Lucio Silla was Mozart's second serious opera, and the last major work he wrote for Italy. It was by all accounts a success, with a run of 26 performances beginning at the end of 1772; but Mozart was never again invited to Italy, and as far as we know the opera was never revived. Possibly it was rather elaborately scored for Italian taste, and almost certainly it was too long: the individual arias are substantial, and the piece as a whole lasted six hours (including the ballets, not by Mozart) at the first performance. Its central weakness resides in the feeble structure and motivation of Giovanni de Gamerra's libretto. The tyrannous Roman emperor Lucius Sulla wants to marry Junia, whose father he has displaced and whose lover Cecilius he has proscribed: Cecilius and his friend Cinna, betrothed to the emperor's sister Celia, want to kill Sulla, but Cecilius is caught and Cinna confesses: whereupon Sulla, as if to outdo Titus, conquers his unruly passions and changes his mind, resigning and letting everyone marry whom they please. There is no scope for internal conflict, no dramatic action, no moral dilemma, no development of character.
But there are plenty of opportunities—and in this respect Gamerra did not fail—for the characters to express themselves in heightened emotional states: tenderness or despair, rage or joy, trepidation or resolution. Junia's part is particularly rich, with its four mutually complementary arias showing her in a wide range of moods; Cecilius is seen amorous, heroic, nobly portentous and pathetic. No doubt Mozart would have served Sulla just as well had he not been constrained by a late change of cast, so that the part had to be written for an inexperienced church singer, thought capable of singing only two arias; and that disturbed the balance between his role and the secondo ones, which ended up with three arias (Cinna) and four (Celia), although the roles lack the scope to justify so many (and this inevitably leads to some want of variety in their music). Apart from the arias there are a couple of ensembles, a love duet when Junia first meets Cecilius (whom she had thought to be dead) and a terzet for the two of them with Silla, where their love and defiance is effectively pitted against his anger. And there is a fine scene near the end of Act 1 where Junia visits her father's grave with a group of his supporters and sings a solemn, elegiac invocation to him with the chorus. Also, there are a number of admirably powerful accompanied recitatives. It would be wrong to suggest that Lucio Silla foreshadows much in the later Mozart; here and there one is put in mind of Idomeneo or especially La clemenza di Tito, but essentially this is simply a work full of finely composed music, showing from time to time the strong emotional commitment that was to characterize his mature operas.
The opera has been recorded before; the Leopold Hager version with Salzburg forces (originally on BASF, 1/76, later on DG, 9/80—both nla) is, I understand, to be reissued in the Philips Complete Mozart Edition. The present recording is very much more dramatic in its approach, and of course it uses period instruments. I do not, however, think it is very close to what you might have heard in the Regio Ducal Teatro in Milan in December 1772. For a start, there are several cuts. The recording was made during two performances before an audience (an uncommonly quiet one) in the Konzerthaus, Vienna, in June 1989; cutting may have been necessary there, but for a recording it is sad, to say the least, to have to do without four arias. Those for Afidius (Sulla's friend, a tribune), a role omitted here, and Celia are perhaps dispensable, but the loss of Cecilius's only slow number, his great contemplative Adagio aria in Act 2—to which, incidentally, Mozart's sister later added ornamentation—and Junia's climactic aria of agitation, a little later, seem to me to do serious damage to the work's dramatic structure and character balance. And indeed Stefan Kunze's excellent note on the opera refers to the significance of both, mentioning Junia's as ''important''. Much of the simple recitative is cut, which is understandable as it is very lengthy, and the more so as it is delivered very slowly and deliberately here for the most part.
As to the performance, I have to say that I find Nikolaus Harnoncourt's whole approach very alien and certainly it is remote from any true Mozartian period style. The gruff string tone, the ruthless-sounding accents, the huge dynamic contrasts, the explosive effect of the loud and sharp wind chords, the choppy articulation, the handling of rubato: there is no reason to imagine that there is anything authentic about any of these. The result is often arresting and original, but it has little to do with Mozart. I am surprised too at the paucity of appoggiaturas and especially the inconsistency in their use (often when a phrase comes twice an appoggiatura is inserted one time but not the other); clearly there has been no kind of direction here. Appoggiaturas are not a matter of personal whim but of the application of a recognized convention.
The singing itself, however, is almost uniformly excellent. The Sulla, Peter Schreier, is the same as on the Hager set, with good, straight singing in his Act 1 aria and plenty of fire in the Act 2 piece in which he asserts his authority. Edita Gruberova as Junia keeps her very best for the last aria, ''Fra pensier'', a big two-tempo piece to which she brings considerable intensity. There is a big display aria in Act 2, of which Mozart's father wrote ''Wolfgang has introduced passages that are unusual, quite unique and extremely difficult''; the original singer, he adds, sings them ''amazingly well''—and Gruberova gets around them amazingly well, too, though once or twice the difficulty is evident. The quick music in her Act 1 aria is done with great spirit. I enjoyed the singing of Cecilia Bartoli in the primo uomo role of Cecilius, which demands a very wide compass with a resonant lower register. The tone is firm and well formed, just right for a male role, and the expressive singing is clear and telling. She tends to separate the semiquavers in her passagework rather more than taste here in Britain generally prefers. The brilliant D major aria in Act 2 is done with ample vigour and the moving farewell minuet—sung as he believes he is going to his death—is done very expressively, though I cannot help feeling that Harnoncourt's very slow tempo (this must be the slowest Tempo di Minuetto ever) represents a misconstruction of its nature.
The two singers in the secondo roles give uniform pleasure: Yvonne Kenny makes a fine, indeed sometimes passionate Cinna, singing her big arias of resolution in fiery fashion and executing her passage work with such command that she infuses it with expressive force; and the actual sound is lovely too, clean, firm and warm. Celia's role was evidently written for a soprano who specialized in light, high staccato singing, and Dawn Upshaw carries this off with skill and charm, bringing this gentle character to life even though some of her music is slightly routine. Probably this team of soloists is just about as good as anyone could get together today, though if it excels that on Hager's set (which includes Auger, Varady, Mathis and Donath) it can be by no more than the proverbial whisker. That this performance has more vitality, and more ideas behind it—right or wrong—than Hager's is not really in question; but I think I should more often play the old recording for the sake of its relative completeness and its avoidance of the brusque, violent manner that these days seems to mark so many of Harnoncourt's readings.'