Classic, but not too much so

Since the Second World War, Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito has undergone a process of re-evaluation after having lain in the shadows for more than a century. The revival of Mozart’s last Italian opera is the most fruitful result of a wider interest in 18th-century opera seria that emerged in music scholarship and performing activity during the last decades of the twentieth century. Yet productions of La clemenza di Tito have frequently highlighted the issue of staging a work that conveys an unfamiliar message for contemporary audience: indeed, while the celebration of Titus’s clemency was perfectly suited the occasion for which Mozart wrote his opera (the coronation of the new Austrian Emperor Leopold II in 1791), on the other hand it says little if nothing to most present-day spectators, unless they are interested in a merely…