MITRIDATE, RE DI PONTO (Mitridate, king of Pontus)
Masterpiece of a 14 year old genius
Opera seria in three acts by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Libretto by Vittorio Amedeo Cigna-Santi, based on the play by Jean Racine.
Sung in Italian with French surtitles.
This opera contains so much beauty and provokes such powerful emotions that it can only be described as a masterpiece. Staging family conflicts against a backdrop of the collapse of an empire, Mitridate, re di Ponto, Mozart’s first opera seria, already bears the mark of the genius which would blossom prodigiously in his later works. Composed on an Italian libretto based on the eponymous play by Jean Racine, it presents a family drama in which two rival sons and a domineering father compete for the hand of the same princess. All this under the imminent threat of an assault by the Roman armies, launched to conquer a region today called Crimea. The characters – their ambitions, their contradictions, their passions – are portrayed with a disturbing truth, especially since the composer was only 14 years old.
