Lyric Opera 2018-2019 Issue 3 Idomeneo

O P E R A N O T E S | L Y R I C O P E R A O F C H I C A G O 30 | October 13 - November 2, 2018 the gods yield to the power of love and reason. A Voice (whose?) announces that “Love has triumphed!” and that the new political community will be ruled by a loving male-female duo, Ilia and Idamante (prefiguring the dual initiation of Pamina and Tamino at the end of e Magic Flute ). Instead of a monarchy based upon fear, we have a new regime, based on freedom, flexibility, reciprocity, and love. But how did we reach this point? Mozart’s subtle and original musical language shows us what the libretto itself could not, revealing what tenderness and flexibility can be and do. It is remarkable that in all of Mozart’s other major works there is no happy duet between two truly loving lovers. Either the lovers are in conflict (Susanna and Figaro, the Count and Countess), or they are ill-matched (Sesto and Vitellia) or the love is based upon deception (Don Giovanni and Zerlina, the two pairs of lovers in Così fan tutte ). Ilia and Idamante are the exception. Idamante has been a tender peace-loving lover from the beginning; Ilia, who initially sees things in terms of implacable opposition between enemies, gradually comes to see the world his way, and in the beautiful “Zeffiretti lusinghieri” (“Gently caressing breezes”) that opens Act ree, her long, delicate phrases are musical caresses sent through the breeze to her lover. When he arrives, they sing the remarkable duet “S’io non moro a questi accenti” (“If I do not die at these words”), in which the two voices, in close-knit harmony, express the joy of trusting reciprocity looking forward to happiness: “Ah, our happiness overcomes the cruel anguish we have suffered. Our passion conquers all.” Although this unique duet precedes the yielding of the gods, it prefigures it, and its exemplary beauty causes it: love’s nature makes Nature yield. Of equal importance is the opera’s delicate depiction of filial and paternal love, in the whole unfolding of the Idamante-Idomeneo relationship, and in Ilia’s gradual opening toward trust in her former enemy as a father, in the exquisite Act Two aria “Se il padre perdei” (“If I have lost my father”). So far we have left out one of the major characters: Elettra, who has some of the opera’s most dramatic and dazzling music, in the two towering revenge arias “Tutte nel cor vi sento” (“In my heart I feel you all”), addressing the Furies, goddesses of revenge, and, near the opera’s end, “D’Oreste d’Aiace” (“Of Orestes and Ajax”), again referring to her internal Furies. And it was fitting to leave her isolated, because she isolates herself. She never changes, nor does she respond to any other character. In her single-minded dedication to vengeance and the Furies, in her renunciation of “love, mercy, and compassion,” she belongs to the old cruel world and refuses the lure of the new world. As she finishes her first aria, the ensuing music of the storm outside is very similar to the music she has just been singing about her insides – Mozart’s way of showing that she embodies the older world of cruelty and rigidity, untampered by tenderness or gentleness. Elettra’s music is spectacular but ultimately solipsistic and hard, even ugly. Her arias, both the early and the late, have a breathless character that a good singer will mimic (with, of course, supreme breath control!). Revenge, after all, takes your breath away. Retributive anger operates as the opposite of Ilia’s tender love, which extends itself in long breeze-like phrases. And in her final aria, sung after the Voice has announced the triumph of Love, Elettra simply sings herself to death. Singing of suicide (“Alecto’s torch brings me death…or a sword shall end my pain”), she verges on vocal collapse, with the ugly cackling pyrotechnics of the aria’s end. And then, done with the aria, she simply does collapse, in most productions and in Lyric’s – killed, apparently, by her own exhausting emotions of anger and hatred. Her collapse is sad, because Mozart lets us see that she does have a softer side. In her first aria we encounter a more delicate theme as she bids farewell to her former emotions of “love, mercy, and compassion.” And in Act Two, briefly, she sings an aria expressing love – before, disappointed, she reverts to a harsh retributivism. Joseph Kerman, the author of Opera as Drama , says that Elettra is far from the center of the work, a peripheral character – and in a way this is true, but it does not show that she is irrelevant. Like the Queen of the Night in e Magic Flute , she is an antitype, the exemplar of an older realm with no reciprocity and no compassion, and what Mozart shows us is that this way of being in the world leads ultimately to exhaustion and burnout. Ilia and Idamante, by contrast, lead forward to personal and political regeneration and to happiness. Martha C. Nussbaum, Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at e University of Chicago, has also taught at Harvard, Brown, and Oxford universities. Her recent book, Aging oughtfully: Conversations About Retirement, Romance, Wrinkles and Regret, appeared in 2017 and is co-authored with her colleague Saul Levmore. Her newest book, e Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis , appeared in July 2018 from Simon and Schuster. In 2016 she received the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy. Mariella Devia (left) as Ilia and Veseslina Kasarova (right) as Idamante at Lyric, 1997-98 season. Vinson Cole as Idomeneo at Lyric, 1997-98 season.