About this Piece

Although Mozart was not pleased with his fee, the commission he received in 1780 for a new opera for the Bavarian electoral court in Munich was nonetheless a major coup for the young composer in terms of prestige. It came at a welcome moment, after years of increasing frustration at home in Salzburg and disappointments in job searches abroad. 

Mozart arrived in Munich early in November, with some of the opera already drafted. The subject of Idomeneo (a Cretan king returns home from the Trojan War, with a fatal vow) undoubtedly came from the court, but it was probably Mozart or his father who chose their Salzburg colleague Giambattista Varesco to write the libretto. He based it on earlier French sources, and it quickly became clear that there was way too much of it.  

Cuts and revisions ensued throughout rehearsals, and the last music to be completed was a dance sequence. “Till now I’ve been kept busy with those cursed dances—Laus Deo (Praise be to God)—I have survived it all,” Mozart wrote to his father on January 18, 1781. The work opened 11 days later. 

One of the main attractions of this commission was the chance to write for a large and accomplished orchestra, the famous Mannheim band now in residence in Munich with its patron. Mozart deployed those forces with characteristic invention and brio in the Chaconne that is the main part of the ballet music. This is not a chaconne in the Baroque sense, but rather in the rondo-like French style, with a brilliant, ceremonial principal theme (borrowed from an opera by Gluck) danced by the whole company alternating with softer, more sensuous sections danced by soloists or pairs. —John Henken