La clemenza di Tito

If Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1787) is an opera ahead of its time—a Romantic opera in Classical disguise—then La clemenza di Tito (1791) is the opposite. Despite being the final opera Mozart would compose, it’s a throwback to an earlier age. Clemenza is an opera seria, an old-fashioned form Mozart had left behind with Idomeneo a decade earlier. The opera’s context explains this anomaly. Composed to celebrate the coronation of Leopold II as King of Bohemia, its theme and form were carefully chosen to help reinforce the new monarch’s God-given authority. With revolution spreading across Europe, Mozart needed the weight of a Classical story and a traditional form to amplify the work’s message of royal goodness and wisdom. But if that sounds stiff, the opera is anything but. This is mature Mozart writing at the height of his powers, and the story of the Emperor Titus, his friend-turned-conspirator Sesto and the manipulative, ambitious Vitellia, is as much a deeply human drama as a political allegory. Sesto’s mighty “Parto, parto”, in which he galvanizes himself for his terrible task, grows from controlled beginnings into a dazzling musical frenzy of misguided passion, with the help of an athletic obbligato clarinet, while Vitellia’s “Non più di fiori” is a vividly expressive turning point for the villain of the piece.