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Mozart's first operatic masterpiece, which premiered two days before his 25th birthday, is a thrilling mix of florid vocal writing and eloquent orchestral episodes. The great Mozartean tenor Kurt Streit returns to San Francisco in one of his signature roles: a powerful king who, in the aftermath of the Trojan War, makes a pact that he comes to regret. Vienna critics raved, "Kurt Streit masters the monster role of Idomeneo with confidence," and "his tenor radiates power, brilliance, grandeur." The superb cast, conducted by Donald Runnicles, also includes the acclaimed British mezzo-soprano Alice Coote and notable artist debuts.

Mozart's first operatic masterpiece, which premiered two days before his 25th birthday, is a thrilling mix of florid vocal writing and eloquent orchestral episodes. The great Mozartean tenor Kurt Streit returns to San Francisco in one of his signature roles: a powerful king who, in the aftermath of the Trojan War, makes a pact that he comes to regret. Vienna critics raved, "Kurt Streit masters the monster role of Idomeneo with confidence," and "his tenor radiates power, brilliance, grandeur." The superb cast, conducted by Donald Runnicles, also includes the acclaimed British mezzo-soprano Alice Coote and notable artist debuts.

ACT I

Ilia, a Trojan princess and King Priam's daughter, has been taken prisoner in Crete. Alone, surrounded by captured Trojan plunder, she struggles with her guilt at loving Idamante, son of the king who conquered her homeland. Idamante approaches and tells Ilia that his father's fleet has been sighted. In honor of this joyful day, and because of his love for Ilia, Idamante frees all the Trojan prisoners. As the Cretan people and liberated Trojans rejoice, Elettra, the daughter of Agamemnon, enters. She has been living in exile on Crete after the murder of her mother Clytemnestra. She objects to the liberation of the Trojan prisoners. As Idamante defends his actions, Arbace, Idomeneo's chief counselor, arrives with the news that Idomeneo has drowned at sea. Idamante departs, overwhelmed with grief. Left alone, Elettra fears that if the king is dead, her hopes of wedding Idamante will die with him.

Idomeneo's fleet has been overcome by a storm and driven onto the rocks. Miraculously, Idomeneo and some of his men have survived. After coming ashore, the men leave Idomeneo alone to reflect on the vow he made to Neptune in exchange for his protection from the storm: to sacrifice to the god the first person he encounters on land. Idamante enters, having sought solitude to ease his grief. He fails to recognize the stranger and offers him shelter. When Idomeneo finally learns that the young man is his son, he reveals his own identity. Appalled by the situation, Idomeneo recoils from his son's embrace and departs, forbidding Idamante to follow him. Idamante is inconsolable at his father's rejection.

The storm has now abated and the Cretan people gather to praise Neptune and celebrate the king's safe return.

ACT II

Idomeneo tells Arbace of his vow to Neptune, and decides that for Idamante's safety, he will send him to Argos with Elettra. Ilia appears and tells Idomeneo of her happiness at finding a new homeland in Crete and a new father in Idomeneo. After she is gone, he realizes that she loves his son, and he leaves, overcome by the pain and suffering his vow will cause. Elettra enters and expresses her pleasure in having Idamante to herself.

The boat which will take Elettra and Idamante to Argos is ready to set sail, and the people of Crete assemble. All look forward to a safe voyage. Idomeneo arrives to bid farewell to Elettra and Idamante. As the couple are about to embark, a storm suddenly arises. The frightened people realize that someone has offended the gods and they demand to know his name. Idomeneo tells them that he is the guilty one, and as the storm continues, the crowd flees in terror.

ACT III

Ilia can only think of her unhappy love for Idamante. He tells her that he will fight the terrible monster Neptune has sent to plague the island and that he may never return. They reveal their love for each other. Idomeneo and Elettra interrupt the lovers. Idamante begs his father to reveal the reason for his harsh behavior, but when Idomeneo cannot answer, the prince sadly departs.

The High Priest of Neptune demands from Idomeneo the name of the one to be sacrificed to placate the god. Idomeneo at last names his son. The crowd is horrified and the priest asks for mercy for the innocent man.

Solemn prayers are offered to the god. A victory celebration is heard nearby, and Arbace enters with the news that Idamante has slain the monster. The young hero returns, knowing his father's vow and ready to sacrifice himself to the angry god. As the ceremony is about to begin, Ilia intervenes, offering herself in place of her lover. The entire situation is resolved by an oracular pronouncement: Idomeneo is to renounce the throne, which Idamante is to ascend and there be united with Ilia. At this unexpected announcement, Elettra is left with her worst fears realized and leaves in a rage. Idomeneo presents Idamante to the people as their new king and is hailed by the populace.

Idomeneo: Mozart's Musical Enlightenment, Part I

by Thomas May

Mozart experienced the happiest period in his life during the months when he created Idomeneo, in the winter of 1780–81. So reported his widow, Constanze, years after her husband’s death. She would not be courted by Mozart until he moved to Vienna later in 1781—he had previously fallen in love with her sister Aloysia, who rejected him—so the memories that he recounted to her of working on the opera must have been especially vivid.

            Constanze did witness firsthand the grip Idomeneo held over Mozart when the newly married couple paid a visit to his father Leopold and sister Nannerl in Salzburg. The four of them gathered around the keyboard to engage in an impromptu rendition of the marvelous, unprecedented quartet from the opera’s third act—Leopold and Wolfgang reprising the father and son roles of Idomeneo and Idamante, respectively, and Constanze that of Ilia while Nannerl undertook the part of the volatile Elettra. Mozart, Constanze later recalled, became “so overwhelmed that he burst into tears and had to leave the room; it was a while before I could console him.” Happiness and heartbreak: It should not be surprising that Idomeneo aroused such emotional polarities, for Mozart invested his deepest creative self in the opera. And its charge remains undiminished—even if an absurdly long time elapsed before audiences, in recent decades, came to recognize the extraordinary nature of what Mozart achieved here.

            The term “breakthrough” authentically applies to Idomeneo—in a personal sense as much as an artistic one. Mozart composed the opera just ahead of his twenty-fifth birthday. Before the commission to write it arrived in the middle of 1780, he found himself cornered, facing a highly uncomfortable stalemate. The years of being lionized as a child prodigy were long past. Despite his obvious musical gifts, Mozart’s attempts to win independence from his subservient position as a musician in the Archbishop of Salzburg’s court had hitherto struck out. Indeed, his genius was a liability insofar as it signaled an unwillingness to conform to the standard way of doing things. Mozart had returned to Salzburg in early 1779 following a lengthy, traumatic tour to Paris—and several German cities on the way—that failed to procure him the kind of post he craved. The trauma resulted from the sudden death of his mother in Paris in 1778; she had accompanied her son since Leopold’s duties required him to remain in Salzburg. Compounding all this was Aloysia’s point-blank rejection of his love. Presto, Mozart found himself back where he had started, trapped in the Salzburg he now loathed.

            But the Paris tour did have some positive consequences. In the French capital, Mozart, already deeply versed in the reigning Italian style of opera, was exposed to significant new developments via the reforms of Gluck and others. His sojourn in Mannheim meanwhile excited in Mozart a sense of new artistic possibilities and won him important friendships among musicians who had built Mannheim’s court orchestra into what was reputedly the finest instrumental ensemble in Europe. They were supported by the Elector of Bavaria, Karl Theodor, an enlightened monarch who, like Frederick the Great ofPrussia, was especially inclined toward music. In his wonderful recent surveyMozart and His Operas, David Cairns describes the Elector as “a ruler steeped in Enlightenment culture, deeply interested and actively involved in the study of science, philosophy, language and the arts.” His circle “helped generate the serious atmosphere which captivated Mozart when he arrived in Mannheim in 1777.”

            Undoubtedly his musician friends continued to pitch for Mozart after he departed. They had been relocated, along with the entire court, from Mannheim to Munich , and it was for the Carnival season of 1781 in Munich that Mozart was asked to compose the annual opera. Although the hopes of receiving a long-term appointment that this generated turned out to be illusory, the immediate opportunity was a godsend. Mozart fervently desired to devote his creative energy to opera above all else, yet for five years he had not been given the occasion to write one. When Mozart asked his father to “remember how much I long to write operas” in a letter during the disastrous Paris tour, he was referring to the genre at its most ambitious, of which he had gotten a taste in his opera seria of a decade earlier, Mitridate . Stuck in Salzburg, which lacked a resident opera company, in 1779 he had begun composing the Singspiel-melodrama Zaide, with no prospect for performance, but abandoned it when the commission for Idomeneo came through.

           With this new project came the added advantage of having to take up temporary residence in Munich. It was customary for composers to work closely with the singers cast for a new opera (Mozart already knew most of them from his earlier encounters) and to be on hand as the production took shape. This required finagling his official six-week leave from Salzburginto an absence of several months. Mozart was already skating on thin ice with his Archbishop employer; within just months of the Idomeneo premiere, he would break free entirely and begin the final phase of his career as a full-fledged freelancer in Vienna.

           Yet another advantage, for posterity, was the detailed epistolary communication between Mozart and Leopold that this arrangement necessitated. The librettist chosen for Idomeneo was the Abbé Giambattista Varesco, an older chaplain in the Salzburg court, and Leopold was delegated the task of mediating between his son and Varesco during the sometimes heated negotiations needed to tailor the libretto to Wolfgang’s specifications. The surviving letters between father and son open a fascinating window into Mozart’s creative process while he was in the thick of composing and rehearsing Idomeneo . They reveal his fixation on the detail and integrity of the musico-dramatic experience.

           Mozart frets over the singers’ acting, remarking that in rehearsal the tenor playing Idomeneo “stands around like a statue” (in contrast, he is very pleased with the tenor playing the king’s confidant Arbace). He recurrently underlines the need for brevity and directness (Varesco’s rambling, overwritten text required careful pruning). Regarding the mysterious voice of the oracle near the end of the opera, for example, Mozart writes that the first draft is too long: “The longer [the voice] goes on, the more the audience will become aware that there’s nothing real about it. If the speech of the Ghost in Hamlet were not quite so long, it would be much more effective.” Later, as opening night (January 29, 1781) approached, Mozart ruthlessly cut whole numbers—including some of the score’s most splendid moments—to shorten the running time. Yet he obeyed his intuition about the quartet despite doubts expressed by his Idomeneo. “The more I try to imagine how the quartet will sound onstage,” he says after a piano rehearsal, “the more I know it will be effective….Nothing in the entire opera pleases me as much as this quartet.”

           Varesco’s libretto was actually a reworking of an earlier French one by Antoine Danchet, which André Campra had composed as a tragédie-lyrique in 1712. The modern Idomeneo characterized here is something of a synthetic myth (bringing in the unrelated figure of Elettra [Electra] as a sort of refugee from Mycenae, after Orestes has slain their mother Clytemnestra to avenge Agamemnon). His appearances in the literature of classical antiquity are rare (most famously in Book XIII of The Iliad as one of the bravest Greek warriors battling the Trojans). The fateful episode of Idomeneo’s return home to Crete, where he survives a shipwreck only to have to sacrifice his son, is not nearly as fleshed-out as the comparable human-sacrifice story of Agamemnon and Iphigenia (treated by the Greek tragedians).

           The Baroque era developed a special fascination with these stories—suggesting obvious counterparts to the biblical narratives of Abraham and Isaac, and Jephtha and his daughter—which carried over into the Enlightenment and was taken up by opera composers of the eighteenth century. Gluck chose the Iphigenia story for two of his greatest reformist operas, including his masterpiece Iphigénie en Tauride. In his book Mozart and the Enlightenment, Nicholas Till points out that these myths gained renewed currency (despite their use of what the celebrated librettist Metastastio called their “tragical terrorism”) because they dramatized the Enlightenment conviction in “the superiority of natural law to customary and religious law; for human sacrifice, as a sacramental deed, provides a religious sanction for a basic transgression against nature: murder.”

            For this reworked Idomeneo, much of the baroque machinery of the French source was cut away to streamline things. The sphere of the gods, who figure much more prominently in Campra’s opera and manipulate the action throughout, is trimmed down to include Neptune alone (though the opera is set in Crete, Varesco customarily uses the Latinate rather than Greek names for these mythological figures). Most significantly, the original tragic ending—Idomeneo, turned insane, does sacrifice Idamante and Elettra thus gets her longed-for vengeance in the earlier French opera—is retooled into the triumph of both reason and love.

Idomeneo: Mozart's Musical Enlightenment, Part II

by Thomas May

There is some debate about the extent to which Mozart may have had a say in selecting the topic for the Carnival season’s new opera (a composer in his position normally had little control over that all-important choice). Regardless, Idomeneo’s story and central themes could scarcely have been calculated to resonate more profoundly with him. The uncertainties its characters endure in their experience of love and of the bond between father and son must have struck home. A number of commentators wisely caution us not to overdo the Freudian psychobiographical sleuthing, and we cheat ourselves of the full richness of Idomeneo if we reduce the opera to the emotional dynamics of the father-son issue. Still—keeping in mind that this is but one aspect—it is possible to perceive something of a self-portrait of the composer in Idamante. Like Mozart, he initially faces the pain of apparent rejection by his beloved (Ilia) and desperately seeks the approval of his father. (Leopold’s controlling behavior toward his son, a long-standing pattern, crops up at various moments in the Idomeneo correspondence. Advising Mozart to take care of his cold, he refers to his wife’s death in a way bound to stir up guilt: “If I had been with your Mother…she would still be alive.” He even offers suggestions on what sort of music to compose for the oracle.) And like Mozart, Idamante decides to strike out on his own as he goes to slay the sea-monster terrorizing the Cretans.

            The personal relationships are just one among several dimensions of the drama in Idomeneo that Mozart’s score brings to life. As Julian Rushton observes in his Cambridge Handbook Guide to Idomeneo, each of the opera’s three acts symmetrically follows the same overall pattern, crescendoing from a personal point of view to a dramatic event in the public sphere (the first act repeats the pattern, moving from Ilia to the chorus of Greeks and Trojans in the first half and from Idomeneo on the beach to the celebration of homecoming in the second).

            What this structure seems to underscore is the closely knit connection between the intimate and the public, even the cosmic. Mozart is interested not only in the inner emotional lives of his characters as they face their dilemmas—which in themselves are made richly vivid through the appealing diversity of his arias—but in the larger implications of his story (much as The Magic Flute explores a symbolic, complex ethical dimension beyond its fairy-tale surface). In Idomeneo, the overriding issue is how these characters face and challenge authority. Indeed, the literal father-son tie is just one configuration among several in the opera for the archetypal relationship of submissiveness to a parental authority. It is echoed in the enslavement of prisoners of war to the Greeks, of humans to the will of the gods, even of lovers to their emotions. Those who triumph in Idomeneo point a way out of this default posture of submission. In 1784, just three years after Idomeneo, Kant published his famous definition of the philosophical movement that had dominated the century: “Enlightenment is humanity’s release from self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own reason without guidance by another.”

            Ilia (whose first aria begins with the word “padre”) moves from a position of vacillation between love for Idamante and tribal allegiance to Priam and the Trojans (her Aida complex, if you will) to the overwhelming courage of her decisive action to save Idamante, thus prompting the dramatic turnabout of the finale. Idamante is an obedient son, but he dares to challenge the old order and ultimately slay his monster. Even if his command to liberate the Trojan prisoners of war is motivated by a desire to impress Ilia, he internalizes this code of ethics. When he fatefully confronts his father as a stranger on the beach (they fail to recognize each other because Idomeneo had been away at war for at least ten years, leaving his son to grow up back in Crete), Idamante automatically responds with compassion.

            Idomeneo’s own remarkable first aria shows his capacity to feel pity for his imminent victim, yet he remains trapped by the old order and can try only to evade his problem. The fact that he has landed in this plight arises from his vow, a potent symbol of superstitious, fear-driven subservience. When that fear becomes embodied in the rampaging sea-monster, his son faces it head on. In the end, reason and love unite to govern in a new order, replacing the old one of fear. Elettra, of course, remains as the outsider, the outcast who is still enslaved by her disproportionate passions. Mozart—in a coloratura style prefiguring the Queen of the Night—clearly savors the challenge of musically representing this violent spillover of untamed emotion. In the process he radically reimagines the convention, well-worn by then, of the rage aria (Rushton aptly compares Elettra’s final aria to an exorcism). In another sense, she is the lurking fury that will erupt into revolution by century’s end.

           Perhaps Idomeneo’s most astonishing aspect is its sheer comprehensiveness and scope of ambition. Into it Mozart poured everything he had learned: from the conventions of Italian opera seria with its lyrical underpinning of intense emotions; from the reformist streamlining of Gluck he had observed in Paris, with the dramatic naturalness and directness it sought; also from opera as practiced French style, the stimulating effect of frequent choruses and the powerful theatricality of ceremonial pomp and “spectacles” such as the divine interventions that interrupt each ofIdomeneo ’s three acts (the shipwreck, the terrible storm and sea-monster, and the oracle); from his settings of sacred music for chorus and soloists; and from his experience as a symphonic composer. He had at his disposal, thanks to the Munich theater orchestra (originally from Mannheim), an exceptional group of virtuosos and took maximum advantage of the woodwinds in his delectably detailed scoring. (Consider the effect, for example, of his beloved clarinet in Idomeneo’s final aria of resignation, “Torna la pace.”)

           Mozart responds to the variety of scenes and interludes with music of brilliant colors and heightened intensity, all the while using contrast to memorable dramatic effect. Notice for example how startling the oracle is within the larger context of the final scene. Nearly two centuries before Billy Budd, Mozart creates a sonority that, like Britten with his famous series of thirty-four chords, effects a radical rupture in our experience of this operatic world. He does it with fewer chords, scored simply for three trombones and two horns and with a monotonic vocal line for the bass, but they convey a similarly numinous quality. Idomeneo brims with beautiful melodies, but Mozart does not hesitate to summon the sublime as well, even if that means writing hair-raising sounds that might be perceived as ugly. (In response to Leopold’s concerns that he might be writing too much “connoisseur”-centered music—he advises him not to forget “the so-called popular style, which tickles the long ears”—Mozart writes “Don’t worry about it, In my opera you’ll find music for every kind of listener, except for those with the long ears.”)

           At the same time, Mozart binds this teeming variety together in a score whose cohesiveness and musico-dramatic integrity points toward the future of opera. Particular musical ideas—not exactly leitmotifs—recur with great flexibility at crucial moments in the score (the most famous is the simply descending figure first given by the winds after the overture’s stately opening chords, which becomes loosely associated with the idea of sacrifice and suffering). Even more significantly, Mozart cleverly links arias with recitatives and the surrounding action into longer, continuous sections. Elettra’s first aria, for example, not only established her passionate nature; its music bleeds into the ensuing storm. The libretto’s poetic cliché of a storm within prompts Mozart to an original musical approach (in the following scene, the direction is reversed: after the storm’s fury has been spent, Idomeneo complains of the tempest raging in his heart).

            This marvelous knitting together of disparate elements in new ways reaches a new height in the quartet of the third act—precisely when the four principal characters are most torn by their individual, conflicting predicaments. As David Cairns so eloquently observes, Idomeneo offered Mozart “the chance to give out all that he had learned from life and art, all he had experienced of love and suffering and pity and guilt, his comprehensive understanding of the dramatic, his consciousness of unequalled powers, in an opera that was an answer to prayer.” With Idomeneo, Mozart engages with every facet of operatic expression available to him and shows off his rapidly maturing powers, reinvigorating handed-down conventions with a new sense of urgency and dramatic truth.

Idomeneo: Mozart's Musical Enlightenment, Part II

by Thomas May

There is some debate about the extent to which Mozart may have had a say in selecting the topic for the Carnival season’s new opera (a composer in his position normally had little control over that all-important choice). Regardless, Idomeneo’s story and central themes could scarcely have been calculated to resonate more profoundly with him. The uncertainties its characters endure in their experience of love and of the bond between father and son must have struck home. A number of commentators wisely caution us not to overdo the Freudian psychobiographical sleuthing, and we cheat ourselves of the full richness of Idomeneo if we reduce the opera to the emotional dynamics of the father-son issue. Still—keeping in mind that this is but one aspect—it is possible to perceive something of a self-portrait of the composer in Idamante. Like Mozart, he initially faces the pain of apparent rejection by his beloved (Ilia) and desperately seeks the approval of his father. (Leopold’s controlling behavior toward his son, a long-standing pattern, crops up at various moments in the Idomeneo correspondence. Advising Mozart to take care of his cold, he refers to his wife’s death in a way bound to stir up guilt: “If I had been with your Mother…she would still be alive.” He even offers suggestions on what sort of music to compose for the oracle.) And like Mozart, Idamante decides to strike out on his own as he goes to slay the sea-monster terrorizing the Cretans.

            The personal relationships are just one among several dimensions of the drama in Idomeneo that Mozart’s score brings to life. As Julian Rushton observes in his Cambridge Handbook Guide to Idomeneo, each of the opera’s three acts symmetrically follows the same overall pattern, crescendoing from a personal point of view to a dramatic event in the public sphere (the first act repeats the pattern, moving from Ilia to the chorus of Greeks and Trojans in the first half and from Idomeneo on the beach to the celebration of homecoming in the second).

            What this structure seems to underscore is the closely knit connection between the intimate and the public, even the cosmic. Mozart is interested not only in the inner emotional lives of his characters as they face their dilemmas—which in themselves are made richly vivid through the appealing diversity of his arias—but in the larger implications of his story (much as The Magic Flute explores a symbolic, complex ethical dimension beyond its fairy-tale surface). In Idomeneo, the overriding issue is how these characters face and challenge authority. Indeed, the literal father-son tie is just one configuration among several in the opera for the archetypal relationship of submissiveness to a parental authority. It is echoed in the enslavement of prisoners of war to the Greeks, of humans to the will of the gods, even of lovers to their emotions. Those who triumph in Idomeneo point a way out of this default posture of submission. In 1784, just three years after Idomeneo, Kant published his famous definition of the philosophical movement that had dominated the century: “Enlightenment is humanity’s release from self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own reason without guidance by another.”

            Ilia (whose first aria begins with the word “padre”) moves from a position of vacillation between love for Idamante and tribal allegiance to Priam and the Trojans (her Aida complex, if you will) to the overwhelming courage of her decisive action to save Idamante, thus prompting the dramatic turnabout of the finale. Idamante is an obedient son, but he dares to challenge the old order and ultimately slay his monster. Even if his command to liberate the Trojan prisoners of war is motivated by a desire to impress Ilia, he internalizes this code of ethics. When he fatefully confronts his father as a stranger on the beach (they fail to recognize each other because Idomeneo had been away at war for at least ten years, leaving his son to grow up back in Crete), Idamante automatically responds with compassion.

            Idomeneo’s own remarkable first aria shows his capacity to feel pity for his imminent victim, yet he remains trapped by the old order and can try only to evade his problem. The fact that he has landed in this plight arises from his vow, a potent symbol of superstitious, fear-driven subservience. When that fear becomes embodied in the rampaging sea-monster, his son faces it head on. In the end, reason and love unite to govern in a new order, replacing the old one of fear. Elettra, of course, remains as the outsider, the outcast who is still enslaved by her disproportionate passions. Mozart—in a coloratura style prefiguring the Queen of the Night—clearly savors the challenge of musically representing this violent spillover of untamed emotion. In the process he radically reimagines the convention, well-worn by then, of the rage aria (Rushton aptly compares Elettra’s final aria to an exorcism). In another sense, she is the lurking fury that will erupt into revolution by century’s end.

            Perhaps Idomeneo’s most astonishing aspect is its sheer comprehensiveness and scope of ambition. Into it Mozart poured everything he had learned: from the conventions of Italian opera seria with its lyrical underpinning of intense emotions; from the reformist streamlining of Gluck he had observed in Paris, with the dramatic naturalness and directness it sought; also from opera as practiced French style, the stimulating effect of frequent choruses and the powerful theatricality of ceremonial pomp and “spectacles” such as the divine interventions that interrupt each of Idomeneo’s three acts (the shipwreck, the terrible storm and sea-monster, and the oracle); from his settings of sacred music for chorus and soloists; and from his experience as a symphonic composer. He had at his disposal, thanks to the Munich theater orchestra (originally from Mannheim), an exceptional group of virtuosos and took maximum advantage of the woodwinds in his delectably detailed scoring. (Consider the effect, for example, of his beloved clarinet in Idomeneo’s final aria of resignation, “Torna la pace.”)

            Mozart responds to the variety of scenes and interludes with music of brilliant colors and heightened intensity, all the while using contrast to memorable dramatic effect. Notice for example how startling the oracle is within the larger context of the final scene. Nearly two centuries before Billy Budd, Mozart creates a sonority that, like Britten with his famous series of thirty-four chords, effects a radical rupture in our experience of this operatic world. He does it with fewer chords, scored simply for three trombones and two horns and with a monotonic vocal line for the bass, but they convey a similarly numinous quality. Idomeneo brims with beautiful melodies, but Mozart does not hesitate to summon the sublime as well, even if that means writing hair-raising sounds that might be perceived as ugly. (In response to Leopold’s concerns that he might be writing too much “connoisseur”-centered music—he advises him not to forget “the so-called popular style, which tickles the long ears”—Mozart writes “Don’t worry about it, In my opera you’ll find music for every kind of listener, except for those with the long ears.”)

            At the same time, Mozart binds this teeming variety together in a score whose cohesiveness and musico-dramatic integrity points toward the future of opera. Particular musical ideas—not exactly leitmotifs—recur with great flexibility at crucial moments in the score (the most famous is the simply descending figure first given by the winds after the overture’s stately opening chords, which becomes loosely associated with the idea of sacrifice and suffering). Even more significantly, Mozart cleverly links arias with recitatives and the surrounding action into longer, continuous sections. Elettra’s first aria, for example, not only established her passionate nature; its music bleeds into the ensuing storm. The libretto’s poetic cliché of a storm within prompts Mozart to an original musical approach (in the following scene, the direction is reversed: after the storm’s fury has been spent, Idomeneo complains of the tempest raging in his heart).

            This marvelous knitting together of disparate elements in new ways reaches a new height in the quartet of the third act—precisely when the four principal characters are most torn by their individual, conflicting predicaments. As David Cairns so eloquently observes, Idomeneo offered Mozart “the chance to give out all that he had learned from life and art, all he had experienced of love and suffering and pity and guilt, his comprehensive understanding of the dramatic, his consciousness of unequalled powers, in an opera that was an answer to prayer.” With Idomeneo, Mozart engages with every facet of operatic expression available to him and shows off his rapidly maturing powers, reinvigorating handed-down conventions with a new sense of urgency and dramatic truth.

Listen Sunday, August 2 at 8 pm on Classical 102.1 KDFC

Recorded live at the War Memorial Opera House during the 2008-09 season.

This broadcast was produced by San Francisco Opera, with technical production by the San Francisco Opera Sound Department.
Producer: Marilyn Mercur
Broadcast Host: Elaine Warner

• Idomeneo: Kurt Streit
• Idamante: Alice Coote
• Ilia: Genia Kühmeier*
• Elettra: Iano Tamar*
• Arbace: Alek Shrader
• The High Priest of Neptune: Robert MacNeil*
• The Voice of the Oracle: Kenneth Kellogg
• Two Cretan Maidens: Mary Finch
• Two Trojan Men: Chester Pidduck

• Conductor: Donald Runnicles
• Director: John Copley
• Set Designer: John Conklin
• Costume Designer: Michael Stennett
• Lighting Designer: Christopher Maravich