Room 4 - Idomeneo’s Operatic Canvas

Summary

The rich visual history surrounding Télémaque makes it impossible not to consider the musical topography of Varesco and Mozart's opera as part of this painterly culture. The opera is an adaptation of one of Fénelon's most striking tableaux: King Idomeneus, in the wreckage of his ship, begging Neptune to spare his life in exchange for a human sacrifice. The aggressively visual lexicon of Fénelon's novel practically cries out for theatrical treatment, and the opera responds to this visual cue with an unusual dramaturgical layout. Idomeneo's violent seascape breaks away from Mitridate's suffocatingly enclosed palace walls, and Varesco and Mozart's piece moves ever further away from tragedy's neoclassical architecture into a more epic landscape.

As we have discovered, the “canvas” with which Mozart and Varesco began was far from blank and by no means just textual: along with Fénelon's original novel, Crébillon's play, and Danchet's tragédie lyrique, the countless paintings and engravings of Télémacomania added layer upon layer of gesso on top of which Mozart and Varesco started to create their own version of the Idomeneus story. Idomeneo is thus inspired by a multimedia, multilayered cultural backdrop. Contextualizing the opera amid this cache of images and stage adaptations is only a first step in understanding the impact of Fénelon's novel on the work, however. To be sure, Idomeneo is an integral part of the visual tradition inspired by Télémacomania, but more than this, the opera itself is a piece of moving visual art. Its stage space is in fact ideally suited to host the narrative energy of Fénelon's book and, consequently, of reimagining dramaturgy along more epic and visual lines. On the one hand, the opera's dramaturgy in many ways echoes the techniques of Télémacomania's artists. On the other hand, Mozart and Varesco's work surpasses the two-dimensional confines of the texts and paintings that preceded it. The goal of establishing points of compatibility between opera and the visual arts is of course not to equate the two media or suggest that they approach the Idomeneus material in the same way. Rather, the comparison will throw into relief the ways in which opera's relationship to its source texts is heavily mediated by multiple media (image, music, performance).