Mitridate, Re Di Ponto - Royal Opera House: Opera review
HAS there ever been such a precocious genius as Mozart? He wrote Mitridate, Re Di Ponto when he was only 14 and it was already his fourth opera.
I suppose they didn’t have GCSEs at the time, but there must have been something more appropriate for a 14-year-old boy to be doing.
We should all be grateful that he didn’t spend too much time on other distractions, though, for Mozart died far too young (at the age of 35) and as Mitradate makes clear, even in his early teens, he was producing works of great beauty and maturity.
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The plot of this opera is typically convoluted. Mitradate, King of Pontus in Asia Minor (now in Turkey) has been defeated in battle by the Romans and has encouraged news to be spread that he is dead.
This will, he thinks, give him a good chance to discover which of his two sons is being disloyal to him. One of the brothers, it turns out, has strong ties with Mitridate’s bitter enemies in Rome, the other is in love with the woman his Dad is going to marry, so the scene is set for political and marital infidelities and intrigue.
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While they are sorting out the problems, all the principals, as was the operatic fashion of the time, are given some wonderfully fast and complex arias turning attention away from the tenuous plot into a glorious singing contest, which was what the audiences of the time wanted.
There are therefore fewer duets, trios and other ensembles that characterise much of the later Mozart arias and lots of wonderful show-off stuff. How the singers of that time accepted such tonsil twisting stuff from a 14-year-old composer is something I shall never understand, but it makes for great entertainment.
There is not much in the way of action, and the attempt to make up for this with a striking range of exotic and colourful constumes is not totally successful.
Indeed, it often looked as though several of the singers had become inescapably merged with ironing boards which must have made motion rather cumbersome. But the music and singing were glorious.
Russian soprano Albina Shagimuratova is glorious in the role of the King’s fiancée Aspasia, but Lucy Crowe is even better as Ismene, who still wants to marry one of Mitradate’s sons, even if he has said he loves Aspasia.
Lucy Crowe excellent captures the absurdity of her situation and gives the entire opera a delicious comic sheen as well as a wonderfully flexible voice. Mitridate himself is played by American tenor Michael Spyres who displayed a phenomenal range and versatility in his voice that surely cannot be improved upon.
Mozart’s later operas, Cosi Fan Tutte, Marriage of Figaro, The Magic Flute and Don Giovanni have become so established in the repertoire and so well known that much of his early work has become neglected.
As this production (first seen in 1991) shows, however, even the 14-year-old Mozart had a phenomenal amount to offer. It would have been a very far-seeing music master or reviewer of the time to dare to suggest that, as became clear in his later works, that he could do better.
Tickets: www.roh.org.uk or 020 7304 4000 (various dates until July 7)
