Idomeneo

• 1. Introduction

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  Idomeneo, re di Creta received its first performance on the 29th of January 1781 at the Cuvilliés Theatre in Munich. The city press reviewed that evening with a notable omission. The notice praised set designer Lorenzo Quaglio and called his decors masterpieces. Mozart's name did not appear. The commission had come from Karl Theodor, Elector of Bavaria, who wanted a new work for his court carnival. The source material was a 1705 play by Crébillon père, which André Campra had already set to music as Idoménée in 1712. Mozart inherited that layered tradition and added his own fierce convictions about what opera could achieve. The result was his first mature opera. How did he blend Italian and French operatic conventions within a drama rooted in ancient Greek myth? Why did he fight so intensely with his librettist over individual vowels? And how did a work of such ambition spend more than 150 years waiting for a regular place on the world's stages?

• 2. Layers of Influence

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  The libretto Giambattista Varesco delivered to Mozart had already traveled far. Antoine Danchet had written the original French text for André Campra's 1712 opera. Varesco adapted that French source into Italian. A 1705 play by Crébillon père lay beneath everything. Musicologist Kurt Kramer has argued that Varesco also knew the reform writings associated with Ranieri de' Calzabigi, the librettist closely connected with Gluck. That connection helps explain why the opera's most dramatic passages carry the imprint of the latest French operatic style, passed through Italian hands.

  Metastasio's conventions shape Idomeneo at the structural level. The overall layout, the approach to character development, and the poetic language of the individual numbers follow templates that Metastasio had made standard for Italian opera seria. The choruses, marches, and ballets are distinctly French in character. The shipwreck scene near the end of act one parallels the structure of a similar scene in Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride. The sacrifice and oracle sequences echo Gluck's Iphigénie en Aulide and Alceste.

  Mozart pulled this synthesis back toward its Italian roots. All the singers in the premiere cast had trained in the classical Italian style, and the recitatives follow that tradition throughout. The Chaconne that opens the ballet music quotes directly from Gluck's ballet in Iphigénie en Aulide, making the debt to Gluck audible from the very first bars of the dance.

• 3. The Orchestra's Voice

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  Mozart's score for Idomeneo deploys each rarer instrument under strict conditions. The woodwinds include pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons. Four horns, two trumpets, and three trombones complete the brass. B clarinets, an instrument now obsolete, appear in two specific numbered passages. A piccolo enters only in the storm scene in act two. Three trombones sound only to accompany the off-stage Voice of Neptune in act three.

  The divertissement Mozart described in a letter to his father on the 30th of December 1780 showcases the Mannheim orchestra's famous techniques. These include its stupefying crescendos and the passages where the full ensemble plays in massed coordination. Mozart reported in that letter that the management of the electoral theater in Munich had requested the addition.

  One architectural choice in Idomeneo began what became a lifelong practice. Mozart ended the opera in D major, matching the key of the overture. He applied the same rule to every subsequent opera he wrote. The practice made him unique among composers. The overture itself unfolds in a modified sonata form, with D major as the tonic and A major as the dominant of the exposition. Its final chords are soft and tentative. They resolve not into D major but into the dominant of G minor, the home key of the scene that immediately follows.

• 4. The Ballet Music

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  K. 367, the ballet music Mozart wrote for Idomeneo, runs around fifteen minutes and divides into two clearly distinct halves. The first four dances connect through attacca transitions, flowing without pause. They move from a Chaconne in D major to an Annonce in B-flat. A Chaconne reprise follows, starting in D minor before resolving to D major. The Pas seul in D major closes this continuous opening sequence. The final three pieces stand separately: a Passepied in B-flat, a Gavotte in G, and an unfinished Passacaille in E-flat major.

  Mozart wrote dancer names beside specific passages throughout the manuscript. One entry reads "Pas seul de Mad. Falgera." Another designates a section for Jean-Pierre Le Grand, the main choreographer for the Munich premiere. The Gavotte in G later found an independent audience. Tchaikovsky conducted it at one of his Russian Musical Society concerts. Daniel Heartz speculates that the final three dances were never performed, pointing to their separation in the manuscript and the incomplete state of the Passacaille.

  Harald Heckmann, writing in the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe, proposes that the ballet followed act one. Heartz takes a different view, arguing it must have come after the final chorus of act three. Heartz cites the majesty and grandeur of the D major Pas seul as perfectly suited to closing an opera. Mozart left no unambiguous instruction in the score about where the divertissement was meant to appear.

• 5. Composer vs. Chaplain

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  Giambattista Varesco was the court chaplain in Munich when Mozart engaged him to write the libretto. The two men's working relationship was contentious from the start. Mozart pushed for large cuts and demanded changes down to specific words and single vowels. The word "rinvigorir" posed a particular problem. Its repeated "i" sounds, pronounced in Italian as in the English word "bee," were awkward for singers to sustain. Mozart had the word changed. His correspondence with his father from Munich shows how actively he reshaped the text he had been given.

  Anton Raaff sang the title role as a tenor at the premiere. Vincenzo dal Prato took the castrato role of Idamante. Dorothea Wendling sang Ilia, Elisabeth Wendling sang Elettra, and Christian Cannabich led the orchestra. The work ran for three performances in Munich and was then set aside. Later in 1781, Mozart considered revisions that would have brought the opera closer to Gluck's style, including making Idomeneo a bass and casting a tenor as Idamante. He did not carry those plans out.

  In 1786, Mozart returned to the work for a concert performance at the Palais Auersperg in Vienna. He wrote new music, made further cuts, and changed the role of Idamante from a castrato to a tenor. After that Vienna evening, the opera would not reach a public stage again until Erik Chisholm brought it to Glasgow.

• 6. Strauss Steps In

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  In 1931, the 150th anniversary of Idomeneo's premiere placed several major European opera houses in an awkward position. Commemorative performances seemed obligatory. But programmers feared that contemporary audiences would reject so formally complex a work in its original form. Munich commissioned a revision from Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari, which was performed in 1931. Vienna turned to Richard Strauss, whose approach was far more interventionist.

  Strauss worked with librettist Lothar Wallerstein on a German text partly translated from the original Italian. He replaced roughly one third of Mozart's score with music of his own. He introduced the "Fall of Troy" motif from his 1928 opera Die ägyptische Helena. He changed the character of the princess Elettra into a priestess named Ismene. Ilia's opening aria, "Padre, germani, addio," survived mostly intact, though with changes to its long introductory recitative.

  When Idamante enters in the Strauss version, he sings not the original "Non ho colpa" but Mozart's concert aria Non piu, tutto ascoltai, K490. That piece had been added by Mozart himself during his 1786 Vienna revision. Critics noted that Strauss's additions blend classical compositional style with his own distinctive harmonic language. In 1984, New York's Mostly Mozart Festival staged the Strauss version. Jerry Hadley took the title role, Delores Ziegler sang Idamante, and Alessandra Marc sang Ismene.

• 7. The Repertoire Catches Up

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  Erik Chisholm conducted the British premiere of Idomeneo on the 12th of March 1934 with the Glasgow Grand Opera Society, an amateur ensemble. The first American performance came in the summer of 1947, produced by Boris Goldovsky at the Berkshire Music Festival at Tanglewood.

  Idomeneo now holds a secure position in the standard operatic repertoire and is regularly performed on major stages. In 2006, the Deutsche Oper Berlin cancelled its planned revival of a production that Hans Neuenfels had first directed there in 2003. The dispute drew international attention and confirmed Idomeneo's place at the very center of operatic culture.