Underrated score

MARK SWED’S article on Mozart’s “La Clemenza di Tito” might keep some opera lovers from a score now considered among his most beautiful [“Mozart’s Misfit Blossoms,” Oct. 1]. That would be a shame. Swed includes information that scholarship of the last few decades has refuted. The opera was not composed in just 18 days. The failure of the premiere was due to such immediate circumstances as its late starting hours, and in the decades after Mozart’s death, it was so popular as to be the second most performed of his operas.

If performed with attention to the human conflicts involved in love, obsession and loyalty and not as a freak show, it can be strongly dramatic. Get some version of it, listen to it and hear Tito say, “If I cannot assure the loyalty of my realms by love, I care not for a loyalty born of fear.” Then ask yourself if it could have been intended as anything other than an allegory of God’s limitless mercy, which is reason enough for Tito, God’s stand-in, to be “way too nice.”

Mozart had completed “Magic Flute,” the moral universe of which was way too simplistic for a Mason of Mozart’s sophistication to be satisfied with. So he adapted a libretto about what happens when good people (they don’t have to be Euro-trash monsters) do evil things and truly repent. And composed near divine music for that theme.

LOUISE L. PALMER

San Luis Obispo