Cold at heart

‘A masterpiece comparable with the last great plays of Shakespeare’, ‘a veritable turbocharged dynamic of music’, ‘a cliffhanger’, ‘a rollercoaster of a drama’ — which opera deserves these and many more ecstatic epithets? They all occur in the brief programme notes to last week’s concert performance at the Barbican of Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito, though also quoted there, as an example of outdated hostility to the work, is Charles Rosen’s ‘it’s difficult to convey how unmemorable it is’. Try as I might and have with Clemenza, I am on Rosen’s side. I’d much rather agree that the opera belongs to the canon of Mozartian masterworks, but just think of the openings of the three Da Ponte operas, or of Die Zauberflöte, how they immediately grab you and take you into the action, and then compare the long stretch of dry recitative that opens Clemenza, and isn’t even by Mozart.