Opera
Spirit of Pilgrimage
By DAVID CAIRNS
This is only as it should be. The moral of Idorneneo is the same one that The Coronation of Poppea puts even more forcefully—that in opera it is not the form that is importantbut the composer. The form is as stiff or as flexible, as alive or moribund, as the music which in- fuses it. There has never been anything the matter with opera that a composer of dramatic genius could not quickly remedy. It is an im- perfect talent that resorts to 'Reform.'
exaggerate. But the fact is that not all Gluck's high seriousness could lift him to the level of dramatic art which Mozart, no doubt profiting from Gluck's example, achieved the moment a commission from Munich to compose Idorneneo gave him the chance he had been waiting for. Wagner's endless theorising about opera was much more necessary to himself than to the art whose decadence he deplored; he saw it, of course, the other way round, but it was he and his strong but coarse gifts that needed refining and developing (by will-power, thought and remorseless practice) to be ready for the medium of opera, not the medium that needed purifying to be ready for him. The greatest of all opera composers was the one who was least bothered about reform; and though musicologists may produce meticulous reasons to prove that he came at precisely the right point in musical evolution for the type of creative artist he was, it remains extraordinary that in his first complete opera since he was a Youth, and in a form that was historically dead, Mozart composed dramatic music of a power and beauty and aptness and fecundity that had not been heard for over a century. Idomeneo is an epoch-making work in many ways. Its prolific melodies are not only beautiful M themselves but nearly always organic to characterisation and plot; for instance the great but Tuor del mar' reflects, in its majestic bt- slightly hectic bravura, Idomeneo's state of iind at this mid-point in the development of ttl he drama—guilt-ridden but still defiantly regal, not yet beaten to his knees by resentful destiny. Mozart's mastery of vivid atmosphere by simple it-leans is already assured; compared with the two storm scenes in Idorneneo (1780-81) the storm which opens 1phigenie en Tauride (1779), though quite adequate to Gluck's chaster pur- first Ses, Is flat, archaic, two-dimensional. And the
few minutes after the superb overture make it clear that Mozart has discovered the vital secret which eluded all other opera composers in the eighteenth century—a strong, flexible, ex- pressive recitative style.
The humanity with which Mozart warms and quickens his operatic characters is nowhere more impressively seen at work than in the sub- Metastasian dummies of this routine opera seria (on which Mozart, it is true, had worked pains- takingly with his somewhat astonished librettist to make it more dramatic and plausible). And the harmonic richness and the boldness of modu- lation are prodigious—and again strictly dramatic. Think of the phrases, so characteristic in colour and shape, in which Electra answers Idomenco at the beginning of the Trio: the downward sweep of the melodic line and the turn towards an awesome D minor look forward to Donna Anna (as do the modulations in the recitative before Electra's aria in the second act). Or think of the leitmotiv-like touch in Idomeneo's recitative immediately after Ilia's aria 'Se it padre perdei,' where the repetition, in a completely different colouring, of certain phrases in the aria marvellously paints the dark trend of Idomeneo's thoughts and the terrible irony which his secret knowledge of the threat to his son's life has given to Ilia's innocent avowals. Such things are remarkable in their historical context, superb in themselves.
The leitmotiv device also links the aria directly with the recitative. Idorneneo's achieve- ment is above all in the degree of dramatic con- tinuity attained and in the freedom of form which makes this possible! Again and again the arias end not with the formal closes prescribed in an age of singer's opera but with modula- tions or linking phrases which carry the music- drama forward without a break. Ilia's aria in Act 3 ends on a seventh chord, preparing the way for the crucial entry of Idamante. In the first act the music flows continuously from Electra's recitative 'Estinto, Idomeneo!,' through her aria and the shipwreck scene to the landing of Idomeneo, his meeting with his son, and his ensuing aria. Act 2 is even more remarkable: Electra's aria, the March, the serene chorus `Placid° it mar' (containing in the middle an arioso for Electra in the large soaring style that Mozart developed in the unfinished opera Zaide a year before), the Trio and the great sequence of choruses which ends the act suc- ceed each other in a virtually unbroken chain. Act 3 is designed with the same care for con- trast, growth, climax and resolution, and here the music reached a height of sustained dramatic invention rarely equalled outside Mozart.
The magnificent continuity of Idorneneo makes nonsense of attempts to 'improve' it, such as the Paumgartner version. This meddle- some kapellmeister has presumed to tell us how Mozart would have composed the opera had he had the benefits of his knowledge and experi- ence. Idomeneo's aria in Act 1 has disappeared altogether (although the preceding recitative is precisely designed to lead . into it), Electra's arioso is inanely divided between 'two Cretan maidens,' and in Act 3, where the music is at its greatest and the sequence of scenes (and keys) unfolds with the utmost inevitability, the heart of the act has been destroyed by the com- plete reordering of six numbers. The quality of Paumgartner's musicianship may be judged from the fact that he marks an optional cut of nine bars in the Quartet, an ensemble so perfectly proportioned that it should humble the crudest vandal, even without the testimony of Mozart himself that `if I knew of a single note which ought to be altered in this Quartet, I would alter it at once.' In an age of Urtexts it is astonishing that Mozart should be the victim of spoliation— astonishing, that is, that a reputable firm like Bahrenreiter should publish the edition, not astonishing that an inhabitant of Salzburg should be guilty of insolent parochialism.
All this, though grotesque, would not matter if it were only an isolated act of musicological abuse, confined to Salzburg (which Mozart always hated). But the crime is self-perpetuat- ing, it breeds others, because the Paumgartner edition is the only one in print.. If an amateur company decides to put on Idorneneo, it is pro- vided with a set of Paumgartner parts, and, knowing no better, it perpetrates a mutilation; or if it does know, it will have a very tiresome time correcting the parts (and then later rub- bing out the corrections), as the Chelsea Opera Group discovered when they performed the work the other day. Some public-spirited pub- lisher (if such a phenomenon exists) ought to bring out a clean, correct edition and end the greatest textual scandal in opera since Rimsky's Boris. The pious cant of a 'performer's edition' has been once and for all exploded by the per- formances at Sadler's Wells.
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