La clemenza di Tito (Neapel 1752) (review)

Christoph Willibald Gluck. La clemenza di Tito (Neapel 1752): Dramma per musica in drei Akten von Pietro Metastasio. Hrsg. von Franz Giegling. (Sämtliche Werke, Abt. III: Italienische Opere serie und Opernserenaden, Bd. 16.) Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1995. [Vorwort, p. vii-x; Bildbeigaben, p. xi-xvi; score, 431 p.; Krit. Bericht, p. 433-53. Cloth. ISMN M-006-49546-7; BA 5773. DM 550.]

Christoph Willibald Gluck's La clemenza di Tito 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 opéras comiques and collaborate with Raníero 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 Bologna 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 typify it, and, even twenty years later, very little was...