La Clemenza di Tito, Royal Opera House, review: a missed opportunity in Covent Garden

Talk about a spoiler. The title of Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito (The Mercy of Titus) tells us the opera’s ending before we’ve even begun. Which raises the question: if we already know that the emperor will still be merciful and the outcome happy, where does the drama of this near-tragedy come from?

Some would argue that it doesn’t – that there’s a reason Mozart’s opera (composed just months before his death in 1791, alongside The Magic Flute) has long languished in the also-rans. But director Richard Jones thinks differently. His new production at the Royal Opera House takes that question and turns it from rhetoric into something very real. When is mercy not truly merciful? We soon find out in this brutal staging.

If anyone was hoping for escapism or indulgence from the ROH’s grand reopening this week, they’ll be disappointed by such an uncompromisingly bleak show. What was originally a piece of musical propaganda, composed to celebrate absolutist monarchy just two years before the French royals were executed at the guillotine, reveals itself as more complicated here.

After a failed coup, Emperor Titus must decide between pardoning the conspirators – his dearest friend and his fiancée – and condemning them to death. Jones transposes the action from Imperial Rome to a run-down institution or school. The “Capitol”, with its white classical columns, is revealed as a folly – a games pavilion whose neoclassical façade conceals breeze blocks and bilious green walls. Nothing here, Jones makes clear, is what it first appears.

Tito becomes the maverick head, unwilling conspirator Sesto his star footballer, and the rapacious Vitellia (who conceals a knife beneath her sensible skirts) a mistress in both senses. The atmosphere is charged. A bunch of thuggish teenagers stalk the stage in hoodies, daubing graffiti on walls (“Choose wives and cattle from your native village”); Tito’s hand lingers a fraction too long on Sesto’s thigh; interchangeable administrators swarm in ugly brown suits while the Capitol quite literally burns.

An opera that’s all about restoring order must first create a failed state. But Jones loads the dice. Failure here isn’t situational but systemic. The abuses – of power, sexuality, race – that we see ricocheting through the action all stem from Tito himself. Far from the virtuous stuffed-shirt he’s often painted as, this Tito (Edgaras Montvidas) is complicit, an authority whose merciful judgement – delivered seemingly on the brink of madness – is as suspect as his earlier choices.

Musically, things are a fraction cheerier. There’s a barnstorming role and house debut from Canadian mezzo Emily D’Angelo as Sesto. (A major record contract with Deutsche Grammophon, to be announced next week, confirms she’s one to watch.) American mezzo Angela Brower is a charming Annio, the understated sincerity of her romantic subplot a corrective to the histrionics of Nicole Chevalier’s Vitellia.

But neither she nor Montvidas offer much in the way of vocal beauty, and the compensatory conflict can feel over-egged. Conductor Mark Wigglesworth, meanwhile, generates craggy grandeur, if little obvious warmth, from the orchestra, and the chorus, presumably banished from the stage by Covid restrictions, is piped out from the back of the auditorium with mixed success.

From a company who have delivered the bare minimum over the past year, outdone at every turn by smaller and less heavily subsidised institutions, this is not the back-with-a-bang we might have hoped.

Until May 23. Info: roh.org.uk