At last, one of Deutsche Grammophon's DVD releases of the Salzburg Festival's complete canon of Mozart operas from last year has impressed on almost every level.
Indeed, were it not for several extremely dubious directorial decisions, this live film of Lucio Silla would be a huge triumph.
The reputation of Mozart's early opera has always suffered from its generic categorization of being an opera seria. Writers have long dismissed it as antiquated, adhering to an old-fashioned baroque form of opera rather than pushing back the frontiers. Mozart's final opera, La clemenza di Tito - another opera seria - has always suffered from comparisons to Die Zauberflöte, which is written in the very 'modern' German Singspiel form, because the image of the composer usually promoted by biographers is of a forward-looking and inventive artist. Such an artist cannot be admitted to have ended his career with an opera in the baroque form, and to an extent, all his earlier opere serie have been overlooked in preference to the supposedly more 'socially aware' Enlightenment operas such as Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte.
Nevertheless, Lucio Silla is an extraordinary work. Written over the Christmas of 1772 and first performed at the Milan carnival in 1773, the opera brought out the best in the sixteen-year-old Mozart. Far from merely following the operatic conventions of an earlier era, the composer reinvigorated the form entirely, adding new emotional and psychological scope to the sometimes staid style of the arias and literally paving the way for subsequent opere serie such as Tito.
Of particular importance is Giunia's aria from Act Three, 'Frà I pensier'. Having just seen her lover Cecilio led away to his death, the young woman sings of her anguish and her determination to join Cecilio. The accompagnato preceding it is unusually vivid: Giunia fancies that she can hear Cecilio's voice, and the flutes and violas play a smooth melody in thirds to represent his voice in her mind. Then when the aria itself begins, the words are unusually savage and vividly gruesome ('From my dearest's severed veins already pours his soul and blood' and 'Bowed over his bleeding body I wish to die' are two examples). Significantly, Mozart also uses a chord (in which oboe, flute and bassoon briefly enter over the strings) that signifies death in Don Giovanni and seems to serve the same function here.
Musically, this DVD is a real treat. Although it occasionally results in a loss of sense, the curtailing of over half of the recitatives allows the action to flow more quickly, and in the hands of conductor Tomás Netopil the score is gripping throughout. His tempos are all convincing, while the balance of the instruments is always sensitive, as is the accompaniment of the singers generally.
For me, the outstanding voice in the cast is that of Julia Kleiter in the fairly small role of Celia, sister of Lucio Silla. Her intonation, her controlled vibrato and the sheer beauty of her voice reveal her to be the most accomplished and natural Mozart singer in the cast, excelling particularly in the legato sections of her first and final arias.
The Giunia of Annick Massis is scarcely less impressive as Giunia. She ensures that the aria mentioned above is the highlight of the opera, plumbing the depths of every emotion and coping admirably with the monstrously wide range of her part (her first aria alone covers almost two octaves). Both Monica Bacelli (Cecilio) and Veronica Cangemi (Lucio Cinna) throw themselves into their trouser roles with gusto, their voices perhaps underprojected at times but always stylistically aware. For my taste, Roberto Saccà's voice is a little too heavy and not supple enough for Mozart, but he plays the eponymous tyrant with swaggering confidence.
Which brings me to the production. I enjoyed the staging of the first act enormously. The opera was performed in the Felsenreitschule in Salzburg, its wide stage allowing the director Jürgen Flimm and the designer Christian Bussmann to divide different characters in discrete areas across the stage. The central piece of scenery is a copy of the Palladian façade of Vicenza's Teatro Olympico, which rotates sometimes to show the scaffolding holding it together, indicating perhaps the inner workings of the drama. During Act One, snow covers the ground, an appropriately bleak landscape for this frequently savage opera.
But from Act Two onwards, the behaviour of the characters becomes irrational and surreal, the costumes likewise. And Flimm completely overturns the ending from the original libretto. The opera is about a vicious dictator, Lucio Silla, who has many enemies and is on the brink of having several of them condemned to death when he decides to pardon them all. Such an ending was a convention of eighteenth-century opera, a commonplace gesture for composers and librettists to flatter their patrons and rulers by loosely portraying them in their operas as beneficent leaders. Such is the ending of many of the operas set to libretti written or influenced by Pietri Metastasio, the leading librettist of the day. And the music always reflects this dramatic harmony with an upbeat finale. In the case of Lucio Silla, the finale is in D major and undoubtedly signifies resolution. But with his typical arrogance, Flimm decides that 'Saul cannot become Paul' and Silla is stabbed to death. It makes no sense whatsoever and is an utter travesty, worse even than the recent Covent Garden Fidelio that he directed.
However, this is a hugely important opera, and it is given a near-ideal musical performance that rises above the absurdities of the latter stages of the production.