Idomeneo

Idomeneo (1982)

Opera royalty Luciano Pavarotti brings dignity and power to the title role in this 1982 production. During a squall at sea, Idomeneo -- the king of Crete -- swears to Neptune that if the monarch survives, he'll sacrifice the first person he encounters onshore. Tragically, that person ends up being his son, Idamante (Frederica Von Stade). Maestro James Levine masterfully conducts the orchestra and chorus of the Metropolitan Opera. A musical production that was designed for the "Live From the Met" series, this program was produced by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle.

Date of release
1982-01-01
TMDB
8.0 / 10 (2)
Runtime
3h 5m
Genres
Music
Director
Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, Kirk Browning

Casting

Interesting facts

Idomeneo is a 181-minute television film of the Metropolitan Opera's first staging of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's 1781 opera Idomeneo, re di Creta ossia Ilia e Idamante, produced by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle and performed by a cast headed by John Alexander, Hildegard Behrens, Ileana Cotrubaș, Luciano Pavarotti and Frederica von Stade under the direction of James Levine. It was recorded live on 6 November 1982, and telecast live in the United States by the Public Broadcasting Service series Live from the Metropolitan Opera. It has been released on VHS video cassette, Laserdisc and DVD.

Background

In Greek legend, Idomeneus was the King of Crete, the son of Deucalion and the grandson of Minos and Pasiphaë. A suitor of Helen of Troy, he was a major figure in the war between the Greeks and the Trojans precipitated by Helen's departure from Greece with the Trojan Prince Paris. The Odyssey relates that after the Greeks' victory, he led his men through the perils of their journey home without losing a single one of them.

In 1780, while the 24-year-old Mozart was in the employment of Hieronymus von Colloredo, Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg, he received a commission from the court of Karl Theodor, Prince-elector and Duke of Bavaria, to write an opera to be performed in Munich during the carnival season of 1781. Historians think that it was the court rather than Mozart that chose the tale of Idomeneus as a topic.

Mozart's correspondence with his father records the evolution of his composition in detail. He effected several major revisions of his early ideas, some occasioned by the disappointing abilities of Anton Raaff and the castrato Vincenzo dal Prato ("Il nostro molto amato castrato Dal Prato", Mozart joked), the first Idomeneo and the first Idamante respectively.

With Mozart on the podium, Idomeneo was premiered in the court theatre of the Munich Residenz on 29 January 1781, and repeated on 3 February and 3 March. The work received only one further staging in Mozart's lifetime, a production in Vienna in 1786 for which Mozart revisited his score to accommodate Idamante's being cast as a tenor.

Modern productions of the opera have presented it in a variety of different versions. The Met's first staging in 1982 largely adhered to that conducted by Mozart in Munich 201 years earlier, but with four important exceptions. All were in act three. Elettra's aria "D'Oreste, d'Aiace" and Idomeneo's aria "Torna la pace", both cut by Mozart, were reinstated, and Idamante's aria "No, la morte" and a lengthy concluding ballet were omitted.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

Recommended