The cast wasn’t to blame. With the fiercely empathetic mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato as Sesto, a trouser role she has made her own, this revival made a strong case for the work’s rehabilitation on musical grounds.
But by recycling the airless Rococo-dress staging by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle from 1984, the Met perpetuates the prejudice against the work as dramatically irrelevant. His take is so short on ideas that it might be more honest to let the singers wear their own clothes and call it a concert production.
Mozart wrote “Clemenza” on commission in 1791 for the coronation of Leopold II as king of Bohemia. In the opera, a Roman emperor forgives his friend, who had been compelled by love to conspire against him. The 1734 libretto, by Pietro Metastasio, already felt sclerotic by Mozart’s theatrical standards; he tweaked it to create ensemble numbers amid the sequence of dry recitatives and pomp-and-firework arias that made up a traditional opera seria.
Even so, an Austrian nobleman who attended the premiere called it “most boring” in his diary. The new queen, Maria Luisa, struggled to stay awake. Reports that she called the opera “una porcheria tedesca” — German pigswill — may be apocryphal. Or perhaps she bristled at the work’s political message, which presented clemency and tolerance as a ruler’s supreme virtues just weeks after Marie Antoinette had been arrested midflight and forcibly returned to Paris amid jeering crowds. After all, the production Leopold and Maria Luisa watched in Prague was in contemporary dress.
On Saturday, the singers struggled to convey a unified dramatic concept amid 18th-century wigs and pastel Roman columns. Tenor Matthew Polenzani sang the title role of the ruler unhappy inside his power bubble with a plush, slightly woolly tone and plain-spoken phrasing. In one scene he confronts Sesto, who has confessed to the plot on his life without letting on that the vengeful Vitellia (the voluble soprano Elza van den Heever) manipulated him into it. Polenzani’s acting seemed to suggest a homoerotic bond between Tito and Sesto. That’s an intriguing idea, but would require a new staging designed around it; the opera shows Sesto being very much in love with Vitellia.
And when DiDonato portrays that passion, she does so wholeheartedly, with body and voice. In scenes with van den Heever, her sound was flickering, brilliant and complex, its warmth tempered with the touch of vinegar DiDonato injects when singing the part of a man.
In the dazzling aria “Parto, parto,” DiDonato vividly rendered the moment at which her character, buffeted by hope and despair, snaps into action and commits to the conspiracy plan. The subtle electric charge that went through the house at that moment was yet another reminder that she is one of the great singer-actors of our time.
Van den Heever’s acting is more rigidly histrionic, but with her flame-drawn singing, she brought a welcome over-the-topness to a work filled with conflicted-but-noble characters.
A source of pure joy and light was Ying Fang as Servilia, sung with a soprano of succulent sweetness. Her character is mostly a foil for Tito’s generosity: He wants to marry her but desists instantly when she tells him she is in love with another man, Annio. But something about Servilia’s quiet integrity and courage clearly endeared her to Mozart, because he wrote two of the opera’s loveliest arias for her.
As Annio — another trouser role — mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo conveyed youthful tension with a high-voltage, nervy tone. Bass-baritone Christian Van Horn was decorous and steely as Publio, the guardian of protocol.
In the pit, Lothar Koenigs drew brisk and streamlined playing from the Met Orchestra — which included 22 players who had soldiered through the five-hour matinee of Wagner’s “Die Walküre” earlier in the day. Their commitment to reviving the musical riches of “Clemenza” was inspiring. The Met should invest in a production to match it.
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“La Clemenza di Tito”
Through April 20 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.