Mitridate, re di Ponto

• 1. Introduction

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  Mitridate, re di Ponto reached the stage of the Teatro Regio Ducale in Milan on the 26th of December 1770, with its composer just fourteen years old. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had spent 1770 touring Italy, absorbing operatic style from established masters. This opera seria in three acts was proof he could compose at their level.

  Doubts trailed the production before it opened, doubts rooted entirely in Mozart's youth. Yet the opera ran for 21 performances during the Milan Carnival season, a genuine success by the standards of the day. Then it vanished. No company revived Mitridate again until the 20th century. What carried a teenager's opera onto that stage, and what kept it locked away from performance for so long afterward?

• 2. Learning From Mysliveček

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  Daniel E. Freeman, a musicologist, showed that Mozart composed Mitridate with close reference to Josef Mysliveček's opera La Nitteti. La Nitteti was the production being prepared in Bologna when Mozart first met Mysliveček there in March 1770, travelling with his father.

  Mysliveček returned to visit the Mozarts often that summer, while Wolfgang was still writing Mitridate in Bologna. Those visits gave the younger composer a working education in Mysliveček's craft. Mozart folded some of his older friend's musical motifs directly into his own score. Mozart himself conducted the opera's premiere that December.

• 3. Voices Of The Premiere

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  Antonia Bernasconi sang Aspasia at the premiere, the queen pledged in marriage to Mitridate. Two of the king's sons were written for castrato voices. Sifare was taken by a singer known as Sartorino, and Farnace by the alto castrato Giuseppe Cicognani.

  Arbate, governor of Nymphaea, was also written as a soprano castrato role, taken by Pietro Muschietti. Guglielmo d'Ettore, a tenor, carried the title role of Mitridate himself. Gasparo Bassano sang the Roman officer Marzio, and Anna Francesca Varese took the part of Ismene, the Parthian princess promised to Farnace. Each of these singers stepped into a plot borrowed from a French tragedy of statecraft and doomed love.

• 4. Aspasia, Rome, And Betrayal

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  Jean Racine's tragedy Mithridate supplied the bones of the story, translated into Italian by Giuseppe Parini before it reached Mozart's stage. The action unfolds around the Crimean port of Nymphaeum in 63 BC, during Rome's war against the kingdom of Pontus.

  Mitridate is believed dead after a crushing defeat, the false news that opens the drama. The governor Arbate carries word of that death to Aspasia and to both of the king's sons. Sifare and Farnace both want Aspasia, the queen promised to their father. Their rivalry runs deeper because Farnace has already thrown in with the Romans against his own family.

  Mitridate turns out to be alive, sailing home with Princess Ismene, his intended bride for Farnace. Both sons scramble to hide their feelings for Aspasia before he arrives. Mitridate does not stay fooled for long. He corners Aspasia into confessing she loves Sifare, and he moves to destroy both his son and the woman he wanted for himself.

  Rome attacks while Mitridate is still consumed by jealousy, and the invasion pulls him back to the battlefield. Defeated there, he takes his own life rather than accept capture. Dying, he forgives Farnace, blesses Sifare and Aspasia's love, and the four survivors swear to drive Rome out of the region for good. That reconciliation plays out entirely through solo voices, the same individual arias that carry nearly every scene in the opera.

• 5. An Opera Almost Without Duets

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  "Se viver non degg'io" closes Act 2, a duet between Aspasia and Sifare and one of only two moments in the opera when voices combine. The other is a brief quintet that ends the opera itself, gathering the surviving characters for a short tutti finish.

  Everywhere else, Mitridate hands each principal role its own virtuoso aria, a structure that keeps every singer alone in the spotlight for their big moment. That format followed the standard convention of baroque opera seria, which typically closed with a short coro or tutti number rather than an ensemble scene. Each principal carried at least one signature aria, including Mitridate's own "Vado incontro" near the opera's end.

• 6. Rediscovery

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  Charles Malherbe, cataloguing Mozart's manuscripts in 1901, turned up several previously unlisted works, including a soprano aria from Mitridate. Camille Fourrier performed that recovered aria in Paris later that same year.

  The Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg recorded the opera in 1971 under conductor Leopold Hager, with a cast including Edda Moser, Arleen Auger, and Pilar Lorengar. Hager conducted the same orchestra again in 1977, with singers Werner Hollweg, Edita Gruberová, and Ileana Cotrubaș, released on CD by Deutsche Grammophon. Jean-Pierre Ponnelle directed a 1986 film version, with Nikolaus Harnoncourt conducting the Concentus Musicus Wien and singers Gösta Winbergh and Yvonne Kenny, released on DVD.

  Christophe Rousset conducted a 1998 recording with a cast that included Giuseppe Sabbatini, Cecilia Bartoli, and Natalie Dessay. Marc Minkowski conducted two separate recordings, one at the Salzburg Festival in 2006 and another with Les Musiciens du Louvre in 2020. The 2020 version featured Michael Spyres, Julie Fuchs, and Sabine Devieilhe. That recording stands as the most recent entry in a catalogue that keeps adding new voices to Mitridate.