Edited & Revised

For Mozart's money, Don Giovanni and Idomeneo, Re di Creta were the two best operas he ever wrote. Few have ever doubted that Don Giovanni was his best. Few have ever heard Idomeneo. Last week, at Massachusetts' Berkshire Festival, an audience heard Idomeneo in one of its few performances in 166 years, its first ever in the U.S. Though few would be willing to switch their bets from Don Giovanni, most agreed that Idomeneo was well worth hearing.

Buffeted by Storms. Mozart wrote Idomeneo when he was 24. He was already a mature and original symphonist, but as an opera composer he was still leaning on the past. He fashioned Idomeneo after the Alceste and Iphigenie en Aulide of Gluck, the grandfather of grand opera. Gluck had tried to pump some life into the stodgy, formalized opera seria which had degenerated into stiff, static pieces in which singers could show off their voices.

Mozart's librettist, Giambattista Varesco, brewed a confusing plot based on the Odyssey, with such extraneous characters as Electra thrown in. Idomeneo, King of Crete, is buffeted by storms on his return from the siege of Troy. To appease Poseidon, he swears to sacrifice the first person he encounters on landing. That turns out to be his son Idamante, who is in love with Ilia, daughter of the vanquished King of Troy. The gods finally clear up the whole matter, and the opera ends four hours later with Idamante and Ilia on the throne. Even the charm of Mozart's music failed to offset the plot.

But to the Berkshire Music Center's energetic Opera Director Boris Goldovsky, Mozart's neglected opera had a modern message: man's struggle with vast natural forces. He also felt that "it is the responsibility of contemporary musicians, ' who are the trustees of the great composers, to resurrect [their works] to the best of their ability." Goldovsky streamlined the opera down to bearable length (2 1/2 hours), straightened out some of the curves in its tortuous plot. Then he put a student cast and chamber orchestra to work on it.

Joy to Anguish. In the tiny, clapboard opera theater at Tanglewood, Idomeneo was a joy to hear. Wrote the New York Times's Critic Noel Straus: "For its astounding choral writing alone, Idomeneo would be worthy of frequent hearings. No two of the choruses are alike. . . . Never was Mozart to write a finer operatic ensemble than the great quartet in this opera."

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Back in Mozart's birthplace, the Salzburg Festival's main event last week was a different kind of opera. Listeners found few tunes to whistle when they came away from Danton's Death, the new opera by Gottfried von Einem. But few could for get the sheer violence of Einem's orchestral onslaught on dictatorship. What was left unsaid by the orchestra was sung by the chorus, which Einem employed as Mussorgsky did in Boris Godunov, as the real protagonist of the drama. There were few arias, and most of them were drowned in the dissonant thunder from the pit.

Last week, wags expressed their feeling that the music was derivative in a German pun: "Nicht von einem sondern von anderen" (not by one but by others). By the "others," music lovers meant chiefly Mussorgsky and Stravinsky. But, added one critic: "Mussorgsky never wrote his principal themes for the bass drum."

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