For a time, my favorite Mozart opera was La clemenza di Tito. It’s a left-field answer when the trio of works he wrote with Da Ponte are right there, but I was living in Rome at the time, a new recording featuring Magdalena Kožená had just been released, and I came from the generation of women turned queer thanks to the Salzburg production of the work starring Vesselina Kasarova in the cuntiest of white button-down shirts.
There was something about riding the bus from Piazza Venezia back to my apartment in Monteverde — not too far off from Via Vitellia — and passing the remains of Titus’s era while listening to Mozart’s version of events that gives you the effect of a multisensory palimpsest. The incongruities between Mozart’s Classical era of music and the ruins of the Roman empire feel reconciled.
So I was happy to revisit Clemenza earlier this summer with a program essay for the Edinburgh International Festival, which asked me to focus specifically on how truth manifests in the opera, and how that truth is shaped by power and self-interest. I also wound up being a bit bewildered by the experience; what did 20-year-old me, running around in 2006, know about power and self-interest? In some cases, a fair bit: The first election that I had true political consciousness around was Bush v. Gore. The first one I voted in was Bush v. Kerry. In between, as an Arab-American, I watched the Patriot Act flourish and the United States invade a foreign nation that had no connection to the attacks of September 11.
I then moved to an Italy where Berlusconi was moving out of power, only to come back in full Bunga Bunga force a few years later and eventually give way to an era of newfound fascism. But oh, that hope when Romano Prodi won the 2006 election and sanity seemed like it may make a comeback!
Still, at the time, Clemenza to me was all breathless sapphic desire and a void of a tenor role. I didn’t care about Titus’s search for the truth. I cared about the curves of “Come ti piace, imponi,” the way that Sesto pleaded for Vitellia to command him, the combination of rancor and longing in his line “You are my destiny; everything I do is for you.”
As I noted in my Edinburgh program note, the original source for Clemenza, Metastasio’s libretto of the same name, had been adapted into several dozen operas before it reached Mozart. Werner Wunderlich described it as an “opera of royal homage” originally written to celebrate the name day of Emperor Charles VI of Austria; grandfather to Joseph II and Marie Antoinette, known in Italy as “the successor of the Roman emperors.”
Real power, it turns out, is far less sexy, and much more boot-licky. “Believe not, Sire, that I wish to portray you in Titus,” Metastasio told his employer. “But I see that everyone recognizes you in him.… And, well, o Sire, all virtue combined in you most beautifully, how could one portray someone that would not resemble you?” Historian Suetonius, whose account of the Caesars was Metastasio’s basis for his Clemenza, called him “the delight and darling of the human race.”
In 2025, it’s pretty funny to consider the plot of Clemenza, in which the first act ends with an attempted insurrection and coup d’état and the second act begins with uncertainty as to whether or not Titus is alive. The state of affairs in America is such these days that “when it happens” is a euphemism that requires no elucidation. This past weekend in particular was dominated by a conspicuous lack of Mar-a-Lago Mussolini online or in public (h/t Molly Crabapple) and an equal-opposite series of reactions.
The irony, as I also note in my essay for Edinburgh, is that Titus, as presented by Metastasio, Mozart, and Suetonius, is no better than the politicians that have followed in his wake. As merciful as he is in this story, his early military achievements were the byproduct of nepotism, with a dash of war crimes as he ruthlessly and systematically razed Jerusalem to the ground, allegedly plundering so much that the gold standard in Syria dropped by half as a result.1 His rule from the throne was more diplomatic, though this could be related to the fact that he died after only two years in power and spent much of those two years seeing to the recovery efforts in Pompeii and a plague in Rome.
With that in mind, how are we supposed to take Publio at face-value when he suggests that Titus is one “who has never been treacherous” and is therefore “slow to discover betrayal”? Moreover, who is this clemency actually for? This line matches the “sure, Jan” energy of the la Rochefoucauld maxim: “The clemency of princes is often but policy to win the affections of the people.” (RIP François de la Rochefoucauld you would have loved the January 6 trials.)
Metastasio and Mozart both keep the people out of the world of Clemenza. It exists within the vacuum of power, skewing the image. This was the starting point for Milo Rau’s extraordinary production of the work for the Grand Théâtre de Genève a few years ago.
“Artists tend to dramatize and aestheticize violent reality in their work, so that the authenticity of that reality is weakened and kept at bay,” Rau wrote of his concept when the production traveled to the Opera Ballet Vlaanderen. “In La clemenza di Tito the same thing happens: the opera tells the story of power games among the elite that can lead to coups d'état, while the citizens of Rome suffer under the violence and their city burns.”
We’re living in our own waking version of this opera as Rau sees it; one where the remove between artifice and reality seems to be widening with each act. Sesto is our stand-in, caught between both the masculine and feminine, between his conflicting love for Vitellia and Titus, between two competing versions of the truth.
But Sesto is a cautionary tale. Not because of the coup (I, for one, am willing to hear Vitellia’s platform), but because he would rather reconcile these competing and contradictory realities in a way where everyone loses rather than take an actual side. What seems on the surface as admirable loyalty is really shallow passivity — witness Vitellia winning him to her insurrectionary side by saying: “If you want to please me, abandon your suspicions and galling doubt. He who trusts blindly rouses trust in others.”
In response to my last post about Lawrence Brownlee’s performance in Moscow — which has now been fully cancelled — I’ve heard from several people that art does still have the power to elevate; to serve as moral action or reassessment. I do still agree with that, and I think art still has value even if it doesn’t reach that far. But I’m struck by how often we hear that art “can lift us above the divisive rhetoric of present-day politics” only as a defense when an artist takes a job that is linked to the oppressor rather than the oppressed; that’s more in service of power than people. “Theatre is a temple of its own,” wrote Ildar Abdrazakov (whom I once, full disclosure, worked for) on his Instagram last year after his performances in Naples were cancelled over his support for Putin. “New times have come…when politicians enter the temple of art and music and set the best cast.”
What Abdrazakov failed to mention in that post was that, just a few weeks before, he had been appointed to Russia’s Presidential Council for Culture and Arts. A few weeks after the post, it was announced that he would take over the Sevastopol State Opera and Ballet Theater in occupied Crimea.
The call is coming from inside the temple. But we, the people, are more active participants in this drama than Metastasio would have us believe. We are historical memory. We have our own clemency to offer — and withhold. “Soon all the world will know of my actions,” Vitellia frets as the insurrection she manifested through Sesto falls apart. “Where will I hide?”
It’s also worth pointing out here that Titus spent a lot of effort issuing coins that commemorated his successes as a statesman.
“I’m struck by how often we hear that art ‘can lift us above the divisive rhetoric of present-day politics’ only as a defense when an artist takes a job that is linked to the oppressor rather than the oppressed; that’s more in service of power than people.”
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Great essay. I'll have to dig deeper into "La Clemenza di Tito"