Mozart: Lucio Silla

Opera 7

Mozart: Lucio Silla

The mature operas of Mozart have been part of my musical life for as long as I remember. Playing in the orchestra for a production of Cosí fan Tutte when I was still at school was a formative experience. But I have never explored the earlier operas, so this was a good opportunity to start to put that right.

Lucio Silla is as astonishing work for a 15 year old. He had already mastered all the techniques of Italian opera seria and was writing music of real power. Indeed there are many places in the score where you get a real foretaste of what was to come.

But of course this is an opera seria. So instead of the dramatic narrative that we get in the mature works we are still in the world of long arias interspersed by recitatives. There are a few ensemble numbers but those are perhaps the less striking parts of the score. There is also significant amounts of coloratura passages. Those are of course still present in the mature operas but here they really do seem there simply to show off the singers’ abilities. There is more for the chorus to do than one expects in an opera of this type but the chorus is still rather peripheral. It is the soloists who, as individuals, are at the heart of this opera  It is a score dominated by women’s voices - there is inevitably a trouser role and the tenor only has two full arias - there was a problem with the original production which meant that he could manage the four operas he was originally going to be allocated. 

Perhaps the highlight of the score is the long arias near the end of Act 3 for Cecilia. This has astonishing maturity and the slow section, in particularly, wouldn’t be out of place in any of the more famous operas.

This recording has had mixed reviews. It does have some small cuts and Harnoncourt’s conducting has been criticised as over interventionist and over emphasising the rhetorical gestures. I didn’t hear it that way - in fact I thought that it was extremely expressive and made the most of what was a fascinating score.