ABSTRACT
This chapter first discusses the significance of Pietro Metastasio’s 1734 libretto. Through it, Metastasio aimed to offer a Catholic response to the ideology of power politics proposed by Niccolò Machiavelli’s 1513 book, Il Principe (The Prince), and the political ideas of Roman philosopher Tacitus. Metastasio’s advocacy of a balance between clemency and rigor reflects the Habsburgian conception of absolutist rule encapsulated in the term clementia Austriaca. Second, the chapter discusses the changes that Mozart and Mazzolà introduced to Metastasio’s libretto in their different political and philosophical context of the late Enlightenment and the dawning age of sensibility. In their hands, the opera advocates for the rule of law and a Beccarian understanding of clemency as general lenience in punishing, rather than the absolute ruler’s extraordinary use of pardons based in his liberum arbitrium, as in Metastasio’s libretto. The audience might have understood this altered understanding of political rule as reflecting the conception of God as “the good Lord” (der liebe Gott) in the bourgeois age.
