Idomeneo and Die Entfiihrung.—Idomeneo is the only opera of Mozart in a form which could show the influence of Gluck. Its wonderful choruses and its mature orchestration and pro found counterpoint are as far beyond Gluck's range as its formali ties and hampered action are repugnant to Gluck's dramatic re forms. The problems of comic opera were far more suggestive to Mozart. In Die Entfiihrung his exuberant music still needed (and to a slight extent received) pruning, but his dramatic genius, as shown in the part of Osmin, began to run away with his music instead of his music running away with the action. And his power of musical characterization was genuine, and not dependent on tagging each person with a mannerism. After Die Ent fiihrung, Mozart's record is a series of masterpieces, accompanied, but not interrupted by a running commentary of popular trifles, which often served him as studies. Almost every composition solves an art-problem, sometimes with the queerest materials. The repertoire of the modern organist contains, since Bach, no grander piece than the two fantasias which Mozart wrote for the barrel of a musical clock. Shortly before his death he wrote a beautiful adagio and rondo for the glass harmonica, in combination with flute, oboe, viola and violoncello, a perfect scheme which nobody else could have imagined. He wrote some effective processional music for two flutes, five trumpets and four drums; a beautiful adagio for two clarinets and three basset-horns (practically five clarinets), and a nice little sonata for bassoon and violoncello. His work in the larger instrumental forms is further discussed in the article SONATA FORMS.
Mozart's later operas, from Figaro onwards, represent the nearest approach to a perfect art-form attainable in pre-Wagnerian opera. We cannot guess what he might have attained in serious opera had he lived to see the solemn triumphs of the French operatic stage in the austere sincerity of Cherubini and Mehul. We cannot doubt that he would have taught Beethoven to bully his librettist betimes, and that Fidelio would not have stood in perilous and lonely splendour as an opera with a serious plot. But Mozart knew serious opera only as an Italian art form, which Gluck himself could not permanently rescue from the tyranny of singers. After Idomeneo he handled it only perfunctorily in La Clemenza di Tito. Comedy gave him full scope, and in Figaro he had the advantage of a libretto which was already a famous product of consummate stagecraft before it ever became an opera. Its absurdly complex intrigues do not worry the spectator, for no one attempts to follow them ; but they keep every person on the stage in a state of excitement which is so idealized by the music that, while Beaumarchais' Mariage de Figaro has its place in literature, Mozart's Figaro is one of the greatest classics in all music. The subject is a social satire;
but Mozart lives in Cloud-cuckoo-land. His characters are as irresponsible as fairies. Theirs is the world described by Lamb— the Utopia of gallantry, where pleasure is duty and the manners perfect freedom. The countess, however, is human. Producers destroy the purposes of Beaumarchais and of Mozart when they make her seem no longer young. It is only two or three years since she was Rosina in Le Barbier de Seville; the young Cherubino is in love with her; and the Count's intrigues have no excuse.
In Don Giovanni Mozart rises, not only in the music of the ghostly statue, but also in that of Donna Anna and Donna Elvira, to heights that must be called sublime; the comedy of gallantry is in conflict with real human issues. Donna Anna's cadences are conventional when her grief has become a memory that stands between her and her lover; but at the first shock of her father's death her music is as tragic as Beethoven could have made it, cadences and all. Elvira, Don Giovanni's deserted wife, ought, like the Contessa in Figaro, to be represented as quite young. She enters in search of her vanished husband and sings Italian formulas which Wagnerian critics tell us are inade quate for the expression of her sorrows. Look at the sforzando in the second violins at the words Ali se ritrovo l'empio. Mozart is telling us that this inexperienced girl has not as yet come to any determination more serious than the wish to scratch Don Giovanni's eyes out. As soon as his character is revealed to her in Leporello's comic aria of the "catalogue," she determines that others at all events shall not suffer as she has suffered; and from that moment she becomes majestic. In the second act she weakens and Don Giovanni fools her to the top of her bent. Yet Mozart realizes better than Da Ponte a consistent development of her character. Her last confession of weakness, Mi tradi, was, like Non mi dir, inserted by Mozart afterwards. Both arias may be omitted ; but at all events we need not make nonsense of Elvira's behaviour by putting Mi tradi into the first act as her second utterance, in immediate response to Leporello's catalogue aria! The final impression made by a well-conceived performance of Don Giovanni is of something grander than comedy. Da Ponte's stage directions should be respected; Don Giovanni should be carried off by little Italian pantomime devils, and the music should be allowed to rise undisturbed by the efforts of pantomime scenery to follow it. The beautiful final scene afterwards added by Mozart should be omitted, though with regret. Don Giovanni's indomitable courage should be that of a nobleman; and there should be no buffoonery in the comic figures of Leporello, Masetto and his fairylike Zerlina, whom Elvira snatches from the wicked hero's toils.