La Clemenza di Tito in Full Score

by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Mozart was commissioned to write La Clemenza di Tito for the coronation of the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II as King of Bohemia. Working with libretto by Metastasio, he based the plot on incidents in the life of the Roman emperor Titus and composed the opera during the same climactic period in which he completed Requiem and The Magic Flute . La Clemenza di Tito was first performed in Prague in 1791, a few weeks before the premiere of The Magic Flute in Vienna. Whatever enjoyment Mozart and Leopold II may have derived from the opera, it was short-lived; both composer and king were dead within a year of the debut.
Long neglected but now frequently performed and recorded, this Mozart masterpiece is once again a popular favorite of opera audiences worldwide. It is reprinted here from the authoritative edition published by Breitkopf & Härtel of Leipzig.

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Johann Georg Leopold Mozart, the Austrian composer, toured Europe with his son, child prodigy, noted Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who gracefully and imaginatively refined the classical style with symphonies, concertos, operas, Masses, sonatas, and chambers among his 626 numbered works.

The comic plays of French writer Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais inspired Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to operas.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart prolifically influenced the era. Many persons acknowledged this pinnacle of piano and choral music. His popularity most endures.

Mozart showed earliest ability. From the age of five years in 1761 already competently on keyboard and violin performed before royalty. At seventeen years in 1773, a court musician in Salzburg engaged him, who restlessly traveled always abundantly in search of a better position.

Mozard visited Vienna in 1781; Salzburg dismissed his position, and he chose to stay in the capital and achieved fame but little financial security over the rest of life. The final years in Vienna yielded his many best-known Requiem . People much mythologized the circumstances of his early death. Constanze Mozart, his wife, two sons survived him.

Mozart always learned voraciously and developed a brilliance and maturity that encompassed the light alongside the dark and passionate; a vision of humanity, "redeemed through art, forgiven, and reconciled with nature and the absolute," informed the whole. He profoundly influenced all subsequent western art music. Ludwig van Beethoven wrote on his own early in the shadow of Mozart, of whom Franz Joseph Haydn wrote that "posterity will not see such a talent again in 100 years."

Reviews

[Sammy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thoroughly underrated. Let's not deny it: "Tito" is less dramatically meaty than Mozart's masterpieces, and in any case, his dramas have nothing on the simply sublime nature of his comedies.
However, "La Clemenza di Tito" has a lot to support it. The music is utterly divine: Sesto and Tito get gorgeous arias throughout, and the music for Annio is utterly exquisite. The love duet between Annio and Sevilia is perhaps my favourite Mozart piece, and that's without even discussing the magnificent character of Vitellia.

"Tito" will never be an audience favourite, given that its predictable plot hinges on a leader's clemency, rather than anything more invigorating. But I cherish it for its tightly-focussed character parts (the chorus appear only twice, and our six leads handle all the rest), its noble music, never showy but consistently haunting (that closing quintet of Act One, punctuated by an offstage chorus and the light of the Capitol burning down), and a sense that - as with so much of the great composer's music - this score so readily opens up the brilliant yet troubled nature of Mozart's mind, questioning his own talent and career, and only months from death.

Well worth it. See a good production (like the long-running Met production, most recently displayed in cinemas in 2012), and you'll understand.