Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Some years ago, planning a Mozart concert in Melbourne featuring two soprano prima donnas, a search was on for a duet they could sing together. Someone – knowledgable, as it turned out – suggested there was a remarkable one in the opera Mitridate, but the idea was rejected without the music being looked at. The opera was unknown. Possibly the staged production by Graham Vick, from the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, presented with the Australian Chamber Orchestra in this year’s Festival of Sydney will be the first performance of any of Mitridate in Australia.
But there’s something even more remarkable: which duet was meant? The one premiered in Milan in the Teatro Regio Ducale on 26 December 1770 was composed at the last minute, as a replacement for Mozart’s original setting of the words (a remarkable virtuoso piece, of extraordinary difficulty). The primo uomo, the castrato who sang the role of Sifare, had only arrived in Milan at the last minute. Mozart was more than equal to the challenge of the new deadline. His father Leopold proudly reported that the two singers, Bernasconi, who sang Aspasia, and Benedetti (Sifare) were ‘absolutely delighted’ with Mozart’s new duet. In fact, Benedetti assured Leopold that if it didn’t succeed with the public, he was willing ‘to allow himself to be castrated a second time’. A duet as a highlight was unusual in opera seria. Mozart enthusiasts have hailed this duet as prophetic, one even finding in it a musical anticipation of the duet for Constanze and Belmonte in The Abduction from the Seraglio, where the characters face a similar situation, expecting imminent death as a result of their faithfulness to each other.
The duet’s composer was 14 years old. If the rest of the opera were even to approach this remarkable standard, we might ask ourselves why it isn’t better known. The letters of Mozart and his father, naturally biased, but objective about Mozart’s development, leave no doubt that the boy had a great success with Mitridate. The Mozarts knew what they were up against: the Milan public was one of the most sophisticated in Europe, and there were those who condemned the opera in advance because of the composer’s extreme youth.
Even before the opening night, Mozart had to convince the singers. It was customary for the great virtuoso opera stars to insert into operas by other composers arias written especially for their voice – these insertions were called ‘suitcase arias’, because the singers carried them around from one opera house to another. Indeed Mitridate’s prima donna, the soprano Bernasconi, had intended to insert, into her role of Aspasia, arias already composed in a successful opera on the same libretto by Gasparini, but when she saw Mozart’s arias she was, Leopold reported ‘besides herself with joy’, and so was her very experienced vocal coach. Evidently Mozart’s practice had paid off of leaving the composition of the arias until he could tailor them to the particular voice and skills of the singer.
Leopold reported that the premiere of Mitridate was a huge success: ‘God be praised that the first performance met with unanimous approval…after almost all the arias…there was an astonishing amount of applause, with cries of “Viva il Maestro, viva il Maestrino!” [the little master]’. Mozart had passed his greatest test so far, and on a leading international stage. It was a test he and his father had courted. His previous opera, La finta semplice, had failed to reach the stage in Vienna in 1768, because of intrigues against it, including doubts whether it could have been written by a boy of 12 unaided. In any case that was a comic opera, an opera buffa, and it was opera seria which was the highest aspiration of any composer of the time.
It was Leopold Mozart’s intention that his son, as a finishing school, should, like a grown–up composer, make the mandatory trip to the city where his new opera was to be performed, completing its composition there in collaboration with the singers, rehearsing it and playing in the first performances. But for that to happen, he needed a commission, known in the Italian–dominated opera world as a scrittura. Salzburg lay in the provinces of the world of opera, but Austrian Hapsburgs ruled Milan. The Governor–General of Lombardy, of which Milan was the capital, was Count Carl Firmian, the nephew of the first Archbishop of Salzburg under whom Leopold Mozart served. Firmian held the patronage of Milan’s leading opera house, the Teatro Regio Ducale, and it was he who arranged for Mozart junior to submit some arias to convince his noble entourage, before giving him a scrittura for a full–scale opera. Eventually Mozart was to spend much of the year 1770, on and off, in Milan, and the success of Mitridate led to two further commissions over the next three years, for the festa called Ascanio in Alba and the opera Lucio Silla.
Composing an opera seria was a major project indeed: Mitridate – Mozart’s score – lasts close on three hours in performance, but the evening in the Teatro Regio Ducale was much longer, with ballets between the acts extending the evening to six hours, so that Leopold Mozart felt sorry for the public, whose after–show dinner was so long delayed. The lengthy elaboration of 18th century grand opera has stood against it in the 20th century. Mozart biographer Alfred Einstein regretted so much misplaced effort: connoisseurs, he thought, may well have thought ‘what a lot of superfluous notes! Any Italian composer could have composed more simply and at the same time more effectively. But what a talent!’. There are a number of prejudices hidden in this statement. Why, asks Einstein, hadn’t Mozart taken more notice of what Gluck was doing to reform opera seria? – after all, Gluck’s Orfeo and Alceste were known to him. What an unreasonable ask, of a 14 year–old would–be professional! Mozart’s real genius, Einstein opines, was for dramatic development in concerted vocal music, which was possible in opera buffa and drama giocoso, but not in opera seria. On this view, Mozart’s ‘greatest’ opera seria, Idomeneo ten years later, is also to be regretted for pouring such great music into the ‘wrong’ genre. But in that case, why did Mozart himself opt for opera seria for what turned out to be his last opera of any kind, La clemenza di Tito? In the late 1900s attitudes to opera seria began to change. This may be to do with a love of luxury, and conspicuous consumption, along with a lack of care for dramatic truthfulness. More likely it is to do with what made opera seria so dominant in its heyday: the public’s astonished relishing of truly virtuosic singing. The real reason the opera Mitridate has languished in obscurity may be the scarcity of singers capable of its difficulties.
Four of the five major roles in Mitridate are for high voices, and two of those five are male characters. In the 1920s and 30s, when similar operas by Handel were revived, the high masculine parts were transposed – real men don’t sing alto and soprano. But this narrow defining of dramatic plausibility brought with it too much musical damage. But even if the high roles are given to high voices, there remains the problem of the castrato. The two complete recordings of Mitridate illustrate two solutions – the first, issued in 1977, gives the role of Farnace, the lower of the two major castrato parts, to a female mezzo–soprano, Agnes Baltsa. On the more recent recording, from 1998, Farnace is sung by Brian Asawa, the Nero of Opera Australia’s 1998 L’incoronazione di Poppea. As William Mann points out in the chapter on Mitridate in his The Operas of Mozart of 1977, a gifted young male alto can manage Farnace’s role ‘though he needs a seamless vocal scale, strong in the low register, and a real legato technique’. But no male soprano could even attempt the extraordinary range and flexibility required by the role of Sifare, Farnace’s brother. In one aria, Mozart has the singer vie with an elaborate and brilliant horn obbligato, which may give a clue that the timbre of the original Sifare, Benedetti, known as Sartorino had the brassy quality attributed to some of the castrati, but scarcely found in female voices (on the 1977 recording the part is sung by Edita Gruberova, a high soprano, on the 1998 recording by Cecilia Bartoli, a high mezzo).
The difficulties in casting this opera, then, have to do with vocal range and timbre. But that is not all, as is illustrated by the one major lower voice role, the tenor who sings Mitridate himself. Again, Mozart was tailoring the part to a particular singer, the Sicilian–born tenor Guglielmo d’Ettore. He had been imported from Munich, and was clearly of a standing to get his own way. Mozart much to his exasperation had to re–write his opening aria five times within two days. He eventually satisfied the singer by reproducing almost exactly the bass line and the opening shape of the aria as it had been composed by Gasparini, although the result from Mozart’s hand sounds very different. For Mozarts father and son D’Ettore became a byword for fussiness, but the singer was entitled to suggest improvements, being not only a rising star but a composer in his own right. Mozart turned to advantage D’Ettore’s particular vocal personality, though not everyone agrees this was to good dramatic effect. William Mann thinks Mitridate’s long awaited entrance aria cannot help sounding faintly absurd, as it puts into high relief D’Ettore’s ability to execute difficult leaps over a very wide range, but also his lack of fluency in coloratura. Mann reckons it is as if the great hero Mitridate, having just stepped off a ship, was still searching for his land–legs and had his helmet askew. His music features an ‘unwarrantable’ quantity of D’Ettore’s ringing top Bs.
On the other hand, the French critic Carl de Nys finds Mitridate’s later aria ‘Vado incontro al fato estremo’ astonishing in its depiction of the all–powerful monarch powerless in the face of inexorable destiny. Much of the credit for this, a recent discovery has revealed, must go to Gasparini, because in this case D’Ettore had successfully insisted on the inclusion of his music for these words. Again, Mozart’s modifications to Gasparini’s original, in harmony, bass line, dynamics, articulation, and instrumentation were so thoroughgoing that most Mozart scholars never suspected the aria was not his.
The reader may by now be waiting to hear more about the subject and drama of this opera. It was never intended as a concert in costume, and the Festival of Sydney presentation will be staged. And it is worth staging – for 18th century audiences the libretto containing the words of the drama was as important as the music; it was printed and read, and composers were measured not only by the quota of musical delights, but by their skill in setting the drama. In opera seria the dramatic action is advanced mainly in the recitatives. Here the composer expected to ‘declaim’ the drama in music, to reflect the pace and crises of the action, rather than to write recitatives to suit particular singers’ voices. Young Mozart took longer than usual to compose the recitatives, as he couldn’t, as was his habit, sing to himself what he had written, because his voice was breaking.
There are those who believe Mozart shouldn’t have attempted to set this libretto at all, not because it was a bad one, but because it was such a good one. Alfred Einstein thinks someone, preferably Leopold Mozart, should have told the 14 year–old ‘Keep your hands off! This is beyond your powers…The best opera seria libretto you’ll ever get your hands on’. Mozart scholar Hermann Abert also thought the boy was not emotionally ready for the task. The strengths of the libretto did not include historical accuracy. The story was about a king of Pontus, Mithridates, who conquered much of Asia during his life (120–63 BC), and made war against Rome. But the Mitridate of history was a byword for despotic cruelty and sensuality. The source of the libretto, the play Mithridate by Racine (1673), was unhistorical. Racine made drama from what followed when Mithridate gave out a false report of his death, testing the loyalty of his two sons, one of whom was intriguing with Rome against his father. The opera libretto put more emphasis on a love intrigue, whereby the two sons seem to be seeking the hand of the woman proclaimed Mithridates’ queen, whose name was changed in the opera, for reasons of euphony, from Monime to Aspasia. In the dénouement of the tragedy a dying tyrant triumphs over his baser nature, uniting the lovers whom he had earlier cursed. There are touches of actual history, such as Mithridates’ reference to his defeat by Pompey. Reading history reveals a startling fact: A further familiar connection: it was the real Pharnaces, Mithridates’ son, whose defeat gave Julius Caesar the victory he described in the phrase ‘Veni, vidi, vici’ (I came, I saw, I conquered), but this is not referred to in the libretto.
The libretto, an adaptation of Racine in Italian, was the work of a poet from Turin, Vittorio Amedeo Cigna–Santi. His version had, as we saw, already been set as an opera by Gasparini in 1767. The plot was based on Racine’s play in Giuseppe Parini’s Italian translation. A typical opera seria libretto, Mitridate is a tale of nobles enflamed by passions not always equally noble but where good triumphs in the end, observes Carolyn Gianturco.
To what extent does Mozart’s opera does fulfil the potential offered by the advantageous commission and the excellent libretto? Opinions have shifted, and are still shifting. For Edward Dent, in his survey of Mozart’s operas, Mitridate contains ‘more heroics than humanity’. First impressions of the music seem to support this judgment – Mozart’s concern to supply parts of equal brilliance for each of his leading singers gives us an astonishing sequence of virtuoso arias. The ‘affect’ of each aria is aptly brought out, the basic emotion reflecting a situation which has just developed in the action, but coloratura and virtuoso leaps usually take over, and we marvel at these, rather than being moved. But it is unreasonable to expect to find the most dramatic insights in the arias – that is not opera seria’s way. Paying close attention to the words of the recitatives reveals Mozart more than competent at musical drama. In Mitridate, by contrast with his later ventures into opera seria, Idomeneo and La clemenza di Tito, Mozart was not in a position to modify the libretto by working with its author. So in a sense Mitridate is his purest opera seria, and it should be assessed without hindsight. The Milan audience of 1770 gave it the seal of approval.
Nevertheless, even as a 14 year–old Mozart managed in Mitridate what he said he had done much later with Tito: made it into a real opera. The most remarkable evidence is in Aspasia’s grand scena after Mitridate tricks her into betraying her love for Sifare. Mitridate condemns her to die with her lover, but she is determined to end her life by taking poison. Moving from secco to energetically accompanied recitative, she traverses a wide range of emotions, and having sung a moving lyrical cavatina, beautifully coloured by wind instruments, she is restrained by confusing emotions she doesn’t want to accept. Here Mozart’s music is the servant of the drama, taking its form and expression from each successive emotion. The train of events is interrupted by the unexpected appearance of Sifare, liberated by Ismene, who takes the poison goblet from her and throws it on the ground. This is only the most elaborate example in Mitridate of Mozart’s flexible adaptations of the conventions. Many of the arias are in a modifed da capo form which was common around 1770, in which there are two expositions of the material, then a short contrasting middle section and an abbreviated reprise. In several arias Mozart uses this form to make the character address each of two others in turn, almost turning an aria into a duet. So Mitridate is much more than just a series of brilliantly virtuosic arias – Mozart’s involvement with the characters is evident in the variety of material he invents for each. Nevertheless there is something slightly stereotyped about the treatment, and we shouldn’t expect the mature Mozart’s genius for drama in music – that would be measuring by the very highest standard.
What we get in Mitridate is a brilliant demonstration of what is possible within a particular set of conventions, stimulated by the availability of a first–rate cast and a large and able orchestra, for which Mozart writes with evident relish. Only because he is Mozart do we have to remind ourselves that the composer of Mitridate was fourteen.
First published in Opera~Opera, 2001