Christoph Willibald Gluck.(Review)

Christoph Willibald Gluck. La clemenza di Tito (Neapel 1752): Dramma per musica in drei Akten von Pietro Metastasio. Hrsg. von Franz Giegling. (Samtliche Werke, Abt. III: Italienische Opere serie und Opernserenaden, Bd. 16.) Kassel: Barenreiter, 1995. [Vorwort, p. vii-x; Bildbeigaben, p. xi-xvi; score, 431 p.; Krit. Bericht, p. 433-53. Cloth. ISMN M-006-495-46-7; BA 5773. DM 550.]

Christoph Willibald Gluck's La clemenza di Tilo was first performed 4 November 1752 at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples. By this time Gluck had been composing opere serie for about ten years. A Bohemian from Erasbach near Berching, Gluck began his career in Prague and Vienna, but by 1737, he had arrived in Milan, where his first opera seria was performed for the carnival season of 1742. During the next three years he composed seven more opere serie mainly for Venice and Milan, but also for Crema and Turin. An invitation from London broke this cycle, and after composing Artamene for London in 1746, Gluck was called to Vienna in 1748, to Copenhagen in 1749, to Prague in 1750 and 1752, and finally to Naples in 1752 to compose operas. It is important to keep in mind that during the 1740s and early 1750s, opera seria was enjoying the heights of its popularity in Italy and throughout Europe. Carlo Goldoni and Baldasarre Galuppi were just beginning a collaboration that would transform opera buffa into a genre capable of competing with opera seria for space during the theatrical year, and early efforts to change the nature of opera seria were still five years away. Gluck's own celebrated contribution to this effort, Orfeo, was ten years away, and Alceste was yet another fifteen.

Gluck's La clemenza di Tito, then, represents opera seria at its pinnacle. It also recognizes Gluck's arrival as a composer of significance. The theater in Naples was arguably the largest, finest, and most prestigious in Italy-the site, in the 1720s, of the marriage of the Arcadian reform libretto with the new gallant or classical style in music, and the home of the four great conservatories where composers were trained in the new style and from where it was exported throughout Italy and Europe. Certainly a scrittura for Naples would have been a great honor for the young Bohemian --an acknowledgment of his stature as a composer. Curiously, La clemenza di Tito also marks a turning point in Gluck's career. On his return to Vienna, Gluck would become absorbed with French operas comiques and collaborate with Raniero Calzabigi on French-inspired opera seria-- an effort that ultimately produced the trail-breaking Orfeo ten years later in 1762. Remarkably, Gluck's last two opere serie, Il trionfo di Clelia for Bolo gna in 1763 and a second version of Ezio for Carnival of 1764, followed hard on the heels of Orfeo.

Most of Gluck's opere serie are on texts by Pietro Metastasio, who had been in Naples when a group of young composers of the new classical style began producing operas that would ultimately transform eighteenth-century musical style. From them and from the singers, Metastasio learned to write poetry so supremely well-suited for this new kind of opera that his librettos were reset over and over again throughout the century--sometimes several times by the same composer. Metastasio wrote La clemenza di Tito in 1734 after he had moved to Vienna, where it was performed in a setting by Antonio Caldara. Gluck's setting was around the seventeenth of some forty settings that stretched into the next century, with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's La clemenza di Tito for Prague in 1791 probably the best known. In the second half of the century, Metastasio's librettos were extensively altered to suit changing tastes, style, and aria construction, but by the early 1730s, opera seria had settled into the form that has come to typ ify it, and, even twenty years later, very little was changed in La clemenza di Tito beyond the inevitable cuts in the recitative text. The seconda donna, Servilia, lost two of her arias, leaving her only one per act, and the choruses were cut due to chronic difficulties that Naples had in maintaining a reliable chorus. Anyone only familiar with Mozart's version will miss the many ensembles and the action finale, which were avant-garde interpretations of the early 1790s not even dreamed of forty years earlier. Gluck's setting of La clemenza di Tito, very near to Metastasio's original conception, is a prototypical mid-century "singer's opera" unbroken by a single ensemble.

The plot revolves around the Roman emperor Titus (Tito), who is portrayed as the ideal Enlightenment monarch--wise, considered in his judgments, placing the needs of the people before his own, and steadfastly fair and forgiving in the face of unbearable betrayals. His opposite is Vitellia, daughter of the deposed emperor Vitellius. Hungry for the power she would have as Tito's wife, she vacillates between the desire to share his throne and the desire for revenge. When it appears he has chosen Servilia, she forces a promise from Tito's close friend Sesto to avenge her father's death as proof of his love for her. While conspirators move to carry out Vitellia's wishes, Servilia tells Tito that she loves Annio. He then releases her and chooses Vitellia instead. But it is too late. Rome is on fire and, for a time, Sesto believes that Tito is dead. Tito learns of Sesto's betrayal and is further angered by Sesto's steadfast refusal to defend himself. Of course he could not do so without implicating his beloved Vite llia. In her great aria in the third act, Vitellia reflects on what she is about to lose, knowing full well that she must confess to save Sesto. Tito, however, forgives them all and unites Sesto with his beloved Vitellia.

Gluck's version of La clemenza di Tito has several characteristics typical of the opera seria libretto of the 1730s as well as some unusual and interesting features. During the eighteenth century, it was customary ...