ABSTRACT
The Introduction presents the book’s goal. Rather than inquiring about Mozart’s theology, the book asks what theological messages a theologically educated Catholic prelate in late-eighteenth-century Prague might have perceived in La clemenza di Tito. The thesis is two-fold: first, that such a prelate might have heard the opera’s advocacy of enlightened absolutism as a celebration of a distinctly Catholic understanding of political governance; and second, that this prelate might have found in the opera a metaphor for the relationship between a gracious God and humanity caught up in sin, expressed as sexual concupiscence, pride, and lust for power. The remainder of the Introduction offers some historical background. First, it looks at how the enlightened writer Johann Pezzl described the state of religion in Joseph II’s Austria and the makeup of its clergy. Second, it introduces four Bohemian prelates who show what theological training an eighteenth-century Catholic prelate in Bohemia received and what kind of philosophical and theological outlook he might have shared. Third and finally, it looks at Mozart’s own religiosity as representative of the kind of religious outlook of bourgeois lay Catholics.
