and the woodwind soloists, he composed a “continuous” drama, again and again subverting any applause-catching closes.
Opera at its highest is a compound of, among much else, vocal gesture that touches the heart and eloquent instrumental lines and timbres. One cannot listen unmoved to the plights of gentle Ilia, woodwind-uttered while she sings, or to those of the fierce, stricken Elettra, or to Idomeneo’s anguish, or to the powerful ensemble scenes. Idomeneo is opera at its highest.
This article was published by San Francisco Opera in 1999.
