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Rating:
Mozart was only 11 years old when he composed this work. It is a masterpiece that flows like oil. Vivid, as only a child can be, light, brilliant, sharp and, above all, classical, in taste and in fact. And then there's that handful of melody that Mozart throws at you, almost like an army of naked women clinging to you! You can only let yourself be overwhelmed! But at 11 years old, Mozart was already mature: he didn't lack creativity and was conscious enough to create a work of good compositional level and exceptional communicative power.
What communicativeness, you ask? A Greek myth, rendered with music that is more Mediterranean and classical than anything. I challenge anyone not to find the classical Greece of Homer and Hesiod or even that of Thucydides and Pericles in this musicality. The theme is sacred (the gods of Olympus). But the sacred is rendered pagan, in the sense that the vocalizations are like a Cantata (a sublime example is the duet "Natus cadit atque Deus"), but the accompaniment gives a sense of non-Christian sacred, because the violins are damn malicious, frivolous, or rather immoral; thus, we eternally exit from the sepulchral and funeral Christian churches to abandon ourselves to ecstasy in hills of olive groves. Am I clear? Obviously! The sense of Mediterranean paganism is also added to the classical taste of temples and statues: white marble, "white" music, smooth marble, "smooth" music. Smooth music? Like oil? We talked about olive groves, right! Merveilleux! There's all the sensuality of the Greeks, their passion for civilization, their freshness as an aristocratic, celebratory, and adventurous people, with a proud art in its balance and composure. Love is revenge, it becomes murder, because the history of the Greeks is very different from how academics have shown it to us, as if it were the cradle of peaceful and egalitarian democracy, emblem of harmony and tranquility, apologizing for modernity, a (atavistic) confirmation of current values: like that Teutonic philosopher, disciple of Dionysus, as recently many conscientious people in the field, an L. Canfora for example, we begin to accept that the Greeks were a civilization marked by dictatorships, civil wars, murders, "injustices," blood, greed, will to power...
The Thucydidean dialogue between Athenians and Melians superficially comes to life in this work, in the form of the feeling of love, as a testimony of the true Hellenic spirit. Yes, passionate violence, spirit that is also deceit... A true work, genuine. But contradictions are also present in this sense, showing an irreplaceable link with academic prejudices (after all, I recall that this work was commissioned by the Salzburg University Gymnasium of the Benedictines): the libretto written by Father Widl (example, text of the aria "Laetari, iocari") expresses excessive sentimentality: Melia thinks she will be loved by the people after becoming a goddess, champion of goodness, marrying Apollo; this is a concept foreign to Hellenic culture, at least not philosophical.
Constant harpsichord accompaniment, dominance of the strings, extended chords of the winds (no drone, of course), horns of pastoral theme as Hellenic evocation (aria of the first act "Jam Pastor Apollo"), here and there more or less successful attempts to evoke scenic situations with music (in the first act thunder and love, in the third act Apollo invokes Aeolus against Zephyrus, but here the music is weak in writing - it is not a production error -, as if there were a gap between entrance and exit of the two characters), second act intermezzo with vague Byzantine reminiscences (as will happen entirely in the "Abduction from the Seraglio").
Those who do not love the soprano warbles typical of the Italian style, so despised by the French, but which can at times recall the aesthetics of the Opéra de Paris ("Tales of Hoffmann"), as in the aria "Laetari, iocari", will probably find this work sugary and trivial.
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