La Clemenza Di Tito - Background

Background

In July 1791, the last year of his life, Mozart was already well advanced in writing The Magic Flute when he was asked to compose an opera seria. The commission came from the impresario Domenico Guardasoni, who lived in Prague and who had been charged by the Estate of Bohemia with providing a new work to celebrate the coronation of Leopold II, Holy Roman Emperor as King of Bohemia. The ceremony was to take place on 6 September; Guardasoni had been approached about the opera in June. There was not much room to manoeuvre.

In a contract dated 8 July, Guardasoni promised that he would engage a castrato "of leading quality" (this seems to have mattered more than who wrote the opera); that he would "have the libretto caused to be written...and to be set to music by a distinguished maestro". The time was tight and Guardasoni had a get-out clause: if he failed to secure a new text, he would resort to La clemenza di Tito, a libretto written more than half a century earlier by Pietro Metastasio (1698–1782).

Metastasio's libretto had already been set by nearly 40 composers; the story is based on the life of Roman Emperor Titus, from some brief hints in The Lives of the Caesars by the Roman writer Suetonius, and was elaborated by Metastasio in 1734 for the Italian composer Antonio Caldara. Among later settings were Gluck's in 1752 and Josef Mysliveček's version in 1774; there would be three further settings after 1791. Mozart was not Guardasoni's first choice. Instead, he approached Antonio Salieri, the most distinguished composer of Italian opera in Vienna and head of the music establishment at the imperial court. But Salieri was too busy, and he declined the commission, although he did attend the coronation.

The libretto was edited into a more useful state by the court poet Caterino Mazzolà, whom, unusually, Mozart credited for his revision in his own catalogue of his compositions. Mazzolà added more ensemble numbers and a concerted act 1 finale to Metastasio's original layout of recitatives and arias. Guardasoni's experience of Mozart's work on Don Giovanni convinced him that the younger composer was more than capable of working on the tightest deadline. Mozart had no hesitation in accepting Guardasoni's offer – how could he resist when Guardasoni offered him twice the fee he was used to receiving for an opera in Vienna? Mozart's earliest biographer Niemetschek alleged that the opera was completed in just 18 days, and in such haste that the secco recitatives were supplied by another composer, probably Süssmayr, believed to have been Mozart's pupil. However, some Mozart scholars suggest that Mozart had been working on the opera much longer, perhaps since 1789. In a visit to Dresden in that year he could have started a collaboration with Mazzolà, who had been working there as a court poet. It almost certainly appears that some of the music of La clemenza di Tito had been written by April 1791, because in that month at her concert Josefina Dušková performed a Mozart Rondo with a basset-horn. This work by Mozart has not been identified other than as Vitellia’s rondo Non più di fiori in act 2. The claim that Mozart wrote La clemenza di Tito in 18 days is thus doubtful.

It is not known what Leopold thought of the opera written in his honor. Reports that his wife Maria Luisa of Spain dismissed it as una porcheria tedesca (Italian for "German swinishness") do not pre-date 1871, in a collection of literary vignettes by Alfred Meissner about the history of Prague purportedly based on recollections of the author's grandfather, who was present for the coronation ceremonies.