The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (10 page)

Clearly influenced by the solemnity and majesty of Gluck,
Idomeneo
is perhaps Mozart’s most purely beautiful opera, even if it lacks the wit, sparkle and variety of pace which mark his later Italian works.
Idomeneo
can seem slow on first encounter, but repeated hearings will prove ever more deeply
rewarding.
The Act II quartet ‘Andrò, ramingo e solo’ in which Idomeneo, Idamante, Ilia and Elettra simultaneously voice contrasting feelings is a turning-point in the history of opera – the first moment when an ensemble, rather than a solo aria, functions as the central form of emotional and dramatic expression.

The title role attracts tenors not normally associated with Mozart, including Domingo, Pavarotti and Heppner.
The big bravura aria ‘Fuor del mar’ in Act I presents difficulties for such voices because of its fast coloratura, but Mozart also wrote a less strenuous version which can be substituted.
The other problematic role is Elettra – like Donna Anna in
Don
Giovanni,
this requires a dramatic soprano with spitfire energy and heft for ‘D’Oreste, d’Ajace’, but also high-lying soft singing for the exquisite solo ‘Soave zeffiri’ which interrupts the chorus ‘Placido è il mar’ and sounds as though it should be sung by the gentle-hearted Ilia.

In performance

Idomeneo
is a difficult opera to stage: elaborate baroque productions such as Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s at the Met tend to weigh the drama down; more recently, directors such as Trevor Nunn (at Glyndebourne) and David McVicar (Scottish Opera and Antwerp) have opted for a visually minimalist approach and concentrated on the emotional interaction between the four principal characters.
More ambitious productions have attempted to explore Cretan society and the nature of Idomeneo’s regime, as well as the horrors of the plague that is visited upon it, but such things really have little place in Mozart’s music or Varesco’s text.

Recording

CD: Anthony Rolfe Johnson (Idomeneo); John Eliot Gardiner (cond.).
Archiv 431 674 2

Die
Entführung
aus
dem
Serail
(
The Abduction from the Seraglio
)

Three acts. First performed Vienna, 1782.

Libretto by Gottlieb Stephanie

Weber once wrote that
Entführung
marked ‘the victory of youth in all its freshness’: it is certainly an opera full of exuberance, written at the time of Mozart’s courtship of Constanze Weber.
Constanze’s cantankerous mother put considerable difficulties in the way of their marriage, and it is surely not fanciful to believe that the traditional theme of young lovers escaping from tyranny had a pressing personal relevance to the composer – not least because of the neat coincidence of a heroine called Constanze in the libretto on which the opera is based.

Turkey and the Islamic Middle East was a fashionable terrain for eighteenth-century literature and drama, and the figure of the Noble Infidel showing up the lily-livered Christians would have been familiar to Mozart’s audiences.
The opera was a big instant hit, performed all over Europe, but because of the absence of copyright law, Mozart only ever made his original fee of 100 ducats out of its success.

There is a probably apocryphal story that the Emperor Joseph II greeted the composer after the first performance with the effete judgment, ‘Too beautiful for our ears, and far too many notes, my dear Mozart.’ To which the indomitable Mozart smartly retorted, ‘As many as are needed, Your Majesty.’

Plot

The young Spanish nobleman Belmonte has come to Turkey to rescue his beloved Constanze, who has been sold into the harem of Bassa Selim after her ship was captured by pirates.
Belmonte plots with his quick-witted manservant Pedrillo to gain admittance to Bassa (Pasha) Selim’s palace by pretending to be an architect.

Bassa Selim craves Constanze’s love, threatening to torture her unless she complies.
She remains fiercely loyal to Belmonte.
Meanwhile the lecherous Osmin, overseer of the harem, has designs on Constanze’s pert English maid Blonde, who is enamoured of Pedrillo.
Belmonte and Pedrillo ply the susceptible Osmin with alcohol laced with a sleeping potion, and after he collapses in a stupor, they meet up with Constanze and Blonde.
The men doubt that the women have been faithful to them – a charge the women furiously repudiate.

At dead of night, Belmonte and Pedrillo return with a ladder, but the wakened Osmin catches the foursome in the act of escaping and brings them before Bassa Selim.
When Belmonte reveals his true identity, it emerges that he is the son of Bassa Selim’s worst enemy, a man who has done him a terrible wrong.
Fearing his wrathful judgment, the foursome ask only to die together.
But Bassa Selim shows them clemency, scorning to repay evil with evil, in the hopes that Europeans will follow his example.
To Osmin’s disgruntlement, he sets the lovers free.

What to listen for

This is an opera written in conscious opposition to the high-flown rigour of Italian
opera
seria
– like
Die
Zauberflöte,
it falls into the genre of
Singspiel,
or sung play, advancing the plot by spoken dialogue rather than harpsichord-accompanied recitative, and mixing elements of the Italian style (Constanze’s long and elaborate concertolike aria, ‘Martern aller Arten’) with knockabout farce (the farcical duet for Pedrillo and Osmin, ‘Vivat Bacchus!’) and the purely Mozartian inspiration of the Act II finale, in which the four lovers meet, quarrel and then kiss and make up in the course of one magnificent quartet.

The role of Constanze is probably the most difficult of any in Mozart’s
œuvre,
and few singers have made any real mark in it.
It was written for the great coloratura soprano of the day, Caterina Cavalieri, and Mozart seems to have made her music – to an almost vindictive degree – a challenge to
Cavalieri’s abilities to execute fast runs, roulades and high notes.
The result is that it lies too high for the sort of singer who may be comfortable with the soprano roles in
Così
fan
tutte
or
Don
Giovanni,
but is too heavy and demanding for the sort of high-register light soprano who sings the Queen of the Night in
Die
Zauberflöte
or Constanze’s maid Blonde.
The prevalent views about ‘authenticity’ and honouring the letter of Mozart’s score means that the nineteenth-century solution – transposing the arias to a lower key – is no longer considered acceptable.

For a tenor, Belmonte is another demanding role, benefiting only from the common practice of omitting one or other of his arias.
Nor is Osmin much fun for a bass: his music requires numerous trills, triplets, and several bottom Ds – the lowest notes Mozart ever wrote for a human voice – and his aria ‘Ha!
Wie will ich triumphieren’ extends over the wide range of two octaves.
Even Blonde has her nasty moments, notably the three staccato top Es in her first aria which floor all but the most fearlessly accomplished soubrettes.
Only Bassa Selim escapes the musical minefield – his role is entirely spoken.

In performance

The fact that so many singers shy away from the technical difficulties of this opera contributes to the relative rarity of performance.
Straightforwardly decorative productions like those of Elijah Moshinsky at Covent Garden and John Dexter at the Met provide an attractive setting, but avoid the plot’s curious erotic, racial and religious implications.
In contrast, a famous production in Frankfurt, directed by Ruth Berghaus, was set mostly within a cage, suspended in a white box full of trapdoors.
It emphasized the sexual politics of Constanze’s situation and the idea of smug Europeans confronting the superior moral delicacy of the Muslim world.
At the end of the opera, the lovers did not escape to happiness, but remained lost in a maze of their own making.

Recordings