Early Efforts at Opera

It’s kind of fun to imagine a teenager, almost 15, writing music for a 2½ hour opera, and that’s part of the appeal of watching Mozart’s Mitridate, Re di Ponto. 

He had apparently written another one when he was just 12, so we will have to try to find a recording of La Finta Semplice with English subtitles somewhere.  In fact, it would be intriguing to line it up with “Little Ricky” Wagner’s Liebesverbot, and “Baby Gio” Rossini’s Demetrio & Polibio and “Chubbs” Donizetti’s Pigmalione.  Beginners!

Berlin staged Mitridate in 2022, and that is a cool name for an opera, so let’s see what this amounts to.

Harpsichords and Helmets

Well, it amounts to a pretty tough go, because it’s long, and it offers very little information about who is on the stage or the reason for all their singing.  Is this the actual show, or is the cast warming up, one by one?  Yet it’s a big step from the early-1700’s pieces Mozart’s folks had played for him as a preschooler, so let’s see what the boy wonder has done.

Partly, Mozart has made some of this music complicated and enjoyable.  There are a few appealing songs, some real emotion, tunes to remember and sing.  So just that 30% of the stage time carries it way past the efforts of Handel, for instance.

But most of what young Wolfy was writing here (this was 1770), was still linked to the fading Baroque era, where listeners doggedly subjected themselves to monotonous harpsichords, the favorite weapon of Vivaldi.  Painfully, we see Berlin’s stunning Unter den Linden opera house, where I endured three hours of Giustino in 2022, being used again by a jackhammer orchestra, hitting hard on every single downbeat, for some unbearably long songs.

Incidentally, I had just watched Don Giovanni, which Mozart scored 17 years later, and that was nice music!  Lots going on there, complex tunes and harmonies, changing rhythms, and making full use of the orchestra (harpsichord now out back in the trash).   Adult vs. teenager, and you can easily see the difference.  Baroque was gone by 1787, none too soon.  Plus, in Giovanni, he had the characters walking around a bit, and gesturing to each other, so they seem more like people. 

The other key reason that Mitridate is more fun than Alcina is the headgear.  Wow – one woman has a pair of geese nesting in her hair!  Another has a whole wolf on her head – more than a whole wolf, really, because the tail or something extends down her back to the floor.  This stuff looks heavy and alive!  The simplest hat was on a poor princess, who wore a basic four-layer wedding cake, wired with 20 or 30 bobbing antennas.

A 2022 review of this production suggests that the stuff on their heads was not necessarily how Mitridate and his crew dressed historically.  Instead, it says this is the Germans’ way to make these Persian people look more Japanese.

Hats, But No Plot

You start out with an unidentified woman motionless at center stage, staring straight out the back door of the theater, and singing out from under her wolf head.  Strange.

But look closely!  What an eye-catching intro we have here, because this woman has the sweetest, most lovely smile you will ever see on a 2,000-year-old prince. 

You cannot tell yet that she is a prince, but you know she is royalty because she is encumbered with what looks like 200 pounds of gold armor.  This does not diminish her pleasing smile.  Okay, happy Angela Brower.

Then, another unidentified woman sings (this one has the geese), and she is the queen.  She stands at the side of the stage, also focused rigidly on the back door, and in her case, she sings like that for about 10 minutes, nonstop.  She is not happy, and that is about all we can learn during those many minutes.

She leaves, and the prince sings again, and smiles, also for a really long time.

At 24 minutes in, we know nothing of the plot, as there has been no action whatsoever, and nothing you would call “chemistry” here between the prince and the queen, or with the audience either.

Then the other prince – the jittery brother – shows up, and he has some elaborate artwork on his head, maybe a representation of the Chicago fire, or a communications satellite, with a lizard.  With another quarter-ton of gold armor.  He sings a long time, too, and this is tougher for me, because he’s a countertenor.  So everyone is singing at the same high pitch, and everyone just stands there; it could be a concert presentation of the opera, maybe.

The boys’ father is coming home.  He’s the king, Mitridate, and he has just lost a battle, but not the war.  He has a wagonload of filthy hay on his head.  He sings a heartfelt and completely enjoyable song, about defeat.

Tension in the family, all around, because King Mit has brought home a princess for his nervous son, the one with the lizard.  Neither of these youngsters is very pleased with the king’s matchmaking effort.

It HAS Started.  It is NOT Over.

Right, so that was a dull but puzzling hour.  Here we are, riding right up to the end of Act 1, and I cannot tell what this thing is about.

Because these are extremely long songs, each on a just a single topic, and repetitious.  They rarely mention anyone’s name, and these people are not going anywhere or doing anything.  

Even if you take notes, you only see that their names are fairly similar:  Arbate, Sifare, Farnace, Aspasia, Ismeme.  These are skin diseases, all in a very narrow band of ICD-9 codification.

This show definitely needs a narrator up there, explaining what is going on.  He or she could wear a giant panda on their head, or a 20-speed truck transmission.

Let Us Summarize What We Have Learned

If you stop to figure this out using Wikipedia, you finally learn that the place where these people are standing and singing is Nymphaea, a town on the present-day Crimean peninsula.  Nymphaea is part of Pontus (all the coastlines of the Black Sea), with Mitridate as the king.   From this unwieldy outpost, he is hoping to subdue the entire Roman Empire.

The two princes both lust after the queen, but that is OK in this context because the queen is neither their mother, nor married to their father, the king.  (She is partial to the prince with the pretty smile.)  Still, this queen is “pledged in marriage” to the king, their dad, so we have quite a complicated family issue going here.

There were six King Mitridates of Pontus.  This opera is about the sixth one.  He ate increasing amounts of poison, hoping to build up an immunity, and it worked.  Doing this is now called “mithridatism”.  That is fascinating, but unfortunately, it is not the plot of this story.

Big King Mit is not succeeding against Rome, and one reason is that one of his sons, the unsmiling, high-voiced one, is for some reason on Rome’s side in the conflict.  The fates are lined up against Mitridate the sixth, and it is no surprise that there was never a Mitridate the seventh.

So there we have it.  This is all very clear, and a very believable story, I suppose, if you live in northern Anatolia around 60 BC.

Losers

You have to imagine that Mozart, at this young age, did not go around selecting his stories carefully, and he probably did not care that the 100-year-old play he was working with was not really true to history.  Mozart was in it for the music, and as I said, he did pretty well, with many of the pieces here.

But this royal family is a mess, and the king and his sons are constantly distracted by the nutty plan to conquer Rome.  They team up to fight, finally, but they are upset with each other because they all want the so-called queen, and nobody really wants the wedding-cake princess.

Even though the boys can see that their dad’s eagerness to attack Rome is misguided, they all leave the queen with her own little vial of poison, and march away.  But the queen does not kill herself after all, and she’s still there when her men come home, bloody and beaten.

It’s one of those rare operas where the main character hero has taken the losing side of the war.  You can see this in Meyerbeer’s Le Prophète, and in Verdi’s Aida and Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda, too.  It’s always awkward, because you want your hero to win.  Not here.  Giordano’s Andrea Chénier.  Wow; there are a lot of losers here.  Not so rare after all.

Then, if you have finally figured out who is who under all the hats, and you understand what is driving the story line, the ending holds two jarring surprises for you!

First, in the midst of disappointment, misery, pain, blood, distrust, and defeat by the Romans, the whole cast sings a terrific song of victory and determination for the future.  Way to go, Mozart.

Second, King Mitridate, famous in history for carefully building up an immunity to poisons, downs a little cup of something and dies.  So… it didn’t work after all?  I don’t get it.

Pretty good start, Mozart man!  But I still want to see the one he did when he was just 12.