Mozart's coronation opera; Haydn's Te Deum

THE last year of Mozart's life, 1791, began with the completion of a piano concerto, k595 in B flat, and concluded with the composition of the Requiem, unfinished at his death on 5 December. Many other works central to Mozart's legacy were composed during the year, including ‘Ave verum corpus’, Die Zauberflöte and the Clarinet Concerto. In contrast, a second opera from the same year, La clemenza di Tito, has always been rather marginalized, partly because as an opera seria, it seems at odds with the thrust of Mozart's operatic career – the three Da Ponte operas, Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni and Cosi fan tutte, and the German singspiel Zauberflöte – and partly because it is not easily absorbed into the biographical narrative of a thirty-five-year-old composer who was overworked and under-appreciated. It has enjoyed a degree of rehabilitation in recent decades and the circumstances of its commission have been clarified, yet the very traditional nature of those circumstances and, from that, their influence on the work itself have been undervalued. Nearly seventy years separate the composition of Fux's Costanza e Fortezza and Mozart's La clemenza di Tito, but they do have much in common, features that demonstrate the longevity of certain outlooks in the imperial court and explain why the work stands apart from the remainder of Mozart's mature operas.

The wider political circumstances were even more acute than they were in the 1720s. When Joseph II, Karl VI's grandson, died in February 1790 Austria was faced with unrest on three different fronts. Joseph's chronic insensitivity towards Hungary risked insurrection in the country; together with Russia, Austria was involved in an unpopular war against the Turks; and the western part of the Austrian Netherlands had overturned their Habsburg rulers to form the United States of Belgium. Joseph was succeeded by his brother, Leopold II, a much more conciliatory figure who, in matter of a few months, defused tension in Hungary, secured a ceasefire in the war against Turkey and regained the Austrian Netherlands.1 He recognized, too, the value of imperial tradition as an instrument of diplomacy. Joseph had never been formally installed as Holy Roman Emperor; neither had he been crowned King of Hungary or King of Bohemia.