FROM AROUND THE WORLD: STRASBOURG.(Il Tito)(Review)

Has the time arrived for reassessment of Antonio (Pietro) Cesti (1623-69), the third and youngest (after Monteverdi and Cavalli) of the Venetian opera triumvirate? In June, l'Opera National du Rhin of Strasbourg struck gold with a production of Cesti's Il Tito (Titus), an opera in three acts, with a libretto by Niccolo Beregan. Tito was composed in the last year of Cesti's musical directorship at the Innsbruck Court Theater and given its premiere in February 1666 at Venice's Teatro Santi Giovanni e Paolo. There have been two or three attempts at the Innsbruck Festival to test Cesti's theatrical currency; there was even a staging of Tito in 1983. But these were on shoestring budgets, and Cesti needs luxury, in both vocal matters and production values (his orchestral forces are less lavish) -- as we know from his Il Pomo d'Oro, a "festa teatrale" for Vienna, often cited as one of the grandest, most expensive events in opera history. Strasbourg spared no expense when it launched Il Tito on June 2 (seen June 10). The production turned out to be another triumph for William Christie and his Les Arts Florissants, but even more so for Cesti, whose work in this opera rivals that of Monteverdi in L'Incoronazione di Poppea.

Cesti's Tito is not only 125 years older than Mozart's La Clemenza di Tito, but the character is portrayed ten years before becoming Roman emperor. Cesti's Tito is commander of the Roman troops besieging Jerusalem in A.D. 70, and he has taken prisoner both the Judaean Queen Berenice and her lover Polemon, King of Lykia. Thus Cesti's dramatis personae are totally different from those of Mozart and from those of Racine's Berenice -- though Cesti's Berenice is the axis around whom the action revolves. Every male character, including Tito, is enamored of her, and the erotic entanglements are so complicated as to defy analysis. It is hard even to read the synopsis in the program book and to decipher who's who and who's related to whom, to say nothing of identifying the seventeen soloists onstage, including a magician, Appolinio, who appears from the gorge of a whale with two page boys. Tito is so deeply impressed by Berenice's fidelity to Polemon that he finally agrees to their marriage, while he consoles himself with Marcia, a Roman woman, whom the magician procures for him from a cloud that descends like a spaceship.

Director-designer Alain Germain produced a gigantic, erotic spectacle, full of sensual effects, not without some tongue-in-cheek relief. I could have done without the constant presence of a camera crew rushing about and pretending to film the action, with their shots projected against the props and desert landscape, complete with small ponds and bathing boys in the nude. Pretty to look at and luxuriously costumed, the three-and-a-half-hour show whizzed ...