Opera with a human first face – Weekend – Kommersant
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Is there a lot of kindness in the opera? It seems to be a wild question, but there is a feeling that usually it is exiled in particular characters, in episodes, in shades, in plot mechanisms. It’s not that the main opera characters were all completely sinister – but try to find one with the image of which the very concept of kindness would be persistently associated with the image. The concept seems to be everyday, domestic, but it turns out to be devilishly complex as an artistic matter. There are very few such heroes. The most ideal in every sense is brought out in a strange work, which almost from the very beginning is reputed to be old-fashioned, and at the same time it looks very modern for the third century.
This is a well-known work, and its hero – even more so. His name is Titus Flavius Vespasian, he is a Roman emperor, the penultimate of Suetonian’s twelve Caesars, and the title character of the opera “Mercy of Titus”. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote an opus under this title in the summer of 1791. To make it clearer, this is Mozart’s last summer on the land of the living, work on the Requiem and The Magic Flute is in full swing; accordingly, the score, which in the original is called “La clemenza di Tito”, is his farewell to Italian opera. And what a goodbye. Let’s not touch the quadruple of the main shrines of the Mozart opera house (“The Marriage of Figaro”, “That’s what all women do”, “Don Giovanni” plus the same “Flute”), but, at least among what remains, “Mercy” is definitely at the first place. On the pages of the amazing youthful “Idomeneo” no, no, yes, cockiness is read – “I will shock them, I will make their souls tremble.” “Mercy of Titus” is smoother, clearer, more harmonious. I dare say – and more exciting too, although there is neither a fatal curse nor a sea monster. But the action is springy and solid. And the characters, and Bernini’s generously fashioned culminations! And the free air of grand opera architecture with choirs and marches! And the elegant ensembles, the terrible finale of the first act, the most beautiful instrumental solos (clarinet and basset horn) in the two most important and most desperate arias. And finally, the final miracle enclosed in this frame, which is placed in the title: the emperor solemnly forgives those who attempted on his life. Titus, as we know, was called “the joy and consolation of the human race”, and here this rare for a statesman to become quite convincingly shows us exactly the composer, who himself is an absolute joy and consolation.
Mozart’s Titus is regularly performed and recorded under this impression. But this is now – and a hundred and even fifty years ago, the composer was just not put in a corner for this opera: failure, they say, could not have been otherwise. He took on a dense libretto, the old genre of the so-called opera seria (“serious opera”, which reigned in the 1710s-1760s, when what we call early classicism sprouted from the crumbling baroque), for a conditional aristocratic wampuka about the ancient Romans. He took on an official order: “Mercy” was performed in Prague during the celebrations on the occasion of the coronation of Emperor Leopold II as King of Bohemia. And Mozart, who was in a bad hurry, was sick and tired, and the very idea of the “Mercy of Titus” as a coronation holiday was also tired.
Because in fact, Mozart’s “Mercy of Titus” was already about the fortieth opera with this name. This, of course, may seem to us now almost less understandable than the nature of the Romans of the 1st century AD. e. To imagine that the libretto of “A Life for the Tsar” would have been written not by Baron Rosen, but by Zhukovsky – this is still feasible. But no imagination is enough to imagine how, following Glinka, they write their own “Lives for the Tsar” to the same libretto, for example, Verstovsky, Serov, Mussorgsky, a couple more “Kuchkists”, and then Tchaikovsky, and then Rimsky -Korsakov. In the world of mature romanticism, this does not happen. In the 18th century, this is in the order of things – much like for us the fact that different modern directors stage the same Hamlet. A normal thing, a live theater, and the main legislator of this theater was then the abbot Pietro Metastasio, the greatest operatic playwright, who wrote his “Mercy of Titus” back in 1734. And since then, only one of the composers has not turned to this libretto – Johann Adolf Gasse (thrice!), Gluck, Niccolo Jommelli, Scarlatti-son, Sarti, Myslivechek. Handel also tried on, although it did not work out for him. In a word, an almost complete pantheon of the main names of the Italian opera of those times, plus a decent host of all sorts of dii minores.
The whole existence of this libretto really has a certain court imprint. In 1734, the first “Mercy” to the music of Antonio Caldara was staged in Vienna in honor of the name day of Emperor Charles VI (the grandfather of Mozart’s married customer Leopold II). In 1742, “Mercy of Titus” with music by Gasset was given in Moscow, where Empress Elizaveta Petrovna was then crowned (by the way, the godmother of the same Leopold); the unaccustomed public was explained that this “in explanation of Her Majesty’s merciful qualifications” is represented by “the story of Titus, the emperor of Rome, and the conjuration made on him through Sextus and Lentulus from the instigation of Vitellia, the daughter of the murdered Vitellius, whom the emperor forgave all of this.” Well, and so on – something, obviously, was alluring precisely in the demonstration of “merciful qualifications” as an artistic attribute of a public holiday.
Have there been noble crowned persons in the opera seria yet? Yes, as much as you like, in almost every opera, wherever its action takes place – in Hellas, Persia, Egypt, even Mexico. Were there deafeningly happy outcomes? Especially. Another “conjuration”, or a stormy love-dynastic confusion, or a drama of knightly honor, or a combination of one, the other and the third – all this was bound to be resolved with a happy ending (for the benevolent artificiality of such an outcome, the opera seria was once bonfired especially harshly, calling it “the genre that is cursed by Apollo”). The same Metastasio for a long creative life only three times resorted to an unfortunate denouement – and each time it was perceived as an artistic shock of an all-European scale.
Accordingly, mercy should also have been enough in addition to Titus. If the villain did not die somewhere behind the scenes (the classical opera seria did not encourage murders on stage – also, in essence, out of a kind of kindness understood), then in the finale, in order to solve all the difficulties in front of a happy choir, all that remains is to forgive him most mercifully. Well, or condemned to exile.
With mercy-mercy, in general, an interesting thing: we hear in these words, first of all, Christian overtones, but in fact, the Latin clementia is precisely what since pagan times was perceived as primarily “the virtue of sovereigns”. “The quality of mercy is not strain’d,” says Portia in The Merchant of Venice: “The quality of mercy does not act under compulsion, / Like warm rain, it falls from the sky …” However, the Shakespearean heroine admits that the power of mercy “The strongest of all are those who are invested with power,” just then “it is the property of God Himself.” In other words, this is not about experiencing pity, sympathy, but about taking pity, having mercy – from the height of your position, so be it, soften the legal punishment due to this pygmy.
Is it kindness? Of course not. But there is something infinitely more in the operatic Titus than this stereotypically conciliatory “vertical” indulgence.
When he is offered to build a temple in his honor, he indignantly refuses – and offers to spend the funds raised to help the surviving victims of Vesuvius: “the last day of Pompeii” has just happened. When his Minister of State Security, Publius, brings him a decree on sanctions against those who defiled the memory of the late emperors, Titus refuses to sign it. And when Publius adds that they also insulted the dignity of Titus himself, the emperor replies without hesitation: “So what? If it was due to frivolity, I don’t care about it; if in the clouding of the mind, then I feel sorry for them; if they had reasons, I should thank them; if they acted in a fit of malice, then I forgive them.
When Sextus, his closest friend, turns out to be one of the leaders of the anti-imperial conspiracy, Titus, firstly, does not immediately believe in it (“I judge his heart by myself!”), And then, interrogating the villain, he indulges in persuasion. Well, dear, well, my friend, there is no emperor here, only your friend Titus is here: let me help you, tell me how such a nuisance happened to you. The unfortunate Sextus has nothing to say – he is mortally ashamed before the benefactor Caesar, but one cannot betray his beloved, who instigated him to arrange a putsch (“with the instigation of Vitellia, the daughter of the murdered Vitellius”). There are no mitigating circumstances, it turns out, no, Sextus must be executed, this is not tyranny, but the law – and yet Titus decides to forgive him: one cannot succumb to cruelty and revenge, “if the world finds something to reproach me with, then let him reproach me for mercy, not for harshness.
We call this “beautiful feelings” and say it with coolness, if not derision. But the abbot Metastasio hits backhand – there are so many such feelings in each scene (the other characters are also remarkable here) and they are shown so naturally that a crushing cumulative effect really arises because of this hyperbole. Maybe aesthetic, maybe moral. Yes, of course, all this is fiction, smoke, the shadow of a shadow – but, damn it, “what a masterful creation – a man! How noble of mind! How limitless in his abilities, shapes and movements! At some point, those close to him even beg Titus: they say, die your good deeds, we are crushed, we are no longer able to withstand it. To which he replies: how, and what will remain for me then? What else is pleasant to do in my post, if not to do good?
Any sovereign who was shown such an operatic “mirror” in honor of his coronation is, by and large, even a pity. Titus is not Tsar Fyodor Ivanovich, he is an autocratic, majestic ruler, who, accordingly, should be imitated. But this is hard work; instead of the maxim “I want mercy, not sacrifice” here is another one – “I want humanity and kindness, not mercy.” Otherwise, there will be no warm rain that gracefully falls from the sky.
Kindness is not the way to happiness – Titus is, in general, on the beans: there is not a single kindred soul around, one can only envy the primitive calmness of the “natural person”, not spoiled by either civilization or the cares of government. It is not a strong religious duty – the emperor makes it clear that this is an internal matter: “If, O good gods, in order to reign, you need a stern heart – either deprive me of the kingdom, or give me another heart.”
Perhaps this is closest to Rousseau, who taught that kindness is simply “an innate aversion to the spectacle of other people’s suffering”; to overcome this disgust, both Caesar and the swineherd need a fair amount of depravity. But then, in the political context of the “old order”, the Metastasian libretto looks all the more entertaining, in which so often they saw simply an apology for absolutism, even if it was enlightened. And the Mozart opera itself: after all, 1791, the arrest of Louis XVI in Varennes, and so on, and without Rousseau, as Napoleon used to say, there would be no Revolution. In general, with more than one Don Juan, it turns out that Mozart responded to the gasp of the old order.
On the other hand, the new order will certainly send kindness somewhere to the Biedermeier bourgeois paradise. In this sense, Mozart’s “Mercy of Titus” can then be called old-fashioned – it manages to build a huge spectacular drama around sympathy, participation, generosity, conscientiousness. It seems to be not even a drama, but a fairy tale – buns do not grow on trees, there is no state without coercion, the historical Titus actually reigned for only two years and a little, and then died untimely, perhaps from poison. And yet it is not a fairy tale. “Disgust at the spectacle of other people’s suffering” is not a weakness, but a great thing that changes the fate of people and nations. History – well, let’s say, the history of the opera house of the XVIII century – will not let you lie.
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