Mark Valencia
It was his understanding of human emotions that made the 18th-century composer a true operatic genius, suggests Mark Valencia
‘I had loved the music of Mozart’s operas for many years before I learnt to appreciate their dramatic brilliance too. Three viewings of Peter Brook’s stripped-back Don Giovanni in the ’90s proved revelatory.’
‘D ‘D on’t never forget your true and faithfull friend’, wrote Mozart in a visitor’s book while he was attempting to learn English. He was clearly less precocious with language study than he was as a composer, and that endearing mistake with ‘never’ reminds us that he may have been a genius but he was also human. As an opera composer he went from prodigy to trailblazer within a couple of decades, yet his four most enduring lyric works all celebrate simple yet universal qualities like love and lust.
Take the three operas Mozart wrote with the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte, a figure who looms large in the composer’s output. Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte are supreme masterpieces, but they’re also sex comedies: Wolfgang always enjoyed a smutty giggle. As for The Magic Flute, with its labyrinthine twists and masonic rigmarole, it’s a straightforward tale of boy meets girl, while boy’s friend languishes in sexual frustration. Only at the end, when he finally meets Papagena, does Papageno achieve release from pentup energies with the prospect of happyever-after coupling and a ton of babies, and their catchy ‘Pa-pa-pa…’ duet fizzes with happy hormones.
Mozart’s preoccupation with affairs of the heart is no idle matter – by giving audiences permission to laugh at jokes and weep at tragedy, he helped bring opera down from the stained glass. The opera seria of aristocratic custom was invariably staid: a stew of hieratic alienation depicting heroic acts that supposedly held a mirror up to courtly vanity. Opera buffa, meanwhile, had its own rules, and low comedy about ageing cuckolds and feisty young girls was an encrusted tradition. In The Marriage of Figaro, Mozart and Da Ponte reduced the buffa stock figures to comprimario (supporting role) status and focused instead on the dramatic comedy to be found in more rounded characters. The interplay between Figaro, Susanna, the Count and Countess – then that of everybody with Cherubino, the lovelorn youth – is a kaleidoscope of painfully recognisable foibles that remains truthful, even today, about the human condition.
By happy chance, Mozart’s experiences growing up within the straitjacket of court composition helped him discover ways to find freedom within constraints. The mature operas are really the culmination of a learning process begun in childhood. He was not yet 11 years old when his first stage commission came his way, an invitation to compose Act One of a threeact Singspiel called Die Schuldigkeit des ersten Gebots, shared with Michael Haydn and court composer Anton Adlgasser. Of the three, only Mozart’s contribution has survived. Rumour has it that the Archbishop of Salzburg refused to believe that a child could compose such a thing so shut him away for a week and bade him write an oratorio under supervision. Which of course he did.
Mozart was not yet 11 years old when his first stage commission came his way
Mozart’s first solo opera, Apollo and Hyacinthus, was followed when he was
12 by an elaborate opera buffa based on a play by Goldoni, La finta semplice. Step by step his confidence grew and with it his ambition, through Il rè pastore, whose libretto had been set by a dozen composers before him, to the incomplete Zaïde, the first of his Turkish harem operas. Works from the composer’s half-formed adolescence still find their way into the world’s opera houses: the Royal Opera recently revived its 1991 production of Mitridate, the work of a 14 year-old, while La finta giardiniera, written four years later, has lately been staged at Glyndebourne, Aix-en-provence and La Scala, Milan.
With a dozen apprentice works behind him, lucky number 13 was Idomeneo. In 1771, aged 25 and with only a decade left to live, Mozart embarked on the first of the seven operas that would define his legacy. It didn’t begin well: the composer was at odds with his singers and troubled by a bloated libretto, and in the battle to salvage it he sacrificed music he valued. To cap it all, fate decreed that after his death the opera should languish halfforgotten for 150 years.
Idomeneo relates the tale of a king who is saved from a storm at sea when he promises the god Neptune that he’ll sacrifice the first living person he meets on dry land, and true to the Classical way of things this turns out to be his own son, Idamante. It’s a long opera in which abridgements are hard to achieve without causing structural damage – chiefly because the scalpel-wielding Mozart got there first – and it can seem even longer because while the hand of death is never far away, it doesn’t actually strike. So where’s the fun? Yet the opera has a momentum that looks forward rather than back, and the secco recitatives fall away like dust when Ilia sings to the winds or the unhinged Elettra whips up her own storm with ‘Oh smania! Oh furie!’.
Die Entführung aus dem Serail (1782) succeeds despite the nonsense of its mockturkish plot, a hotchpotch of xenophobic stereotypes that need careful handling in the modern age. This was the ‘Too many notes’ opera for which, so the story goes, Emperor Joseph II notoriously upbraided Mozart. Yet despite extensive spoken dialogue involving Pasha Selim, the
Turk with a heart who keeps two western beauties in his harem, it’s a surprisingly concise Singspiel. It also finds Mozart experimenting with the vogue for Turkish orientalisms, particularly in the two Janissary choruses.
Both Idomeneo and Die Entführung boast central roles for tenors, two in each including the heroes. Curious, then, that
Beaumarchais’s farce Le mariage de Figaro had been banned as scurrilous in Vienna
the high male voice was destined to take a back seat in what followed. In the Da Ponte trilogy the tenor sound was reserved for a grotesque (Don Basilio in Figaro), a sap (Don Ottavio in Don Giovanni) and a cuckold (Ferrando in Così fan tutte).
For the first collaboration with his new writing partner, Mozart turned to Beaumarchais’s Le Mariage de Figaro. The comic French farce had been banned as scurrilous in Vienna, which may be what drew it to Mozart’s attention. It certainly provided ideal material, inspiring the pair to new heights. Worth noting, too, that as Mozart’s first uncommissioned opera, this was also a real labour of love. Almost as miraculous as the cascade of immortal arias is the sure-footed dramaturgy that sees a betrothed servant couple, Figaro and Susanna, join forces with their mistress the Countess to expose her husband as a philanderer. A cynic might opine that Act Four is an act too far because all the action we care about is wrapped up at the end of Act Three… but, well, the music!
No such charge could be laid at Don Giovanni’s door. When the composer heard Figaro being cheered to the echo in a Prague production he vowed to write a new opera specifically for the city, and the result hurtles along with breathless energy. If Da Ponte’s memoirs are to be believed, he wrote the libretto in the evenings while working simultaneously on two other operas, one in the mornings and one in the afternoons. During this time his various personal needs were attended to by the attractive 16-year-old daughter of his
housekeeper. If true, this may explain the libretto’s unapologetic earthiness – think of Leporello’s catalogue aria, or Zerlina’s submissive ‘Batti, batti…’.
The oddest and most controversial of all of Mozart’s operas is arguably his greatest. Così fan tutte is a chamber piece for six singers set in a preternatural land where no external life exists beyond a small passing chorus. Da Ponte’s libretto is a work of ideas rather than events: a merciless experiment by the unaccountable philosopher Don Alfonso who inflicts psychological torture on a pair of sincere young couples. Yet Così gives all four lovers, one in each of the main vocal ranges, a platform for some of the most sublime arias and ensembles in all opera. So great is his inspiration that Mozart gives us little choice but to swallow the premise and wallow in the music.
La clemenza di Tito, which followed, is a throwback to the old ways of opera seria. A near-destitute Mozart composed it for cash as King Leopold’s coronation opera, but it does contain some delicious music, notably for Tito’s childhood friend Sesto. And you could say that Emanuel Schikaneder’s plot for The Magic Flute is a fantastical reboot of Die Entführung auf dem Serail: essentially the same story but with different names and a Queen of the Night thrown in. Yet this riotous, folky Singspiel rambles down strange new avenues in its picaresque and masonically inflected depiction of love pursued. The Magic Flute is both a tale of romantic liberation and a crowd-pleaser that’s stuffed with theatrical bells and whistles.
For a man with only months to live, Mozart in 1791 was at the height of his powers. Those last two operas, so different to one another, were composed pretty much simultaneously and premiered weeks apart in the month of September. Factor in his last Piano Concerto, the Clarinet Concerto and the unfinished Requiem and we can practically see the fevered starshine on his brow. Then in early December, amid drama that’s the stuff of opera in its own right – indeed Rimsky-korsakov actually composed one, his Mozart and Salieri – the 35-year-old composer succumbed to illness and light gave way to silence, leaving a treasure trove of music behind.