The mercy of Titus (Mozart)

The Clemency of Tito (original Italian title, La clemenza di Tito) is an opera seria in two acts with music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Italian libretto by Caterino Tommaso Mazzola, based on Pietro Metastasio. It is numbered KV 621.

It was composed for the coronation of Leopold II of Austria as King of Bohemia. It shows the image of a righteous but merciful ruler with his people, even in the face of an assassination attempt against him prepared by Vitellia and carried out by Sextus, his friend.

It premiered at the National Theater in Prague on September 6, 1791. It is a “serious drama per musica”, with text in Italian.

Characters

Plot

The plot takes place in Rome, at the time of the Roman Empire.

Act I

In the first act, Vitellia, daughter of the deposed emperor Vitellius, calls for revenge against the new emperor, Titus, with whom she is also in love. She uses Sextus, Tito's wavering friend, who is in love with her, to act against the emperor. But when Vitellia learns that Tito has sent Berenice, whom she was jealous of, back to Jerusalem, she tells Sextus to wait to carry out her wishes, hoping that Titus will choose her (Vitelia) as empress..

Titus, however, chooses Sextus's sister, Servilia, and orders Annio to take his message to Servilia. Annio and Servilia, unknown to Tito, are in love. Servilia tells Tito the truth, but acknowledging that if Tito insists on marrying her, he will obey her. Titus thanks the gods for Servilia's loyalty and immediately rejects the idea of coming between her and Annio.

In time, however, Vitelia has heard Tito's interest in Servilia, and is again on fire with jealousy. She urges Sexto to kill Tito. He agrees, and sings one of the most famous arias from this opera, "I give birth, I give birth." Around the same time, Annius and the guard Publius arrive to take Vitellia before Titus, who has now chosen her as empress. She writhes between guilt and worry.

Sexto arrives at the Capitol with the other conspirators and sets it on fire. Everyone is horrified by the fire. Sexto announces that he saw Tito wounded, but Vitelia stops him before he incriminates himself for the murder. Everyone wails, in the slow, sad ending of Act I.

Act II

Annius tells Sextus that Emperor Titus is alive. Between the smoke and the chaos, Sextus had confused him with another Tito. Publius soon arrives to arrest Sextus, explaining that he was one of the conspirators who dressed as Titus and was wounded, though not fatally, by Sextus. The Senate judges Sextus, while Tito waits impatiently, sure that his friend will be exonerated; but the Senate finds him guilty and a distraught Titus must sign Sextus' death warrant.

Tito decides to call Sexto first, trying to get more details about the plot. Sexto assumes all the blame and says that he deserves to die, so Tito tells him that it will be so and fires him. But after a long internal struggle, Tito breaks the order to execute Sextus and decides that if his detractors want to accuse him of something, Tito, he prefers it to be too merciful rather than having a vengeful heart.

Vitelia squirms in guilt and decides to confess everything to Tito, expressing her hopes of being empress in the well-known aria from "Non più di fiori". In the amphitheatre, the damned, including Sextus, wait to be thrown to the wild beasts. Tito is going to show him clemency when Vitelia confesses that she is the instigator of Sexto's plot. Though the emperor is dismayed, he includes her in his general pardon of her. The opera concludes with all the characters praising Titus's extreme generosity, while he himself asks the gods to shorten his life when he stops caring about the well-being of Rome.

Music analysis

Original instrumentation

The orchestra is made up of strings, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, a bassetto horn, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, and timpani. The basso continuo in the dry recitatives is provided by the harpsichord and cello. The outstanding intervention of the clarinet is due to the fact that Mozart's friend, Anton Stadler, played in the premiere orchestra.

Libretto

The libretto for The Mercy of Titus is the work of Pietro Metastasio (1734), who was based on some brief fragments of Suetonius's Lives of the Caesars. It was considered one of the author's most successful librettos, and had already received the music of more than forty composers, including Antonio Caldara (1670 or 1671 - 1736), in 1734; Johann Adolph Hasse (1699-1783), Georg Christoph Wagenseil (1715-1777), Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-1787) in 1752; or Pietro Alessandro Guglielmi (1728-1804).

Caterino Mazzolà, court poet, was in charge of summarizing the extensive original so that it went from three to two acts; arias were removed, replacing them with plot-motivated recitatives and ensembles.

Musical structure

The overture “preserves the objective and solemn character of the Italian operatic symphony in the refined and ennobled form of the last Mozartian pages” (Paumgartner).

The opera has eleven arias, including Sexto's (nº 9: Parto, parto, ma tu ben mio), probably the best known, with clarinet obbligato and that of Vitelia (no. 23: Non piú fiori vi vaghe catene), with corno di basetto.

The grandiose ensemble parts stand out: three duetti (duettino), three triplets, two final ensembles with choir, three choirs and a march. The most notable is the quintet with choir at the end of the first act (no. 12: Deh conserve, oh Dei!), a unique piece. “Here, at the moment of maximum tension, the famous “general pause” occurs; extraordinary discovery of a dramatic genius of the first order” (Paumgartner).

Other prominent group numbers include:

No. 10: I'm here. (third).

No. 11: Oh Dei, che smania è questa (Sext).

No. 17: Your traitorous fosti (Annio).

No. 18: Quello di Tito è il volto (third).

No. 24: Che del ciel, che degli Dei (coro)

No. 26: You, and see, m’assolvi, Augusto? (final annex).

Genesis

In July 1791, the last of Mozart's life, the composer was engaged in the creation of The Magic Flute. He was then commissioned to compose an opera seria. The person carrying out the commission was the businessman Domenico Guardasoni, who lived in Prague and who in June of that year was asked for a new work for the coronation of Leopold II as King of Bohemia, a ceremony that would take place on September 6. Guardasoni went to Vienna, and tried first to hire Antonio Salieri, who was very busy and declined the offer. Guardasoni's experience with Don Giovanni convinced him that Mozart was capable of working under such a tight deadline.

Mozart did not hesitate to accept, as Guardasoni offered him double what he was normally paid for an opera in Vienna. He abandoned the composition of The Magic Flute to dedicate himself to La clemencia de Tito . Mozart's early biographers claimed that he composed it in 18 days, although it is today considered an unproven legend. After working in Vienna, he moved to Prague, with his student Franz Xaver Süssmayr and his wife, Constanze Mozart. To the work that he had already done from Vienna, he added the work done throughout the trip. To Süssmayr he entrusted the writing of a large part of the dry recitatives.

Premiere

Posthumous Portrait of Mozart (Barbara Krafft, 1819)

It premiered at the National Theater in Prague on September 6, 1791. Hours before, Leopold had been crowned.

The work had a lukewarm reception. King Leopold preferred opera in a more Italian style, rather than the Germanic manner that Mozart had settled on. It is not known what Leopoldo thought of this opera composed in her honor, but the anecdote is told that her wife María Luisa referred to her as & # 34; porcheria tedesca & # 34; ("German crap").

It was published by Breitkopf & Hartel in Leipzig (1795). It was popular for many years after Mozart's death. It was staged in German in 1796 in Dresden, 1797 in Kassel, and in 1799 in Weimar. In Italian it was restored in Vienna in 1798. During the following decades it was greatly admired. It disappeared from the repertoire around 1840.

The presence of two castrato voices makes it difficult to recover this opera. However, the great beauty of the score has allowed it to be performed more frequently in the last decades of the XX century. This opera is still in the repertoire, although it is not among the most represented; in the Operabase statistics it appears no.

Assessment

The score and the plot present similarities with The Mercy of Scipio, by Johann Christian Bach, having pointed out the possible influence of this work on that of Mozart.

For a long time, Mozartian scholars considered Titus an inferior work within the composer's repertoire. Alfred Einstein in 1945 wrote that the "usual thing is to speak in a disdainful tone of Tito's clemency and to despise it as the product of haste and fatigue"; to a certain extent, he himself follows this contemptuous line when considering that the characters are mere puppets, for example, "Tito is only a mere puppet that represents magnanimity" and affirming that opera seria was already a dying form (Einstein, Mozart). The critics speak of a cold work, with the rigidity of a serious, statuary, autumnal, dead opera, pointing out the composer's lack of enthusiasm for a subject that did not interest him (Abert and Mila); they refer to a marble beauty, almost funeral (Mila); or they end up concluding that it is "a simple opera to use" (Dal Fabbro).

However, in recent years this opera has been revalued. Stanley Sadie sees this work as showing Mozart "responding with music of refinement, nobility and warmth to a new kind of stimulation" (New Grove Mozart). Mozart represents feelings through the resources of abstract song. This is a conscious approach on the part of Mozart, who wanted to express the psychology of the characters exclusively in musical terms (A. Poggi).

“Today we finally discover in La clemencia de Tito a composition of remarkable psychological introspection, which offers us at least an hour of the best music ever written by Mozart. Which is enough to grant him the gift of immortality” (Robbins Landon, quoted by A. Poggi).

Accommodations

Among the television productions of this opera, we can mention:

• La Clemenza di Tito (1980), German production, led by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, Eric Tappy, Tatiana Troyanos, Carol Neblett, Anne Howells, Kurt Rydl and Catherine Malfitano.
• La Clemenza di Tito (1991), English production, directed by Robin Lough, with Philip Langridge, Diana Montague, Elzbieta Szmytka, Ashley Putnam and Martine Mahé.

Discography

Among the different recordings of this opera, the following stand out:

• Directed by István Kértesz, with Werner Krenn, Teresa Berganza, Maria Casula, Lucia Popp, Brigitte Fassbaender, T. Franc, Orchestra and choir of the Staatsoper in Vienna (Decca, 1967).
• Directed by Sir John Eliot Gardiner, with Anthony Rolfe-Johnson, Anne-Sofie von Otter, Julia Varady, Sylvia McNair, Catherine Robbin, Christian Hauptmann, Solistas Barrocos Ingleses and Coro Monteverdi (1990, Archiv).
• Directed by Sir Colin Davis, with Janet Baker, Yvonne Minton, Stuart Burrows, Frederica von Stade, Lucia Popp and Robert Lloyd, Orchestra and choir of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden of London (Philips, 1976).
• Directed by Karl Böhm, with Peter Schreier, Teresa Berganza, Julia Varady, Edith Mathis, Marga Schiml, Theo Adam, Saxon State Orchestra of Dresden, Coro de la Radio de Leipzig Radio Chorus (Deutsche Grammophon, 1978).

Some arias have been recorded on albums by female singers. For example,

• Album “Mozart’s Opera Arias”, singer Kiri Te Kanawa recorded the aria S’altro che lagrimeOf La Clemenza di Titowith the London Symphony Orchestra and direction of Sir Colin Davis (1982, Philips).
• Album “Opera Arias”, singer Frederica von Stade recorded the aria Torna di Tito a lato; Your toastOf La Clemenza di Tito (Philips)