These operas were funded by royalty and power and therefore had to please and massage egos, but the characters on stage also provided role models for the members of the audience. It contains predictable seria themes: internal conflict within a royal family, a king and/or a queen under duress, a love triangle, but in the end all resolves in ways to some degree rational and good, demonstrating the ruler’s inner strength, wisdom, nobility of character and forgiveness. Serious opera, in other words, not a buffoonery. Idomeneo is opera seria in style, not an opera buffa like his earlier La finta giardiniera. There he would spend the last ten years of his life composing four of the finest operas ever written, plus two other full length ones quite well received at the time, and his major symphonies, and the concerti…you know the rest. Its positive reception and the confidence and experience Mozart gained from this all prompted his decision to move up to the major musical league in Vienna. Idomeneo’s labor and painful birth pangs are well documented in Mozart’s letters to his father. In fact the world premiere almost occurred on his twenty-fifth birthday, but delays were caused by a lot of last minute trimming, rewriting, and also troubles with the singers, particularly with the old tenor selected for the title role. It was Mozart’s most important commission to date, the festival centerpiece of the 1781 Carnival season in Munich. How liberating it must have been for the young genius, knowing that the band could play whatever notes he put on the sheets. Idomeneo is a wonder, arguably Mozart’s grandest, richest score, written for, at the time, one of the more remarkable orchestras in the world.
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