Cold at heart

‘A masterpiece comparable with the last great plays of Shakespeare’, ‘a veritable turbocharged dynamic of music’, ‘a cliffhanger’, ‘a rollercoaster of a drama’ — which opera deserves these and many more ecstatic epithets? They all occur in the brief programme notes to last week’s concert performance at the Barbican of Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito, though also quoted there, as an example of outdated hostility to the work, is Charles Rosen’s ‘it’s difficult to convey how unmemorable it is’. Try as I might and have with Clemenza, I am on Rosen’s side. I’d much rather agree that the opera belongs to the canon of Mozartian masterworks, but just think of the openings of the three Da Ponte operas, or of Die Zauberflöte, how they immediately grab you and take you into the action, and then compare the long stretch of dry recitative that opens Clemenza, and isn’t even by Mozart.

And while, with few exceptions, the arias in Mozart’s great operas contribute to the action, in Clemenza they neither do that nor do they serve, often, to characterise: some of them are beautiful, many of them are wonderfully accompanied, but they are essentially decorating a work as frigid as anything by Canova. Since the Tito whose clemency the work demonstrates and celebrates is so underportrayed — his main interest in life being to forgive the dubious crowd who surround him their appalling deeds — there is no tension in the drama, and even the arias expressing ferocity, desperation and so forth that the other characters have are, so to speak, abstract, there is no sense that they belong to a person whom we have come to know: once more, compare the characters in any of the Da Ponte operas.