Lucio Silla

• 1. Introduction

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  Lucio Silla, K. 135, arrived on the stage of Milan's Teatro Regio Ducale on the 26th of December 1772, performed by a company of singers and conducted by its composer: a sixteen-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The opera is a full Italian opera seria in three acts, built around the figure of the Roman dictator Lucius Cornelius Sulla, a man torn between brute power and the pull of mercy. At its center is a love story under siege: the exiled senator Cecilio and his betrothed Giunia, daughter of his fallen enemy, caught between Sulla's lust, his tyranny, and his surprising capacity for change. What drew a teenage prodigy to such a subject? What made this work different from everything he had written before? And why, two and a half centuries later, does it keep returning to stages from Barcelona to Chicago?

• 2. A Story of Rome

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  Sulla, the dictator at the heart of the drama, wants Giunia for himself. She is the daughter of Gaius Marius, a murdered hero and Sulla's enemy, which makes her desire for the exiled senator Cecilio both a personal act of loyalty and a political defiance. Sulla spreads the lie that Cecilio is dead, hoping grief will open Giunia to his advances. Cecilio, learning the truth from his friend Cinna, slips back into Rome to meet Giunia by her father's tomb on the banks of the Tiber. The opera presses its characters through a sequence of confrontations: Sulla threatening Giunia with death, Cecilio drawing his sword in the Senate, Cinna quietly plotting to kill the dictator himself. What makes the plot unusual for its genre is the ending. Before the assembled senators and people of Rome, Sulla reverses course entirely. He frees Cecilio, hands Giunia to him, pardons Cinna by marrying him to Celia, and announces he will step down as dictator and restore liberty to Rome. He explains that he has seen proof that innocence and a virtuous heart triumph over power and glory.

• 3. A Sixteen-Year-Old Conductor

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  Mozart did not merely compose Lucio Silla; he stood at the podium for its premiere. The cast he led included the soprano Anna de Amicis Buonsolazzi as Giunia and the soprano castrato Venanzio Rauzzini as Cecilio, a voice type that carried enormous prestige in eighteenth-century opera seria. The title role of Sulla went to the tenor Bassano Morgnoni. The premiere earned what one account called "a moderate success," a cautious verdict for a boy who had already conquered audiences across Europe. The libretto was the work of Giovanni de Gamerra, revised by the elder Pietro Metastasio, whose name carried near-mythic authority in Italian opera of the period. Having two librettists, one relatively new and one of towering reputation, shaped the text Mozart set.

• 4. What Made It New

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  Mozart scholars Téodor de Wyzewa and Georges de Saint-Foix described Lucio Silla as a "grande crise romantique," a great romantic crisis, pointing to an emotional intensity that marked a departure in the young composer's output. Others placed it in the context of the Sturm und Drang movement, though musicologist scholars noted that Mozart's engagement with that aesthetic was nowhere near the length or importance of Joseph Haydn's parallel period. Rudolph Angermüller, writing in his book Mozart's Operas, drew attention to something more concrete: Lucio Silla is the first of Mozart's stage works to make full use of recitativo accompagnato, the accompanied recitative that musicologist Stanley Sadie described as "passive and restrained." This was a defining feature of opera seria, and its presence here signals Mozart treating the form with a new seriousness. Angermüller also noted the opera's more ambitious orchestration compared to Mitridate, re di Ponto, the earlier Milan commission, and the frequent use of obbligato parts woven into the arias.

• 5. The Ballet and Its Loss

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  Alongside the opera, a ballet was prepared: Le gelosie del Serraglio, K. 135a, choreographed by the French dancer Jean-Georges Noverre. The completed score of that ballet is lost, though a few sketches survive. Noverre was not a chance collaborator; Mozart would work with him again in Paris in 1778. The existence of the ballet, even in fragments, points to how these productions worked in the eighteenth century: an opera seria did not stand alone on the evening's program but shared the stage with dance, spectacle, and other entertainments. What those sketches contain, and what the finished score might have sounded like, remains one of the small open questions left by this commission.

• 6. The Last Italian Opera

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  Lucio Silla would prove to be Mozart's final opera composed in Italy. As he moved past his teenage years, the aura of the child prodigy that had dazzled European courts and concert halls began to fade, and with it some of the opportunities that aura had opened. His next opera, La finta giardiniera, was written not for an Italian stage but for Munich in 1774. Yet the pull of Italy never left him. In a letter to his father Leopold, dated the 4th of February 1778, he wrote: "Please do your utmost to ensure that we get to Italy. You know my greatest desire is to write operas." In that same letter he mentioned a specific wish to compose for Verona. The desire remained, but the Italian commissions did not return.

• 7. Recordings and Revival

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  The opera's UK premiere came in 1967, produced by Camden Town Hall in London, nearly two centuries after its Milan debut. The US premiere followed in 1968 in Baltimore. A 1962 recording conducted by Carlo Felice Cillario on RCA was among the earliest documented accounts. The 1980 recording under Leopold Hager, featuring Júlia Várady as Cecilio and Arleen Augér as Giunia with the Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg on Deutsche Grammophon, is still regarded as the most complete recording and is considered the reference version of the opera. It was reissued in 1991 as part of the Complete Mozart Edition on Philips, with a full libretto in four languages and notes by Gottfried Kraus, and again in 2000. The 1989 recording under Nikolaus Harnoncourt, the first on period instruments, featured Cecilia Bartoli as Cecilio and Edita Gruberová as Giunia; Harnoncourt removed the minor character of Aufidio entirely and trimmed several numbers, drawing criticism for tempos some found overly fast. Chicago Opera Theater staged the work in 2015 at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance, led by General Director Andreas Mitisek, and Madrid's Teatro Real mounted it in 2017 as part of the theater's bicentennial program.