May 19, 2019: Friedrich Heinrich Kern, glass harmonica; Chelsea Knox, flute; Elaine Douvas, oboe; Jeremy Berry, viola; Estelle Choi, cello WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756-1791) Adagio and Rondo, K. 617 for glass harmonica, flute, oboe, viola, and cello May 19, 2019: Friedrich Heinrich Kern, glass harmonica; Chelsea Knox, flute; Elaine Douvas, oboe; Jeremy Berry, viola; Estelle Choi, cello On a visit to England in 1761, Benjamin Franklin was impressed by Edmund Delaval’s playing on musical glasses—the rubbing of moistened fingertips around the rims of glasses tuned by adding or subtracting water. He was inspired to improve on the instrument by affixing glass bowls of graduated sizes concentrically around a horizontal metal spindle and rotating the apparatus with a crank attached to a treadle. This keyboard-like arrangement made chords and scales easily playable. Franklin’s glass armonica (later dubbed “harmonica”) received later modifications, some unsuccessful—such as the use of a kind of violin bow or keyboard mechanism to activate the sound—but others were worthwhile, such as the extension of the instrument’s range by German maker Joseph Aloys Schmittbaur. Performances across Europe by Schmittbaur’s student Marianne Kirchgässner (1769–1808), blind from the age of four, brought the instrument to the peak of its popularity. Kirchgässner’s playing in Vienna in 1791 inspired Mozart to compose his Adagio for solo glass armonica and also the Adagio and Rondo, K. 617, for glass armonica, flute, oboe, viola, and cello, which he dated May 23. She gave the quintet’s first performance with Mozart himself—probably on the viola part—at Vienna’s Kärntnerthortheater on August 19, and performed both pieces many times thereafter. Despite the fact that she died from a chest infection, rumor had it that the cause of death was nerve deterioration caused by the instrument’s piercing vibrations. The overall volume of the glass armonica, however, is relatively soft, and a critique of a performance she gave in London complained that her part couldn’t be heard above the other instruments. Whether the volume of the glass armonica was at issue, or there was simply a desire for wider circulation, a version with piano came into use even in Mozart’s day. In the present performance, Friedrich Heinrich Kern plays the verrophone, a modern version of the glass harmonica using tuned glass tubes, invented in 1983 by Sascha Reckert. Thus it gives a contemporary presentation of the sound rather than a “period instrument” re-creation. Mr. Kern has made subtle modifications in Mozart’s score to accommodate the differences in playing technique between the two instruments. Because the verrophone can produce more volume than the glass harmonica, the instrument is perfectly suited for Mozart’s quintet—a captivating, rarely heard piece that turned out to be the last chamber work from the master’s pen. The Adagio’s dramatic C minor outer sections alternate powerful chords with delicate ruminating passages. The contrast of the solemn and the ethereal brings to mind Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute, which he was composing contemporaneously. His turn to the major mode brings a graceful middle section that features a lovely keyboard melody interspersed with comments by the quartet. Throughout both movements Mozart takes special care to alternate the keyboard with the other instruments, making the London critic’s complaint seem querulous. Mozart’s treatment of the deceptively simple main theme of the Rondo shows sophistication in its many decorative variants that keep the ear engaged. The form is also a masterful infusion of rondo and sonata form. Most striking are the intervening sections that use a descending chordal pattern—which also receives its share of variation—to launch some ravishing modulations. © Jane Vial Jaffe Return to Parlance Program Notes

BRYAN WAGORN, PIANO Canadian pianist Bryan Wagorn serves as Assistant Conductor at The Metropolitan Opera and regularly performs throughout North America, Europe, and Asia as chamber musician and recital accompanist to the world’s leading singers and instrumentalists. Recent engagements include the Met Chamber Ensemble at Carnegie Hall, and recitals with Angel Blue, Anthony Roth Costanzo, Lise Davidsen, and Nadine Sierra. Mr. Wagorn has appeared at festivals including Tanglewood, Marlboro, Ravinia and Glyndebourne, and served on the faculty of the National Arts Centre of Canada’s Orchestra’s Summer Music Institute, and Carnegie Hall’s National Youth Orchestra. He has been a guest coach at the Royal Academy of Music in London, the Metropolitan Opera’s Lindemann Young Artist Program and at the Glyndebourne Festival’s Jerwood Young Artist Program, and serves on the faculty of Mannes College and Manhattan School of Music.

January 18, 2026: Benjamin Beilman, violin; Jonathan Swenson, cello; Orion Weiss, piano JULES MASSENET (1842-1912) Méditation from Thaïs for violin and piano January 18, 2026: Benjamin Beilman, violin; Jonathan Swenson, cello; Orion Weiss, piano Massenet composed his masterful opera Thaïs for the young California soprano Sibyl Sanderson, for whom he adapted or composed many of his other famous roles. The libretto by Louis Gallet is based on Anatole France’s poem-turned-novel that took the world by storm when published in serial form in 1889. He in turn had taken inspiration from a tenth-century Latin play by German nun Hrostvitha about an Egyptian courtesan-turned-saint, who reportedly lived in the fourth century, and Paphnutius, a monk who made it his mission to convert her. The opera opened at the Paris Opéra on March 16, 1894, rather than the Opéra Comique, owing to a dispute between Sanderson and impresario Léon Carvalho. Though only a marginal success until a 1903 production in Italy, posterity has ranked Thaïs on an artistic par with Massenet’s Manon and Werther . Scored for solo violin and orchestra, the poetic Méditation is heard at the outset of Act II, Scene 2, to portray Thaïs’s conversion from harlot to religious disciple. Massenet ingeniously derives this music from Athanaël’s erotic visions and part of his hymn (Athanaël is the monk’s name in the opera) and later reuses the music to great effect in the oasis and death scenes. A plethora of transcriptions of the Méditation exist for violin and piano as well as for almost every instrument imaginable, including four accordions. Massenet himself made an arrangement for voice and keyboard in 1894 as an “Ave Maria,” which even at the time was introduced into marriage services. The exquisite melody still manages to transcend no matter the medium. —©Jane Vial Jaffe Return to Parlance Program Notes

November 12, 2023: Angel Blue, soprano; Bryan Wagorn, piano CLAUDE DEBUSSY (1862-1918) Clair de lune November 12, 2023: Angel Blue, soprano; Bryan Wagorn, piano Debussy was enchanted by the poetry of Paul Verlaine. Around 1890 he composed Suite bergamasque, a set of piano pieces taking its title from a line of Verlaine’s famous poem Clair de lune. That poem had appeared in a collection of poems entitled Fêtes galantes, which in turn were inspired by the paintings of Watteau and his followers. In these paintings idealized landscapes of parks and gardens in the twilight are often populated by revelers in costumes of the tragic-comic characters of the commedia dell-arte—Harlequin, Pierrot, Colombine, and company. Originally Debussy had called the present piece “Promenade sentimentale” after another Verlaine poem, but when he polished the Suite bergamasque for publication in 1905 he changed the title to Clair de lune (Moonlight). Since that time the piece has taken on a life of its own, having become extraordinarily popular and, sad to say, trivialized. Its luminous qualities and inspired construction, however, should inspire listeners to look beyond its familiarity. That amazing opening—how it just hangs there then gently descends as silvery light from the moon! The rhythmic freedom gives the feeling of floating as does the delay of the anchoring pitch of the home key. Debussy, like his contemporary Ravel, was justly famous for his water imagery. The rippling central section no doubt responds to the line in Verlaine’s poem describing the moonlight bringing sobs of ecstasy to the fountains. The ending is magical—Debussy fragments the theme as moonlight would be broken up by shadows and allows it to die away in a haunting final cadence. —©Jane Vial Jaffe Return to Parlance Program Notes

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December 5, 2021: Paul Jacobs, organ JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH (1685-1750) Trio Sonata in E Minor, BWV 528 December 5, 2021: Paul Jacobs, organ In Leipzig, where Bach served as Kantor of the Thomasschule, teaching was a huge part of his life, and his own sons were some of his very best pupils. Sometime between 1727 and 1730 he composed a set of organ sonatas, BWV 525–530, as a teaching tool for his son Wilhelm Friedemann, who became one of the finest organists of his day. What set these sonatas apart from Bach’s other organ works was their configuration as trio sonatas, in which he assigned one instrumental part to the right hand on one of the organ’s manuals, one to the left on another manual, and the bass part to the feet on the pedals. This configuration led to a lightness and clarity of texture not present in many of his other organ works. He may have also had in mind the forward-looking tastes of Wilhelm Friedemann when he occasionally slipped into a galant, more modern style, such as in the triplet motion of the E minor Sonata’s last movement. In general structure, these six sonatas rely more on concerto form in three movements (fast, slow, fast) than on four-movement sonata models. Because the three individual lines function as in a trio sonata—and because in typical fashion Bach borrowed some of the movements from earlier works and refashioned some into later pieces—the urge for arrangers to transcribe them for myriad combinations of two of more instruments has proved irresistible. In the case of the present Sonata in E minor, Bach borrowed the first movement from the Sinfonia that opens the second half of Cantata 76: “Die Himmel erzählen die Ehre Gottes” (1723), which was scored for oboe d’amore (mezzo-soprano oboe with a bulb bell), viola da gamba (viol held between the legs), and continuo (bass line to be realized by a keyboard player). Thus it makes perfect sense for the entire organ sonata to have been arranged for this combination of instruments, as in the present performance. The first movement of the E minor Sonata movement is unusual and striking in that it begins with a brief Adagio introduction that leads without pause into a high-spirited Vivace. The extremely concise ritornello form of the Vivace is also extraordinary, consisting of a ritornello (recurring section) that appears three times, whose imitative subject is immediately followed by a brief imitative answer, but the last of these answers turns into an episode full of derived figures that lasts the remaining third of the movement before being capped by a cadential phrase. The movement is also unusual for its focus on the viola da gamba line to begin the Vivace, and also for the sheer buoyancy of all three lines, the bass line of which is more elaborate here than in the Cantata. The lovely middle movement exists in an early form in D minor, known from three sources, but since those copies were made after 1750 from a now lost source it is difficult to determine the instrumentation or key of the original. (Pieter Dirksen in his “reconstruction” for oboe d’amore, viola da gamba, and continuo suggests that the lost source may have dated from as early as ca.1714 when Bach was in Weimar.) Sources aside, the beautiful main theme is remarkable for its constant emphasis on two-bar phrase lengths, which Bach maintains even in the sequencing material that follows. These two types of music alternate, A-B-A-B, before Bach brings back the opening in stretto (closer together entries) and adds a final cadence. Bach configures the lively third movement as a rondo fugue, its subject alternating with sequential episodes. The irrepressible triplet figure, introduced only briefly in the subject’s third bar, soon becomes the merry propulsive force of the entire perpetual motion movement. © Jane Vial Jaffe Return to Parlance Program Notes

May 8, 2022: Arnaud Sussmann, violin; Anna Polonsky, piano; Paul Neubauer, viola; Fred Sherry, cello; Michael Parloff, lecturer WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756-1791) Piano Quartet in G minor, K. 478 May 8, 2022: Arnaud Sussmann, violin; Anna Polonsky, piano; Paul Neubauer, viola; Fred Sherry, cello; Michael Parloff, lecturer According to Georg Nicolaus von Nissen (who married Constanze after Mozart’s death and wrote a biography of the composer), Mozart was contracted in 1785 by the publisher-composer Franz Anton Hoffmeister to write a series of three piano quartets. Mozart began the G minor Quartet in July that year—this is the date he entered in his own catalog for the work—and completed it on October 16, as indicated on the autograph manuscript. With this Quartet he had introduced a new genre to Vienna by adding the viola to the already prevalent piano trio combination. Hoffmeister complained that the Quartet was too difficult and that the public would not buy it. Reportedly he told Mozart, “Write more popularly, or else I can neither print nor pay for anything of yours!” Mozart released Hoffmeister from the contract saying, “Then I will write nothing more, and go hungry, or may the devil take me!” Hoffmeister allowed Mozart to keep the money he had already been paid. Mozart had already written the companion Quartet in E-flat major, K. 493, but never began the third. Hoffmeister did in fact issue the G minor Quartet in 1785, but lost money because of poor sales. He began engraving the first violin part of K. 493, but sold the plates to Artaria, who published the work in 1787. It is not surprising that Mozart’s piano quartets would have seemed unattractive to the Viennese public. Amateurs who were used to sightreading piano chamber music at salon gatherings found them too challenging. Even when the quartets had been rehearsed, the audience found them hard to appreciate because of the noisy surroundings and the poor performances at these social gatherings. An anonymous critic in 1788, after complaining bitterly about mangled, dilettantish performances, presumably of K. 493, wrote: What a difference when this much-advertised work of art is performed with the highest degree of accuracy by four skilled musicians who have studied it carefully, in a quiet room where the sound of every note cannot escape the listening ear, and in the presence of only two or three attentive persons! Like its E-flat major successor, the G minor Quartet is laid out in three movements: a large sonata-form first movement, a melodious slow movement—in this case in sonatina form (sonata form minus the development), and an exuberant rondo finale. Striking features of the G minor Quartet’s first movement include the earnest unison opening by all four players and the unusual dynamic emphasis of the second theme, grouping the subject into units of five beats. The graceful second movement, in the relative major, allows the seriousness of the first movement to abate. The piano presents the songlike first theme and the strings the second theme. Streams of thirty-second note figuration extend both themes. Mozart makes subtle alterations in the “recapitulation”—the cello in particular receives more attention. The finale turns the mood to one of out-and-out cheerfulness. Mozart clearly had a fondness for the D major theme of one of the episodes, which Alfred Einstein called “a moment of perfect bliss.” Instead of overexposing it in this movement, in which it never recurs, he reused it in the Rondo for piano, K. 485. Mozart sets the listener up for the conclusion only to divert the course by a crashing deceptive cadence, after which he winds up again for the true finish. © Jane Vial Jaffe Return to Parlance Program Notes

October 27, 2019: Quartetto di Cremona OTTORINO RESPIGHI (1879-1936) String Quartet in D major October 27, 2019: Quartetto di Cremona Respighi received his earliest musical training on the violin. At age twelve he enrolled at the Liceo Musicale in Bologna, where he studied violin with Federico Sarti, eminent teacher of a whole string of violin prodigies. Judging by contemporary reports of his playing, Respighi could have made a career solely as a violinist had not his interests turned toward composition and, partly as a composition tool, toward the piano. While in Russia in 1900 he played principal viola in the Imperial Opera orchestra, continuing to study violin between rehearsals and performances. While in St. Petersburg he also met and studied with Rimsky-Korsakov, who had a profound influence on his development as a composer. Even after Respighi’s return to Bologna in 1902, when his compositions began receiving wider recognition, he continued to perform as a violinist and violist. In 1903 he also became the violist of the Mugellini Piano Quintet, with which he performed until 1908. Thus, though Respighi is known principally for his large orchestral pieces that celebrate the glories of Rome, it makes complete sense that he also wrote smaller scale chamber music all his life. Most of his chamber works, however, date from his early period, 1895 to 1910, and many of the early works remain unpublished. Respighi composed the D major Quartet, actually his third quartet, in 1904 (not 1907 as often stated), and it was first performed in 1906 in Bologna, but it remained unpublished until 1921. The first movement’s lush, Romantic, harmonically ranging first theme immediately proclaims Respighi’s confidence. Some consider it a precursor to his Trevi Fountain music in The Fountains of Rome. The more playful second theme provides contrast with its leaps and silences. Both themes frequently incorporate triplet motion. The movement ends in ethereal high harmonics over a poignant rising cello solo, followed by a more earthbound closing gesture. The highly chromatic slow movement unfolds as a moody theme and variations. Seamlessly, the first admits faster note values, the second becomes almost eerie in its winding chromaticism, and the third features an active cello melody with persistent “chatter” in the other parts. There follows a slow waltz over a drone, a slow smooth contrapuntal variation led off by the cello, a sprightly dancelike variation, and a sorrowful final variation whose lush lines for the three upper instruments are intensified by insistent drone-like repeated notes in the cello. A tender introductory gesture launches Respighi’s lightly scampering scherzo, which he calls Intermezzo. After an impassioned central section, he repeats the scherzo literally and appends a sweetly pensive coda. The finale takes off like a galloping tarantella over persistent, fast repeated-note chords. The second theme provides lovely lyrical contrast. After recapping his themes, Respighi inserts a shimmering passage of harmonics and builds over another drone to polish off his tarantella grandly in the major mode. © Jane Vial Jaffe Return to Parlance Program Notes

October 29, 2017: Peter Serkin, piano WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756-1791) Adagio in B minor, K. 540 October 29, 2017: Peter Serkin, piano According to his own catalog, Mozart completed the Adagio, K. 540, on March 19, 1788. Two weeks earlier he had completed the last of his arias for sister-in-law Aloysia Weber, “Ah se in ciel,” K. 538, and the previous month the Piano Concerto in D major, K. 537, “Coronation,” but he was chiefly occupied by thoughts of the impending Vienna premiere of his opera Don Giovanni on May 7 that year. No specific event appears to have prompted the composition of this exquisite, solitary slow movement for piano, though its ending in B major has invited speculation that he may have intended it for a sonata in E minor. Distinguished English musicologist Arthur Hutchings deemed the Adagio Mozart’s finest single piano work and eminent Mozart scholar Alfred Einstein considered it “one of the most perfect, most deeply felt, and most despairing of all his works.” Had it found a place in a complete sonata it would no doubt have received the larger number of performances it merits. The Adagio displays the elegant simplicity that imparts poignance to so many of Mozart’s slow movements. Here sudden changes of dynamics and register supply drama. The movement follows sonata-form of the binary type, in which the second half containing the development and recapitulation is proportionally equal to the exposition. Mozart adds florid elaboration to the short coda, which ends serenely in B major. © Jane Vial Jaffe Return to Parlance Program Notes

May 12, 2024: Chee-Yun, violin; Brad Gemeinhardt, horn; Alessio Bax, piano Johannes Brahms Trio in E-flat, Op. 40 for violin, horn, and piano May 12, 2024: Chee-Yun, violin; Brad Gemeinhardt, horn; Alessio Bax, piano Johannes Brahms always loved the sound of the horn. Among many other instruments, his father, Johann Jakob, played horn professionally, in dance halls and taverns, and even substituted on horn in the sextet that played at the fashionable Alster Pavilion. Though he finally gave in to his young son’s pleas to learn piano, Johann Jakob had already begun teaching him “useful” instruments, in particular the Waldhorn—the natural, valveless horn, or “hand horn,” referring to the method of obtaining certain pitches by the positioning the right hand inside the bell. Valved horns rapidly became standard during Brahms’s lifetime, and the natural horn had fallen out of common use by the time he wrote his Horn Trio in May 1865 while sojourning in Baden-Baden. But he specifically wrote the piece for natural horn out of fondness for its sound, characterized by the muted quality of certain notes. Brahms may also have been thinking of his early home life—a theory that early biographer Max Kalbeck suggested—in particular since his mother had recently died. But, whereas the poignant slow movement could indeed serve as a memorial tribute, the complete rousting of that mood by the spirited, irreverent music of the finale suggests that the work as a whole is not entirely an homage to her. The two quotation sources that Kalback suggested to back his theory—the folk song “Dort in den Weide steht ein Haus,” which Brahms may have learned from his mother, and the chorale “Wer nur den lieben Gott lässt walten”—are certainly appropriate but do not comfortably correspond to the main theme of the finale and its preview near the end of the slow movement. Scholar John Walter Hill proposes a different folk-song source, which Brahms likely knew and which fits the finale’s main theme like a glove: “Es soll sich ja keiner mit der Liebe abgeben” (No one should have anything to do with love). This would shift Brahms’s thoughts, says Hill, to the end of his romantic involvement with Agathe von Siebold in the late 1850s. Brahms had broken off their relationship when it seemed they were headed for marriage, much to Agathe’s heartbreak, but he paid her tribute in his G major Sextet, op. 36, written around the same time as the Horn Trio. Either as a salve to his conscience, or as a farewell, Brahms had woven notes equivalent to the letters of her name into the Sextet’s first movement, composed in September 1864. He completed the Sextet in May 1865, so it is entirely likely that she was still on his mind as he wrote his Horn Trio in the same month. As Hill suggests, the comical jab at love by a confirmed bachelor makes a great deal of sense in light of the newly revealed folk-song source. No matter what extra-musical thoughts may have come to Brahms in 1865, the Horn Trio stands as an inspired piece of chamber music for the unusual combination of violin, horn and piano. Brahms played the piano part in a trial performance in September in Baden-Baden, and the first public performance took place in Zürich on November 28, 1865, with violinist Friedrich Hegar, horn player Anton Gläss, and Brahms himself at the piano. One of the Horn Trio’s greatest surprises, in view of Brahms’s supreme interest in sonata form, is that the first movement is the only example of a first movement in his multimovement works that is not in sonata form. Rather it contrasts a lovely melancholy main theme with two somewhat livelier sections, resulting in an A-B-A-B-A rondo-like pattern. The rollicking scherzo provides a perfect change of scene, racing along as if on the hunt but without characteristic horn fanfares. The soaring second theme and the lovely pathos of the trio section’s theme provide elegant contrast. The slow movement, one of Brahms’s most melancholy and moving utterances with its expansive melody, grave chords, and soulful bass notes, gives a taste of his much later Four Serious Songs. The canonic treatment of a new theme begun by the horn alone particularly shows Brahms in a nostalgic light and leads to one of his most glorious climaxes. The preview of the finale’s theme occurs just before that peak, nicely scored with the horn above the violin. The finale takes off at full gallop, perhaps the banishment of his last thoughts of Agathe, but surely reveling in the historical connection of the horn with the hunt. Here Brahms achieves an ebullient, rondo-like character but in a full-fledged sonata form. He delights in rhythmic play, bits of yearning, the occasional starry twinkle or growling bass, horn calls that are not typical fanfares in horn fifths, and—most exhilarating—a breathless drive to the close. —©Jane Vial Jaffe Return to Parlance Program Notes

EMMANUEL CEYSSON, HARP With his powerful, virtuoso playing, Emmanuel Ceysson, the “enfant terrible” of the harp, sweeps away all the clichés associated with his instrument. His infectious enthusiasm and boundless energy reveals the harp in all its sparkling splendor, in a world where poetry vies with temperament. Since 2005, he has been a presence in such leading venues on the international musical scene as the Wigmore Hall, the Salle Gaveau, Carnegie’s Zankel Hall, the Vienna Konzerthaus, and the Berlin Philharmonie, where his appearances in recital, concerto repertoire, and chamber music regularly win high praise from the press. His early career was recognized through Prizes by the Académie des Beaux-Arts and appearances in Classical Music Awards “Victoires de la Musique.” Before playing at the Met, Emmanuel was Principal Harp of the Opéra National de Paris for 9 years, where his solo passages were frequently singled out for mention by the opera critics. His unfailing commitment to his instrument has earned him the highest international distinctions. In rapid succession, he won the Gold Medal and a special performance prize at the USA International Harp Competition (Bloomington) in 2004, First Prize and six special prizes at the New York Young Concert Artist Auditions in 2006, and First Prize at the prestigious ARD Competition in Munich in September 2009, thus becoming the first harpist to obtain awards at three major international events. He was Visiting Professor at the Royal Academy of Music in London from 2005 to 2009, as well as Professor at the Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris “Alfred Cortot” from 2014-2015, and has taught at the International Summer Academy in Nice since 2010; he also gives regular masterclasses in the course of his foreign tours. Recordings with Naxos, Naïve, Clavès, MDG, and others include solo, concerto, and chamber repertoire, and have won the enthusiasm of the specialized press. Naïve “Belle-Epoque,” a French concerto CD, was just released, and Mozart double concerto with Philippe Bernold is to come this fall, under the Aparté label.

May 19, 2019: Wendy Bryn Harmer, soprano; Inn-Hyuck Cho, basset horn; Ken Noda, piano WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756-1791) Non più di fiori from La Clemenza di Tito, K. 621 May 19, 2019: Wendy Bryn Harmer, soprano; Inn-Hyuck Cho, basset horn; Ken Noda, piano In July 1791 Mozart received a “last-minute” commission to compose an opera to celebrate Leopold II’s coronation as King of Bohemia. He had to work quickly in order to complete La clemenza di Tito (The clemency of Titus) by September 6, when it would open at the National Theatre in Prague. Having begun the work in Vienna in late July, Mozart arrived in Prague on August 28 and completed the opera only the day before it opened. After modest successes, La clemenza di Tito experienced a triumphant closing night, which was reported to Mozart back in Vienna on September 30, the day of the premiere of Die Zauberflöte. Since most of Die Zauberflöte had been written before Mozart left for Prague, La clemenza is often considered his final opera. He died just nine weeks after the premiere of Die Zauberflöte, and critics attached a sort of stigma to La clemenza, possibly because some of the simple recitatives had to be subcontracted owing to time restraints. The fact remains, however, that Mozart admirably fulfilled the demands of eighteenth-century opera seria (serious opera) for dramatic, noble, and virtuosic writing. More than forty composers had previously set Pietro Metastasio’s libretto for La clemenza di Tito, beginning with Caldara in 1734. For Mozart’s purposes the libretto was adapted by Caterino Mazzolà—“reduced to a proper opera” as Mozart put it—by shortening it by one-third and manipulating almost all of Metastasio’s texts so that there would be ensembles and finales in addition to solo arias. The plot, typical of eighteenth-century opera seria, concerns Titus (Tito), Roman emperor, whose plans to marry someone else inflame Vitellia, daughter of the deposed emperor, with jealousy. She involves Sextus (Sesto), who is in love with her, in a plot to kill Tito that goes awry. Sesto is condemned to death, and Vitellia, unable to bear the guilt, confesses her part in the scheme. Tito, however, has granted Sesto clemency and now does the same for Vitellia. Mozart and Mazzolà reduced the number of Metastasio’s arias to eleven, which include Sesto’s great virtuosic aria with elaborate clarinet obbligato, “Parto, parto” (I go, I go), and Vitellia’s equally renowned showpiece with basset horn obbligato, “Non più di fioro” (No more flowers). Mozart’s friend Anton Stadler came from Vienna especially to play these important solos. Just before the final two scenes, Vitellia resolves to confess all, knowing not only that she’ll lose Tito and the throne but could also be put to death. Her alternately agitated and sorrowful accompanied recitative: “Ecco il punto, o Vitelia” (Now is the moment, O Vitellia) leads into her powerfully restrained “Non più di fiori.” Famous for its tessitura that is lower than much of the role, the aria unfolds in rondo form, painting a deceptively serene picture—except for a few dazzling outbursts—of a woman who is nevertheless experiencing intense emotions prior to possible death. © Jane Vial Jaffe Return to Parlance Program Notes