ABSTRACT
Since the late nineteenth century, many commentators have dismissed Mozart’s last opera seria. Twentieth-century theater critic Ivan Nagel suggested that there is an evolution among Mozart’s operas away from baroque opera seria, with its absolutist notion of grace, toward a renewed concept of opera buffa centered around the notion of human autonomy. In hailing human freedom over divine sovereignty, Mozart purportedly rang the death knell for serious opera and replaced theological concepts with secular substitutes. In this context, La clemenza di Tito appears as an anachronistic return to a world left behind. This chapter takes up the opera’s critical reception history, which seems to delegitimize any theological reading. It situates the work in two historical contexts: the coronation festivities in Prague and the contemporary renewal of opera seria. The opera’s enthusiastic reception among bourgeois audiences suggests that its message resonated in the dawning age of sensibility. The chapter shows that Mozart did not in fact intend to leave opera seria behind. It offers some historical background for the Roman Emperor Titus and discusses how he could become the symbolic representation for the Catholic conception of clemency.
