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Two into Three Won't Go? Poetic Structure and Musical Forms in Mozart's Idomeneo
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2012
Abstract
By the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the typical Metastasian two-stanza aria text could be set to music in one of two ways: in the ternary form typical of the earlier da capo aria (stanzas 1–2–1) or in a binary one (stanzas 1–2–1–2). Why did Mozart choose one form over the other in Idomeneo (1781); what does this tell us about the role of his librettist, Giovanni Battista Varesco, both before and after the composer left Salzburg for Munich to finish composing the opera and to prepare its performance; and how might these issues enable some rational inquiry into questions of music and drama?
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References
1 In Italian metrics, versi tronchi have one syllable less than their nominal syllable count: although the line ‘E un greco adorerò’ contains only six actual syllables it is still reckoned to be a seven-syllable line (settenario).
2 The death of Elector Maximilian III Joseph, Duke of Bavaria, on 30 December 1777 led to the eventual amalgamation of the Mannheim and Munich courts under Elector Palatine Carl Theodor. Mozart knew the Mannheim musicians well from his visits there in 1777–78; most of them moved to Bavaria with the court. As for the genre of Idomeneo, many have noted that calling it an opera seria is somewhat problematic, but it serves no present purpose to quibble, even if the libretto is conventionally styled a ‘dramma per musica’.
3 The plan is now lost, but Leopold Mozart refers to it in his letters to Mozart of 11 and 18 November, and 22 December 1780. For the history of Idomeneo and its sources, see Heartz, Daniel, ‘The Genesis of Mozart's Idomeneo’, Musical Quarterly 55 (1969), 1–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sadie, Stanley, Mozart: The Early Years, 1756–1781 (New York, 2006), 523–47Google Scholar, which supersedes Sadie, , ‘The Genesis of an operone’, in W. A. Mozart: ‘Idomeneo’, ed. Rushton, Julian, Cambridge Opera Handbooks (Cambridge, 1993), 25–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and my ‘In the Operatic Workshop: The Case of Mozart's Idomeneo’, in Opera and Myth, ed. Lichtenstein, Sabine (Amsterdam, forthcoming)Google Scholar. The last also discusses briefly the aria-related issues developed in greater depth in the present essay.
4 Reference here to letters between Mozart and his father are made by date; they are accessible in the most recent edition of Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, Briefe und Aufzeichnungen: Gesamtausgabe, ed. Bauer, Wilhelm A., Deutsch, Otto Erich, Eibl, Joseph Heinz, and Konrad, Ulrich, 8 vols. (Kassel, etc., 2005)Google Scholar; and in Anderson, Emily, ed., The Letters of Mozart and His Family, 3rd edn (London, 1985)Google Scholar. In general, I cite only the English translation.
5 As Mozart admitted when proposing L'oca del Cairo to his father in his letter of 7 May 1783: ‘So I have been thinking that unless Varesco is still very much annoyed with us about the Munich opera, he might write me a new libretto for seven characters’.
6 For these materials, see Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, ‘Idomeneo’, K.366, with Ballet, K.367: Facsimile of the Autograph Score, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin–Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Biblioteka Jagiellońska Kraków (Mus. ms. autogr. W. A. Mozart 366, 367, 489, and 490), 3 vols. (Los Altos, Calif., 2006)Google Scholar. This further includes facsimiles of the two editions of the libretto issued in connection with the Munich premiere.
7 For the chronology of Idomeneo, see most recently Bruce Alan Brown, ‘Musicological Introduction’, in Mozart, ‘Idomeneo’, K.366, with Ballet, K.367, I, 9–20. For the singers and their vocal characteristics, see Mark Everist, ‘The Performers of Idomeneo’, in Rushton, W. A. Mozart: ‘Idomeneo’, 48–61. In general, Mozart preferred not to write an aria until he knew the singer; compare the well-known comment in his letter of 28 February 1778, in relation to an earlier aria written for Anton Raaff, that ‘I like an aria to fit a singer as perfectly as a well-made suit of clothes’.
8 In Mozart's autograph score for Idomeneo, the first encounter between Idomeneo and Idamante in Act I scenes 9–10 has Idomeneo's part written in the bass clef.
9 Remarks by Mozart in his letter of 27 December also suggest that Leopold had not seen either ‘Vedrommi intorno’ or ‘Fuor del mar’, meaning that they were not composed in Salzburg. In a later letter to his father (26 May 1781), Mozart said that when he first arrived in Munich, he had so many engagements and other commitments that for two weeks (so, until 20 November 1780 or thereabouts) he was unable to put pen to paper, although this had not stopped him composing in his head. Thus when Mozart noted on 15 November 1780 that he ‘ran through’ Raaff's first aria (‘Vedrommi intorno’) with the singer he could have played it to him on the keyboard from memory rather than giving him something written down.
10 The term ‘cavatina’ suggests in the context of opera seria an aria-like text but with only a single stanza.
11 In the 4 January 1781 letter, Leopold refers to Varesco having ‘sent Act III to you through Count Seeau’. It is not clear how this might relate to Leopold's sending ‘the libretto and the draft’ (by the latter, he probably means the plan) to Mozart on 11 November. But Mozart's comments on Act III in his letters from 13 November on certainly suggest that he had not thought through many of its detailed issues earlier, and the 13 November letter further implies that Leopold had yet to read it. Varesco may have sent what he thought would be his final work on the libretto directly to Count Seeau in order to effect payment of his fee.
12 Böhmer, Karl, W. A. Mozarts ‘Idomeneo’ und die Tradition der Karnevalsopern in München (Tutzing, 1999), 239–40Google Scholar. For opera in Munich, see also Mozarts ‘Idomeneo’ und die Musik in München zur Zeit Karl Theodors: Bericht über das Symposion der Gesellschaft für Bayerische Musikgeschichte und der Musikhistorischen Kommission der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, München, 7.–9. Juli 1999, ed. Göllner, Theodor and Hörner, Stephan (Munich, 2001)Google Scholar; and for its immediate predecessors, see Paul Corneilson, ‘Opera at Mannheim, 1770–1788’, Ph.D. diss. (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1992). Böhmer's primary target is the remarks on Idomeneo in Gallarati, Paolo, La forza della parole: Mozart drammaturgo (Turin, 1993)Google Scholar, although there are plenty of other examples.
13 Daniel Heartz discusses how some of these elisions were second thoughts added later to the autograph score to replace stronger endings; see his ‘“Attacca subito”: Lessons from the Autograph Score of Idomeneo, Acts 1 and 2’, in Festschrift Wolfgang Rehm zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Berke, Dietrich and Heckmann, Harald (Kassel, etc., 1989), 83–92Google Scholar.
14 Julian Rushton, ‘The Genre of Idomeneo’, in Rushton, W. A. Mozart: ‘Idomeneo’, 62–8; Marita Petzoldt McClymonds, ‘Carl Theodor, the Munich Theatrical Establishment, and the Franco-Italian Synthesis in Opera: The Sertor/Prati Armida abbandonata of 1785’, in Göllner and Hörner, Mozarts ‘Idomeneo’ und die Musik in München zur Zeit Karl Theodors, 143–50; Böhmer, W. A. Mozarts ‘Idomeneo’, 193–4 (specifically on Telemaco). Another model is the opening scene of Günther von Schwarzburg; see Corneilson, ‘Opera at Mannheim’, 211–12.
15 See McClymonds, Marita P.'s entry on ‘Aria, 4: Eighteenth Century’, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edn, ed. Sadie, Stanley (London, 2001)Google Scholar; Webster, James, ‘Aria as Drama’, in The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Opera, ed. DelDonna, Anthony R. and Polzonetti, Pierpaolo (Cambridge, 2009), 24–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar. But neither McClymonds nor Webster explores the textual consequences in ways suggested here.
16 Compare Silla's ‘D'ogni pietà mi scoglio’ (Act II scene 8; no. 13) and Giunia's ‘Parto, m'affretto’ (Act II scene 10; no. 16); there are also other examples here.
17 For example, Nicole Baker, ‘The Relationship between Aria Forms in Mozart's Idomeneo and Reform Operas in Mannheim’, in Göllner and Hörner, Mozarts ‘Idomeneo’ und die Musik in München zur Zeit Karl Theodors, 131–41, argues that Varesco's texts ‘could just as easily have been set as Da Capo arias as progressive binary forms’ (ibid., 140). Julian Rushton carefully distinguishes the aria forms in Idomeneo; see his ‘General Structure of Idomeneo’, in Rushton, W. A. Mozart: ‘Idomeneo’, 95–105; however, he, too, sets less store by their immediate textual derivations, while nevertheless exhibiting a typical sensitivity to their dramatic implications. The most complete account of the arias in Idomeneo, in Böhmer, W. A. Mozarts ‘Idomeneo’, 237–84 (plus the discussion of aria forms used in Munich operas in general on pp. 116–22), makes no reference whatsoever to the textual issues.
18 The issue relates to what one might call ‘I’-arias, which are, for obvious reasons, the most common in the repertory. Any fuller discussion of the rhetoric of aria texts would also need to consider ‘You’-arias and ‘I–You’ ones (Arbace's is in fact an example of the latter), which also raise tricky questions about who hears what on the operatic stage. Of course, third-person arias (where a character sings about someone or something else) are also common.
19 Clearly I disagree with Rushton (‘General Structure of Idomeneo’, 101), who claims that in the case of this aria, ‘nothing in the form of the poetry … prevented Mozart from using binary form’. However, he is right, I think, that ‘This expansive three-section design is suited to a peaceful soliloquy, and Mozart presumably wanted the mood of the first quatrain to precede Idamante's unexpected entry’ (loc. cit.).
20 Wilhelm Seidel comments on ‘Padre, germani, addio!’ that the ‘second subject’ strongly answers in the affirmative the question posed in the ‘bridge passage’ (‘Es ist deutlich: Der “Seitensatz” ist ein einziges, großes Ja auf die Frage, die der “Überleitungssatz” gestellt hat’); see his ‘Ilia und Ilione: Über Mozarts Idomeneo und Campras Idoménée’, in Studien zur Musikgeschichte: Eine Festschrift für Ludwig Finscher, ed. Laubenthal, Annegrit (Kassel, etc., 1995), 339Google Scholar. As his terminology suggests, Seidel's argument is based upon notions of sonata form rather than on the textual choices and manipulations that may have led Mozart to it; he claims that the most one can say of the words is that they do not contradict the music (ibid., 340: ‘Von der Worten kann man nur sagen, daß sie der Musik nicht widersprechen’).
21 Compare Julian Rushton's discussion of the ‘Elettra problem’ in Idomeneo in his ‘Conclusions’ in Rushton, W. A. Mozart: ‘Idomeneo’, 156 – also citing the discussion in Kerman, Joseph, Opera as Drama, 2nd edn (Berkeley, 1988), 80–85Google Scholar – even if this ‘problem’ is in part due to Varesco's weakening of the character compared with Danchet.
22 Mozart wrote to his father on 8 November 1780 that Dorothea Wendling was ‘arcicontentissima’ with her scene (Act I scene 1, one assumes), and on the 15th, that Elisabeth Wendling had sung two arias (which must be those in Acts I and II) half a dozen times to her great delight. They cannot have been composed in Munich.
23 Böhmer, W. A. Mozarts ‘Idomeneo’, 283.
24 ‘The second duet is to be omitted altogether – and indeed with more profit than loss to the opera. For, when you read through the scene, you will see that it obviously becomes limp and cold by the addition of an aria or a duet, and very gênant for the other actors who must stand by doing nothing; and, besides, the noble struggle between Ilia and Idamante would be too long and thus lose its whole force.’ This ‘second duet’ would also have come too soon after the first in Act III scene 2: Ilia and Idamante's ‘S'io non moro a questi accenti’ (no. 20).
25 It is not clear, however, how such a quartet could have squared with the earlier one in Act III, ‘Andrò ramingo e solo’ (no. 21), for Ilia, Elettra, Idamante, and Idomeneo.
26 For a fuller discussion on which I rely, see Heartz, Daniel, ‘Raaff's Last Aria: A Mozartian Idyll in the Spirit of Hasse’, Musical Quarterly 60 (1974), 517–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar. However, Heartz does not discuss all the textual issues that I seek to raise.
27 Heartz, ‘Raaff's Last Aria’, offers some useful comparisons, as does Böhmer, W. A. Mozarts ‘Idomeneo’, 252–6; see also Everist, ‘The Performers of Idomeneo’, 52. Mozart's four-page draft for ‘Torna la pace al core’ is reproduced in Heartz, ‘Raaff's Last Aria’, 526, 528, 531, 532, and in Mozart, ‘Idomeneo’, K.366, with Ballet, K.367, II, 227–30.
28 For example, on 30 December Mozart told his father that save for Idomeneo's last aria, ‘Everything has been composed, but not yet written down.’
29 Heartz, ‘Raaff's Last Aria’, 533, notes that removing this ‘torna lo spento ardore’ may have been to do with giving Raaff a better vowel for a long-held note (‘pa-ce’ rather than ‘ar-do-re’).
30 See McClymonds, Marita P., ‘The Great Quartet in Idomeneo and the Italian Opera Seria Tradition’, in Wolfgang Amadè Mozart: Essays on His Life and Music, ed. Sadie, Stanley (Oxford, 1996), 449–76Google Scholar. The printed libretto does not include this repetition (nor would one expect it to), noting only that Idamante ‘parte addolorato’.