Mozart: The Operas
Last year, when looking for various recordings of Figaro on Rdio, I found Decca’s album Mozart: The Complete Operas (also available here on Amazon), a massive set of 40+ CDs with high quality recordings of every single opera written by Mozart. Having listened to only a few in the past, I decided to listen to each, in chronological order.
His early operas were technically average, but given the context that they were written before the age of 15 they are quite impressive. Without the knowledge that they were written by a (very) young Mozart, they can be boring if like me you don’t like much operas.
The first two operas that have a few interesting arias (songs) were “La finta giardiniera” and “Il re pastore”, both written at the age of 18. They also have traces of the “Mozart magic”, a few moments here and there that made me say “Wow! I want to hear more of that!”.
By the time he writes four years later Thamos, Zaide and Idomeneo, you can tell he’s now a professional and not just this “child prodigy”, and those operas are quite good and technically challenging. They were enjoyable on their own, but not yet masterpieces.
For that, I had to wait for the sequence of operas written starting with “The Marriage of Figaro”. While I still don’t like too much Italian-style operas, roughly one third of all arias are memorable, some of them masterpieces. The last two arias of the opera alone are some of the most divine moments in all of classical opera that made me speechless for minutes after. Even the overture is a cornerstone of the baroque era in music.
And it keeps getting better after that. “Don Giovani”, is another masterpiece. The opening is spectacular, almost half of the arias are memorable, and at some point it even pokes fun at “The Marriage of Figaro”.
“Così fan tutte” is quite good, but light and not as much a masterpiece of what is to come. Mozart finished his career with his two best operas and works, both written at the same time and finished close to his death. “La clemenza di Tito” feels like an homage to Italian operas, and is so well executed that even given my dislike of this style I didn’t mind at all. Well beyond three-quarters of the arias in “Tito” are memorable, and some arias are dark and emotionally gripping like his last Requiem he would compose soon after.
“The Magic Flute” really felt for me like Mozart’s of leaving something to his sons. That opera is so beyond anything else in his career, his contemporaries or even all operas made since that I consider it a pinnacle of operas in classical music. Almost all arias are memorable, and taken individually each surpass almost all of his other arias in his entire career. The two main arias of the “queen of the night” are not only challenging for the soprano, but are so incredibly “other-worldly” that they easily stand the test of time and culture changes. But more importantly, by his choice of the libretto (script) and music style, you can really feel that this opera is not meant for “elites” but for all of us, even if you’re not really into classical music.
After all, his last few operas (Don Giovani, Tito, Magic Flute) and Figaro are sufficient. Listening to the rest felt like an academic exercise more than anything else. But those four operas alone clearly show that Mozart didn’t simply rest on his laurels of his talent, but made some of humanity’s greatest musical works that have the power to touch all of us. Even if like me you tend to dislike operas.
