IDOMENEO

Many years ago, I got into a heated argument with my dental hygienist over the merits of opera. I still can't figure out how I was able to carry on a discussion in the dentist's chair with my mouth full of junk. In any event, the lady dismissed opera disdainfully as an implausible form of entertainment totally disconnected from reality. And she asserted vehemently: "I go for things that are much more basic!" "Well," I replied with all the sang-froid I could muster, "The second act of Puccini's opera Tosca has a torture scene, an attempted rape, and a murder all within a forty-minute period. I can't think of anything more basic than that."

If I had used our opera today, Idomeneo, as an example, I would have had a much harder time convincing her. Mozart's splendid work, composed when he was only 24 years old and performed for the first time in Munich in 1781 is what is called an opera seria, or literally, a serious opera. By definition, an opera seria is a rule-driven lyric drama situated on a lofty moral and spiritual level of unrelieved seriousness, based on subjects frequently inspired by Greek mythology, and depicting stylized characters with predicaments rather remote from those of ordinary mortals.

Yet when one penetrates beyond the mythological facade and formal structure of Idomeneo, one realizes that Mozart and his librettist, Gianbattista Varesco, are dealing with issues of vital importance for all of us in the 21st century: the destruction of cities and countries, the enslavement of populations, the dilemmas and evasions of all-powerful rulers, whose mistakes have tragic consequences for the people they govern. Through the compelling intensity of Mozart's music, the supposedly "far-off events" of Idomeneo can affect us profoundly. All we need to do is keep our ears and minds free of preconceptions, received ideas, classifications, and comparisons with other Mozart operas, and we will be amply rewarded.

The action of Idomeneo unfolds in the aftermath of the Trojan War. The King of Crete, Idomeneo himself, is one of the heroes in the ferocious struggle that pitted the Greeks against the mighty city of Troy. He is returning to his kingdom after a long absence. A violent storm erupts as his fleet of ships is nearing the port of Sidon. In an act of heedlessness and rashness, he implores Neptune, the sea god, to make the storm abate so that he and his men may reach land safely. In return for the god's favor, he vows to sacrifice the first person whom he will encounter on the beach.

Unfortunately for Idomeneo, the first person he encounters is his own beloved son, whom he had left behind as a young child when he set out with the other Greek heroes to conquer Troy. This initial encounter will have devastating repercussions on the principal protagonists of the opera. As they, as well as the King Idomeneo, react to this tragic situation and evolve accordingly, they propel the action of the opera forward. Through his music, Mozart delineates these protagonists sharply, and, in so doing, gives full-blooded life to the issues I mentioned. I would like to view the main characters with you now.

Aside from Arbace, the King's adviser, always ready with another moral bromide and platitude, the others leave a vivid impression on us, beginning with the ruler of Crete himself, Idomeneo. His music, endowed with consistent elevation of tone, suggests unmistakably the combination of grandeur and impulsiveness, regal authority, and sympathetic insight into the feelings of others, that has brought about his plight. He is no stereotyped opera seria monarch going through the motions in a one-dimensional conflict between duty and the turmoil of his heart. Mozart's imagination, fired up by the timelessness of the story, jumped at the opportunity offered here for living dramatic expression.

From the moment of Idomeneo's first appearance, we can sense the remorse already beginning to poison his relief at still being alive. Consequently, his predicament appears to us painfully real. The music shows us his feelings changing with the development of the tragic action. In the second act his superb aria "Fuor del mar" (Out of the sea), with typical Mozartian genius, uses the convention of the obligatory bravura aria for consummately realized dramatic ends, The aria, at once majestic and quivering with fever, becomes a mirror of the king's state of mind at this mid-point of the drama. Idomeneo is guilt-ridden but defiantly regal, a classical hero on the run but not yet forced to capitulate by a cruel fate.

By the end of the second act, he resembles Oedipus: he is caught in the trap. As the noose around his neck tightens, we feel Mozart's compassion for him increasing. Although he strives to repress the deep tenderness he feels for his son Idamante, the intensification of his paternal love for this son he has so recently rediscovered only to lose again, culminates in the wonderfully touching passage in A flat major in the sacrifice scene of the third act. At the same time, his final submission to fate is all the more moving for being the act of a man who throughout has been characterized as unyieldingly proud and stubborn to the point of recklessness.

The King's regal pride as well as the torment he endures are obvious from the very beginning of the opera in the overture. The commanding D major unisons of the first six bars are immediately undermined by a threatening chromatic growl in the strings, rising from piano to forte and provoking a wild cry from the woodwind--a falling figure that will be heard in various forms throughout the opera, evoking the sacrifice of Idamante demanded by the god Neptune, symbol of the power of a malignant fate hanging over human affairs.

Besides Idomeneo, his son Idamante may at first seem a disappointingly pallid figure, and it is undeniable that he expresses himself in music that is less personal than the others. When his music does often rise to a poignant eloquence, it does so in a more generalized way. Nevertheless, I think it is unfair to conclude that Idamante's characterization is basically flawed. I think he is just one more example of Mozart's genius for turning conventions into assets. The singer who created the part of Idamante, the castrato Vincenzo dal Prato, had serious vocal limitations.

Apparently, he was a lousy actor, too. His lack of musicality nearly drove the composer to distraction. Mozart referred ironically to the singer as "il mio molto amato castrato dal Prato."(My dearly beloved castrato dal Prato). Still, I would agree with David Cairns that the very plainness, the almost abstract nobility of Idamante's portrayal has a dramatic function. His self-control, childlike simplicity, and directness save the tragedy from its dreadful completion. If Idamante is a type--the type of heroic, selfless young idealism--it may be because Mozart wanted it that way. Idamante is the representative of the new civilization whose dawn is inaugurated at the end of the opera. In the hands of the composer and his librettist, the story becomes a deliberate and noble expression of the Enlightenment. I'll return to this theme later.

Despite the lack of sharpness in his characterization, Idamante forms with his father an organic relationship. Just as Idomeneo's anguish increases as he realizes that his son's death is necessary to save Crete from the wrath of Neptune, Idamante's dismay and heartbreak at being rejected repeatedly by Idomeneo leads in the end to his awareness that the latter's shunning of him reveals an immense paternal love. Realizing, then, that he alone can save his father, the kingdom, and the citizens of Crete from a horrible fate, he accepts his death with a noble serenity.

At the heart of the opera is the scene where, in music of heartrending tenderness, the father is reconciled with the son whose fated death he has fought so stubbornly to avert and whom he must now slaughter with his own hand. A broad string passage in A flat major, with the violas rising through A natural, introduces Idamante, robbed for the sacrifice. He sings "Padre, mio padre, ah dolce nome ... Ora comprendo che il tuo turbamento sdegno non era, ma amor paterno." (Father, my dear father, ah sweet name... Now I understand-your agitation was not anger but paternal love).When Idomeneo hesitates to commit the ritual murder, it is his son who instills in his father the courage to do so. And Idomeneo, in a variant of the same phrase--the violas, with the cellos, now descending in a long chromatic line--replies: "Oh figlio, o caro figlio, perdona." (Oh son, dear son, forgive me).

Just as the presence of Idamante exerts a profound influence on Idomeneo, so, too, does he affect Ilia, the captive Trojan princess whose life he had saved. With consummate musical and dramatic skill, Mozart traces her trajectory as she ascends from her condition of a conflicted prisoner to the height of sublime abnegation through love. The recitative and aria she sings at the very beginning of the first act--which also acquaints us succinctly with the situation in the opera-- is by turns vengeful and resolute, hesitant and indignant, with indignation melting into tenderness for her captor Idamante. Ilia's music charts the ambiguities and cross-currents of feeling in her heart with moving sympathy, establishes the nobility purity, and passion of her character. In the area itself, we reach a moment of extreme tension.

On the one hand, she is still seething with a desire for vengeance for her father, Priam, the King of Troy, slain by the Greek conquerors. On the other, she cannot repress the feeling of gratitude to Idamante who restored her will to live This surge of tenderness is expressed in a phrase of exquisite beauty that rises to a soft, full A flat, then descends slowly and caressingly as Ilia luxuriates for an instant in her love for the Cretan prince. The prince's decision to free all the Trojan captives simply intensifies her inner conflict In her second act aria, "Se il padre perdei" (If I have lost my father), the florid accompaniments written for the flute, oboe, horn, and bassoon create an atmosphere of dreamlike contentment. The aria marks a crucial point: Ilia no longer hates her Greek captors, and in her new mood of happiness she is ready to acknowledge the reason that has brought about this change of heart: the love she feels for Idamante. At the same time the effect of the music's serene and lavish beauty, in the context of Idomeneo's guilty angst, is one of deep irony, while, dramatically, the king's awareness that Ilia is in love with his son gives the tragedy a further twist.

It is only in the final act, however, that Ilia fully realizes the immensity of her love for Idamante, and she shows it by offering herself as the sacrificial victim in his place. The first part of Act Three is suffused with the soft radiance associated with Mozart's music with the keys of A and E. In a tender aria "Zeffiretti lusinghieri" (Delightful breezes), Ilia bids the winds to bear her message of passion to Idamante. She is no longer conflicted and guilt-ridden about her feelings towards the prince. She fully accepts them now as an integral part of her being. In the ensuing duet with him, Ilia goes even further. Idamante had always expressed his tenderness for her. Now she will reciprocate.

When Idamante informs her that he will seek out death by trying to slay the sea monster plaguing Crete, the thought of losing him forever is too much for her to bear. She finally declares her love for him, openly and passionately. thereby making an irreversible commitment to their relationship. Aware that she cannot live without him, she implores him to show compassion towards her by continuing to live. Thus, it is not surprising that she will later offer her life to save his. As she informs him in their rapturous duet, "Tu sei il solo mio tesor (You are my only treasure). When Ilia demands to be the expiatory victim in the temple ceremony in place of the prince she loves, her sublime offer of self-sacrifice will move the god Neptune. It will appease his anger, enable the couple to wed, and put an end to the terror that has been gripping the kingdom of Crete.

There is a famous French expression: "Le bonheur des uns fait le malheur des autres (Some people's happiness means other people's misfortune). This applies to the third person in the love triangle I have not yet mentioned: Elettra. She will be pushed completely out of the equation. Throughout the opera, she deluded herself into believing that she could eventually conquer the heart of Idamante, whose attitude towards her could most charitably be described by the word "indifference." This mentally disturbed daughter of the Greek king Agamemnon, the General in chief who led the assaults against Troy, and Queen Clytemnestra, comes from a family crushed under the weight of a cosmic malediction.

According to the ancient Greek legend, Clytemnestra never forgave Agamemnon for sacrificing their daughter, Iphigenia, in order to gain favorable winds for his fleet. When he returned from the war, she and her paramour Aegistus, murdered him in his bath. Elettra, who worshiped her father, was determined to avenge his death. As soon as her brother, Oreste, returned home, she exhorted him to slaughter their mother along with her paramour. Killing his own mother unhinged Oreste who plummeted into madness. Elettra then made her way to Crete in the illusory hope of finding comfort in the love of Idamante.

In the opera, Mozart depicts her as both formidable and neurotic, and in the process demonstrates his mastery of music as a dramatic language. Her great scene in Act I shows melody, harmony, rhythm, orchestral colours, vocal virtuosity, and musical form systematically deployed to evoke abnormality on a grand scale; the traditional rage aria is transformed into something extraordinary, and unique to her. The voice part, alternating great upward leaps with piteous semitonal fragments; the pounding, obsessive arpeggios of the accompaniment; the frequent superimposition of 3/4 time on 4/4 to produce violent syncopations; the menacing orchestration, strangely hollow despite the presence of four horns; the atmosphere of harmonic instability, prefigured in the recitative, with its writhing chromatics, all these things combine to suggest the spasms of a tortured mind.

Similar means are used for the even more explosive outburst in Act 3, Elettra's famous aria "D'Oreste, D'Aiace, ho in seno i tormenti" (Within my breast seethe the torments of Orestes and Ajax). As soon as she learns that Ilia and Idamante will celebrate their love through marriage, Elettra lets out a howl of pain. This aria must be one of the most impressive eruptions of psychotic fury in all opera. Now alone in her own tormented world, deprived even of the illusion of hope, Elettra is whipped into a despairing fury,. She is resolved to seek out, in the underworld, her equally deranged brother Orestes and abandon herself to an orgy of self-hatred if not self-annihilation.

Yet Elettra's portrait would be incomplete without the inclusion of a tender side to her being. This is obvious in her lyrical major-key scenes in Act 2: the arias "Idol mio" (My idol) and the arioso "Soavi zeffiri" (Soft winds). Here she gives voice to her joy on learning that King Idomeneo has ordered his son Idamante to escort Elettra back to her homeland in the hope of saving him from Neptune's wrath. Mozart is not always given credit for this example of his humanity within the context of psychological realism.

But who can prove that these pieces are not in character, that this melting mood is not a true aspect of Elettra's complex, unhappy, nature. Why shouldn't she dream her dreams and hug her precious illusions for a fleeting moment? She will lose them soon enough. The music implies this, not only by the immediate context in which it is placed but also in itself: however beautiful, it is touched by the obsessiveness, the withdrawal from reality, that rage in her two other arias.

In the final analysis, Elettra is consumed by jealous fury, Idomeneo is spared the agony of having to kill his son, Idamante and Ilia can marry, and Crete will no longer have to suffer the wrath of a malignant fate because Neptune intervenes in extremis. With the wisdom worthy of a god, he orders Idomeneo to abdicate, gives his blessing to the young couple, and designates them as the new rulers of the kingdom. Naturally, behind the intervention of Neptune, we can discern the presence of Mozart himself. As a man of the Enlightenment, the composer could not accept the denouement of the original French play, Idoménée, by the 18th-century writer, Antoine Duchet, which inspired the opera. In the play, the action moves inexorably to its tragic conclusion: Idamante is slaughtered by his father to rid the kingdom of its curse.

In the opera, however, Mozart sees to it that the spirit of the Enlightenment prevails. Idomeneo, although a benevolent despot and a man of immense decency, represents the old order, he is the victim of the old decrees. He must yield his place--which he does, willingly--to his son who set the Trojan captives free and overcame superstition. Moreover, Idamante's marriage to Ilia symbolizes the rapprochement of the Asian and European continents which had been mired in the murderous insanity of war. So The happy ending is no mere convenient evasion of all that has gone before. It is an assertion of the power of tolerance, reason, and love. The celebratory music that ends the opera affirms this magnificently.

It is Mozart's music that makes this resolution convincing. Without his genius, it would have seemed a betrayal of the tragic vision prevailing in the rest of the opera. Fortunately, music can combine or dissolve categories that in spoken drama are mutually exclusive, just as it can give shape to ideas that otherwise would remain abstractions, and no music can accomplish this feat better than Mozart's. He, along with many of his contemporaries, believed that mankind/womankind was capable of indefinite perfectibility. One wonders what he would have thought of our 20th and 21st centuries which have witnessed the worst explosions of hatred in the history of our human species.

Would his faith in the eventual triumph of goodness have faltered? We'll never know. What is certain, though, is that we still need great artists like Mozart and works like Idomeneo to remind us of the immense potential for nobility that we carry within us. When we are in the presence of his genius, we can hopefully accept the sorrows and horrors of life with greater equanimity, knowing as we do that there exists in the human condition something infinitely better.