Idomeneo

A brief introduction:

The Trojan War is over. King Idomeneo is returning home to Crete, when he is caught in a violent storm. He prays to Neptune to spare him, vowing to sacrifice the first person he meets on his arrival. But when that person is his own son Idamante, he is faced with an impossible choice.

Idomeneo (1781) is the 25-year-old Mozart’s coming-of-age, his arrival at new musical and dramatic maturity. Taking up the old-fashioned genre of opera seria in its dying days, Mozart breathes new life into it: enriching and deepening texture, structure and harmonic language to create a ‘dignified, heroic, yet thoroughly human world’.

The work of a young artist desperate for operatic opportunity, Idomeneo is a musical showcase in which virtuosity and invention both work to dramatic ends. It’s also an Enlightenment parable, taking a Classical myth and bending it to new philosophical ends: the triumph of love and reason over superstition and the supernatural. But Idomeneo is also an opera that opens at a pitch of emotional intensity unmatched anywhere until Don Giovanni – an intensity sustained and swelled through three acts, whose stakes are higher than any in Mozart before or since.

Why not to miss it:

Glyndebourne Artistic Director Stephen Langridge teams up with Music Director Robin Ticciati for their first collaboration on a main-stage Festival production. It’s a piece close to Langridge’s heart, with significant personal history (his father, celebrated tenor Philip Langridge, was long associated with the role, including performances at Glyndebourne spanning two decades) and one whose central themes of war, trauma, sacrifice and displacement arrive at a particularly charged geopolitical moment.

This is the first time in over twenty years that Mozart’s formative opera has been staged at Glyndebourne. Following on from David McVicar’s five-star production of Die Entführung aus dem Serail, it’s another chance to see a genius under construction, to dig down to the musical and dramatic roots of the Da Ponte operas and late masterpieces. Idomeneo is a piece of big themes and the music is scaled to match: explosive virtuosity, marrying bravura demands with almost unbearable emotional weight.

A great moment to look out for:

Idomeneo is an opera about nations as much as individuals: a wide-screen drama whose full drama cannot be limited to solos and ensembles. The piece contains some of Mozart’s grandest and most thrilling chorus writing – the perfect vehicle for the young talent and powerful future-soloists of the Glyndebourne Chorus.

The chorus first shows their mettle in the cinematic Act I double-chorus ‘Pietà! Numi, pietà’. Mozart uses musical echoes to unite the drowning sailors with the onlookers helpless on shore: humanity yoked together as one. Modulations keep the musical constantly on the move, never able to find ground, while woodwind solos are briefly glimpsed (like heads above the waves) through the orchestral texture. In Act II we get the contrasting ‘Placido è il mar’ – a ravishing, delicate portrait of calm seas and sunny skies. Lulling strings provide a gentle rolling accompaniment.

Cast and creative team:

Stephen Langridge directs an international cast in this new staging of Idomeneo. American tenor Ian Koziara sings the title role – something of a signature for the former Met Young Artist and his ‘striking beauty of tone’ – in both his Glyndebourne and UK debuts.

Former BBC New Generation Artist, soprano Katharina Konradi, also makes her Festival debut as Trojan Princess Ilia, with Canadian mezzo-soprano Deepa Johnny another new face as her beloved Idamante. Glyndebourne regular Golda Schultz returns after glowing reviews for her Madame Lidoine in 2023’s Dialogues des Carmélites as spurned princess Elettra, with tenor Ben Hulett as Arbace. Robin Ticciati conducts the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment.

To find out more about production support for Festival 2027 click here
or contact our Director of Development, Helen McCarthy for an informal chat:
call 01273 815032 or email helen.mccarthy@glyndebourne.com

Main image: Hans Neleman/Getty Images. Image design by Louise Richardson