Mozart's Operas: Style, Themes, and Masterpieces Analyzed

Introduction: Mozart and the Operatic Tradition

Opera was Mozart's favorite mode of artistic expression, and he composed twenty-two of them in varying shapes and sizes before his death in 1791 at the age of 35. The "great awakening" of Mozart's operatic achievement, however, comes in the final flourish of his life, beginning with Idomeneo (Cairns 2). Thereafter followed a succession of masterpieces that culminated in Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute). This paper looks at Mozart's operas — those considered to be his best as well as those that preceded them — and shows how the composer incorporated the themes and styles of his contemporaries and transformed them (as Shakespeare did upon the stage in London) into something unique, original, and alive.

As David Cairns suggests, to understand Mozart one must know his operas: "To see beneath the beautiful patterns, to realize all that the music's impeccable control concealed… (requires) familiarity with the operas" (8). These operas are generally seven in number — those composed within the last decade of his life — and of these seven, four are considered masterpieces: The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte, and The Magic Flute (Loomis 2).

The beginning of Mozart's maturity as a composer is typically dated from 1780. By that point he had set aside the German opera Zaide — a work that would not be performed during his lifetime — and taken up the subject of the King of Crete with the librettist Giambattista Varesco, the Salzburg court chaplain and precursor to Lorenzo da Ponte, who would work with Mozart on his most famous Italian operas. Varesco's script for Idomeneo was stilted and clunky, but Mozart, now in full possession of his talent, infused it, shaped it, and altered it to his own liking (Loomis 2).

Mozart's first choral piece was penned at the age of nine, and three years later, at the age of twelve, he composed his first opera, La Finta Semplice (The Feigned Simpleton), which had its first performance in the Archbishop of Salzburg's Palace in 1769. Like his later works, this adolescent composition was an opera buffa. It is safe to say that Mozart always kept about himself a youthful spirit, energy, and vitality that allowed him to manifest all of life's experiences — from the dramatically sorrowful to the delightedly joyful — in musical composition. Above all, Mozart possessed a childlike sensibility that rose above both time and place to find something in common with all generations.

As David Barber jokingly asserted, "Mozart is just God's way of making the rest of us feel insignificant. Whenever you have just composed a piece of music you think is particularly good, it is humbling to think that Mozart probably wrote a better one when he was nine years old" (70).

Idomeneo and the Beginning of Mozart's Maturity

In structure, Idomeneo is a work of formal eighteenth-century Italian opera seria. Its subject is taken from classical Greek mythology and its tone is serious: it is in essence a typical form of the sacrifice drama for which the ancient Greeks were known, and for which Iphigenia was immortalized. Mozart's desire to adapt Idomeneo into an opera from the French drama by Danchet — with which Mozart came into contact in Paris in 1778 — found fruition in Munich and put Mozart "into competition with Gluck" for revitalizing Grecian mythology in opera (Heartz 7). The themes of Idomeneo are serious, as are all the themes of Mozart's operatic masterpieces, but here they are treated in a powerfully dramatic fashion.

However, with the exception of La Clemenza di Tito (performed in 1791), all of Mozart's other mature operas would be comedic (buffa or giocoso). Don Giovanni, for example, is listed as both a dramma giocoso and an opera buffa — even though many today consider it a quite serious work. As Daniel Heartz and other scholars have noted, Mozart's Idomeneo stands apart as the lone towering example of serious grand opera in his mature output, making it all the more significant as a marker of his artistic development.

The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni

Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo da Ponte had saved the Italian Opera house in Prague from a poor financial season with the showing of their Figaro in 1786. They were commissioned to follow up that comedy with another, and the tale of Don Juan — their next collaboration — was modeled both on the spirit of the times (embodied wholeheartedly by da Ponte himself) and on the era's comedic operas. As Henry Simon states, "A good deal of [Don Giovanni] was closely fashioned after the libretto of Il Convitato di Pietro (The Stone Guest), a popular opera… by Giuseppe Gazzaniga and Giovanni Bertati" (4). What Mozart and his talented librettist were able to do, however, was take the conventional light opera and bring it to life in such a way that it would become one of the oldest operas still performed regularly around the world today (Simon 3).

The Marriage of Figaro, just like Don Giovanni which followed, was based on a popular comedy of the time. Pierre-Augustin Beaumarchais had penned La folle journée, ou Le mariage de Figaro in 1778, but it took the comedic stylings of da Ponte and the genius of Mozart to bring the play to life with music and characters that would "redefine comic opera" (Loomis 2). The play was actually a sequel to Le barbier de Séville, which Rossini would later adapt into his most popular opera. For Mozart, the sequel served his purposes and provided him an opportunity to create twenty-eight new musical compositions that, together with the overture, constituted the score for Figaro (Loomis 3).

The plot itself is a complicated yarn full of entanglements, intrigues, seduction, desire, and love — but in the hands of Mozart the play becomes both human and divine, conveying through music the full range of emotional and intellectual ardor that constitutes the various elements of experienced love, from the adolescent to the mature. The ironic aria that ends Act I, Non più andrai, did as much to secure Mozart another commission as the high jinks of the opera did to win over the audience. Mozart married music to words in The Marriage of Figaro in a more accomplished way than he had ever done before: comedies about love and human foibles were his forte.

Opera was, for Mozart, the ultimate expression — the total work of art that Wagner would set out to create in the following century. And for all composers after him, Mozart essentially set the bar. As Daniel Heartz points out, Mozart scholars of the twentieth century (such as Edward J. Dent) upheld Mozart's operas as great examples of the ideals of Western culture: "And more than ever now, in these times of turmoil and confusion, do we need the profound and noble sincerity of Idomeneo and the serene spirituality of The Magic Flute" (ii). However, that which made Mozart great also brought him difficulties: the "pointed satire" that filled Figaro in 1786 and brought audiences flocking also served to ostracize him from "any number of Viennese aristocrats" (Greenberg), and the passion which drove him to convey so much of life in his operas also came at a time when life in Vienna was suffering from a war with the Ottoman Empire. His operas may have been comedic — but life was not always so.

Conclusion: Mozart's Legacy in Opera

Mozart was a composer whose mature operas reveal both the man and his times. In them, Mozart pulled together comedy and drama, various aspects of culture such as religion and the contemporary arts, as well as "lowbrow" entertainment. Mozart towered above his contemporaries and set the bar for all operatic composers after him — yet he never appeared to look down his nose at the common man, for whom, after all, The Magic Flute, his final work, was composed. Indeed, through his operas, Mozart could identify with the common man and yet invest him with a simple dignity, enlighten him as to a higher way, and reward the good in the virtuous.

Works Cited

Barber, David W. Bach, Beethoven, and the Boys. Toronto, Canada: Sound and Vision, 1986.

Cairns, David. Mozart and His Operas. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2006.

Heartz, Daniel. Mozart's Operas. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1990.

Greenberg, Robert. Operas of Mozart. Web. 6 Sept 2011.

Loomis, Harvey. The Mozart Collection. Hollywood, CA: Time-Life Music, 1990.

Simon, Henry. A Treasury of Grand Opera. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1946.