Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Idomeneo seems to be turning up more in the opera repertoire, where it has maintained a fitful presence since its revival in Germany in the 1920s. The cynic may suggest that’s because it is an easy opera to put on with a collection of star singers and minimal stage rehearsals – in other words, that it suits the jet-setting conditions of the international opera scene. Does it matter whether the audience grasps what is going on in all those recitatives? They've probably come for Mozart's music anyway, not for dramaturgical completeness. A concert-in-costume will do – back to the conditions late in the 19th century when a collection of superstars might give the same treatment to Don Giovanni, even less suitably.
What thrust Idomeneo inescapably under the noses of opera administrators was the advocacy of musicians and scholars, who have been saying for so long that this is one of Mozart’s greatest things. Conductors, in particular, pushed for it to be staged, and not just any conductors, but Richard Strauss, Fritz Busch, Colin Davis, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, and others of their calibre. Yet audiences remain lukewarm. I last saw Idomeneo at New York’s Met in 1986, in an intelligent production by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, conducted by Jeffrey Tate, and with Frederica von Stade as Idamante, Hildegard Behrens as Electra, and David Rendall as Idomeneo. The well-heeled audience sat on their hands, and I sensed they were bored. What is the problem?
The usual answer, trotted out even before Idomeneo began to be revived, goes like this: by 1780 opera seria was a dead or dying form; Mozart, stimulated by the commission from the Munich Court, did his very best to breathe new life into it, but even he could not make it viable, and he was handicapped by the conventions, by the stupidity and vanity of singers, indeed by the whole ancien régime of opera, supposedly swept away by Gluck’s reforms. Mozart would return only once more to opera seria, not (it is said) by choice, but out of necessity. Having tried all he could with Idomeneo, he knew there was nothing to be done, so in La clemenza di Tito he merely went through the motions, and the result is a cold museum piece, without even Idomeneo's admitted musical virtues.
Having read this, please delete it from your mind – it belongs in the wastebasket of prejudices and received ideas. But as I’ve already implied, this nonsense cannot be refuted simply by praising Idomeneo in every respect – the truth, as usual, is more complex and more interesting.
Scholars studying Idomeneo sometimes seem to confuse well-documented artistic intentions with results – we know more about the composition of this opera than about any other by Mozart. Mozart went to Munich in late 1780 to finish writing Idomeneo, to coach the singers in their parts, and to supervise the rehearsals; his father Leopold did not join him from Salzburg until shortly before the opening, and as a result there is extensive correspondence between father and son, wonderfully informative about how an opera was prepared. Furthermore, the librettist Giambattista Varesco was a Salzburg cleric, and Leopold was the go-between, so the documentation is unusually full about both words and music.
Mozart's score for Idomeneo, showing crossings-out.
These letters reveal Mozart, as might be expected, very much a man of the theatre, concerned that words and music should work together for the stage effect. We do him an injustice if we content ourselves with praising his music. To give just one example of many: after the first rehearsal of the Act III recitatives in the theatre, Mozart wrote to his father
‘...the libretto is too long and consequently the music also (an opinion I have always held). Therefore Idamante's aria ‘No, la morte io non pavento’ is to be omitted; in any case it is out of place there. But those who have heard it with the music deplore this...The speech of the oracle is still far too long and I have therefore shortened it; but Varesco need not know anything of this, because it will be printed just as he wrote it’.
Mozart willingly dropped even his best musical ideas in favor of stage-worthiness: in any case so rich is his musical invention that Idomeneo, a long piece, contains more great music, in the judgment of some, than any other Mozart opera. One is reminded of the Emperor Joseph II’s comment to Mozart about The Abduction from the Seraglio: ‘too many notes, my dear Mozart, and too beautiful for our ears’, the point of which, often misunderstood, was that the music was too complex for an opera in the German language – this was an aspect of the Emperor’s campaign for vernacular music theatre.
More apropos for Idomeneo is what composer André Campra is said to have remarked in 1733 about Rameau’s first opera, Hippolyte et Aricie, that it contained enough music for 10 operas – ‘he will drive us all from the stage’. It was Campra who set to music as Idoménée (1712) the original on which Varesco based the libretto for Idomeneo. This was no accident, because the type of opera the Munich court favoured and commissioned from Mozart was close to the French tragédie lyrique genre, as composed by Rameau, and before him Campra.
Not your typical opera seria
Idomeneo is by no means typical of opera seria. Atypical, for example, is the large part the chorus plays (chorus was extremely rare in Italian opera seria – when there was any chorus, it was often just the principals singing together).
Song and dance often go together in Idomeneo, as in Rameau – elaborate ballet music was required, which increased the pressure on Mozart’s available time. So we should be careful how we interpret his comment to his father ‘my time has been taken up with those confounded dances. Laus Deo – I have got rid of them at last!'. Mozart enjoyed dance music, and the ballet music for Idomeneo also witnesses to his delight in writing for the orchestra that would play the opera – the famous Mannheim orchestra, including many of Mozart’s friends, recently transferred to Munich: ‘Do come soon’, writes Mozart to his father, ‘and hear and admire the orchestra’.
The danced Chaconne and Pas seul composed for Idomeneo run over the gamut of orchestral devices made famous by the Mannheim orchestra and the composers who wrote for it. In the concert hall this music seems unusually gestural for Mozart. It is never heard as part of the opera these days, partly because the opera is already so long, partly because even though there’s such a wealth of documentation about Idomeneo it doesn't reveal exactly where in the opera the ballet was placed – probably at the end as part of the celebration, the lieto fine or happy ending (obligatory even in tragedy). Besides, the opera gives plenty of opportunity for dancing already, in the choruses, such as those which conclude Act I.
The ballet music quotes from Gluck’s opera Iphigénie en Tauride, suggesting that Mozart was familiar with that ‘reform’ opera. But Daniel Heartz, the leading modern authority on Idomeneo, implies that both Gluck’s work and Mozart’s are essentially adaptations of the French tragédie lyrique tradition from Lully through Campra to Rameau – in other words that Idomeneo isn’t opera seria at all. It remains true that the singers Mozart had to deal with were very much from the opera seria mould (even down to biology – the Idamante, Vincenzo dal Prato, was a male soprano castrato, and this has caused musical and casting problems ever since).
Audience expectations, too, were important for how Idomeneo would be received – what was right in Munich, for example, was wrong in Vienna. This throws light on Mozart’s desire to revive in Vienna what he knew to be so fine, and the adaptations he made for a semi-private performance of Idomeneo there in 1786 (with a tenor Idamante).
Intended for a sophisticated audience
Notice that I haven’t discussed the plot of Idomeneo – could it be that the problem with the opera is that’s it a dull story unconvincingly brought to the stage? Hardly – but the opera was intended for a sophisticated audience very familiar with the story in its Biblical and classical versions – of a ruler or leader (Jepthah, Idomeneo) who in extremis vows to make a human sacrifice to God, and is confronted with the horrible necessity of sacrificing his own offspring. Everyone knows what is going to happen – the main interest is in how composer and librettist will present the events.
A leisurely time-scale is assumed; debates between Mozart and his father often hinge on this point, as when Wolfgang suggests, concerning the subterranean voice ‘If the speech of the Ghost in Hamlet were not so long, it would be far more effective’. Both Mozarts had probably seen Hamlet recently, when Schikaneder’s troupe produced it in Salzburg in 1780.
The younger Mozart, experiencing a variety of theatrical genres, was shifting the ‘classical’ conventions of Italian-language opera towards something more dynamically dramatic. Mozart’s frustration can be sensed with Raaff, the famous but veteran tenor for whom he was obliged to compose the title role of Idomeneo. The aria ‘Vedrommi intorno’, for example, Mozart describes as a commonplace, i.e. conventional aria, ‘good and beautiful’, he says, ‘but if I had written it for Zonca, it would have suited the words much better’. Zonca was a bass, and giving the title role to a bass-voice would have been even more unusual than giving it to a tenor. Raaff, says Mozart ‘is so tied to old fashioned routine that flesh and blood cannot stand it.’ Nevertheless, his big set-piece aria ‘Fuor del mar’, Mozart says, is well-adapted to the words and ‘on the whole the most superb aria in the opera’.
The problem was not with the set-pieces, but with moving the drama along: ‘Raaff and dal Prato spoil the recitative by singing it without any spirit or fire, and so monotonously. They are the most wretched actors that ever walked on a stage'. Mozart in Idomeneo's recitatives seems to be anticipating the singers’ sluggishness – compared with other Mozart operas a striking feature of Idomeneo is its musical continuity. Very often Mozart avoids a perfect cadence, or any cadence at all, between recitative and aria: indeed, as the opera’s curtain rises Ilia’s recitative comes straight out of the orchestral decrescendo at the end of the overture.
The orchestra plays in a very high proportion of the recitatives – no wonder Cannabich, their conductor, said to Mozart ‘We shall have to rehearse like the deuce’. Alfred Einstein wrote that the score of Idomeneo is one ‘which one never tires of studying and which will always remain a source of delight to every true musician, a veritable explosion of the power of musical invention’.
The public hasn’t learnt to love it, however, and according to John Steane this is because ‘Idomeneo is a very long opera and it does not have readily memorable tunes’. Unfair – there are catchy things in this opera: Ilia’s ‘Zeffiretti lusinghieri’; the little march for Idomeneo’s party after the shipwreck; even the bravura of ‘Fuor del mar’, if a modern tenor can be found good enough to bring it off. In any case, do we hum the tunes from Beethoven’s Fidelio, or Verdi’s Macbeth?
Connoisseur’s opera Idomeneo may be, but it always has been. The fact is that an opera of this kind requires serious attention from the public, not just to the music, but to the text as well. Rossini’s serious operas (and Bellini’s and Donizetti’s) are enjoying a new lease of life partly, as Carl Dahlhaus has somewhat cynically suggested, because they focus attention on cantabile singing rather than on the words (which would have been important to their first audiences) and therefore suit the international star-driven scene, with its emphasis on vocal virtuosity rather than dramatic meaning.
As I suggested, Idomeneo may be benefiting from the same syndrome. But it suffers, also, from comparison with excellent Mozart operas based on different premises (without being a conscious innovator, Mozart invented some of those premises, or at least, in Figaro, Seraglio, and Così, was the first to prove their potential). Mozart-lovers expect Idomeneo to be enjoyable in the same way as those other masterpieces, whereas it demands somewhat different expectations, and requires also some more homework to broaden the historical imagination.
Once those conditions are supplied, Idomeneo will be appreciated, not merely as great music, but music serving a drama of a particular kind, a masterly amalgam of French and Italian conventions. Mozart did not get his way in every respect - what composer for the theatre ever does? But he put enough of his stamp on every aspect of this work to justify Edward Dent’s claim that Idomeneo has ‘a monumental strength and a white heat of passion that we find in this early work of Mozart’s and shall never find again’.
First published in Opera Australia, 1993