How could a fourteen-year-old boy possibly write an opera seria that would capture "the chiaroscuro so necessary in the theatre"? Many voices were raised in disbelief, doubting if even the child prodigy from Salzburg could carry this off, but they were silenced when Mozart's Mitridate, re di Ponto was performed for the first time to great acclaim at Milan's Teatro Regio Ducal -the forerunner of today's La Scala - on 26 December 1770.
The libretto was adapted from Racine's Mithridate by Vittorio Amedeo Cigna-Santi and had already been set to music four years earlier by the maestro di cappella of Turin Cathedral, Quirino Gasparini. All the singers who had taken part in the Turin Mitridate were also engaged for Mozart's opera in the hope that some of the numbers from Gasparini's successful score could be reused in Milan. But Mozart evidently surpassed all expectations on the part not only of his aristocratic employers but also of his singers, none of whom wanted to sing Gasparini's arias any longer, a point that Mozart's father, Leopold, was pleased to report on in a letter home: the prima donna Antonia Bernasconi,who was singing the part of Aspasia, was not alone in being "beside herself with delight at the arias that Wolfgang has written at her desire and behest". Mozart’s genius revealed itself within the strait jacket of opera seria, turning the ossified figures of the genre into men and women of flesh and blood. It is remarkable to discover what a keen sense of dramatic flair the young composer had at his disposal, allowing him to depict the most extreme situations and emotions, notably when he included Aspasia's lover, Sifare, in her ombra scene, so that her E flat major cavatina, "Pallid'ombre", in which she longs for death, is followed by an aria marked "Allegro agitato", expressive of her lover's inner turmoil. The libretto offered no precedent for this anguished outpouring of grief and betrayal in C minor.
In Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's 1986 film of Mitridate, a tearful child follows this and all the othertragic developments that unfold in Mitridate's palace. The French director and designer invented this character as the third of the king's sons alongside Sifare and Farnace, treating him as Mitridate's youthfully naïve adviser in place of the Governor of Nymphaea. All three of these roles were written for castratos, but Ponnelle elected instead to use a boy soprano and two women's voices.
Ponnelle chose Palladio's exceptionally beautiful Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza as the setting for his film of Mozart's early opera, thereby bringing together two distinguished creative minds: Mozart, who in Ponnelle's view was "the greatest genius in the history of music, perhaps even in western civilization, and Palladio, the most dreamy and visionary of architects". Pet Halmen's enormously wide costumes, with their often vast pannier skirts, were designed to suggest the final stages of an overdeveloped, manneristic theatrical tradition. Against this background, the viewer is struck even more forcefully by PonneIle's impressive handling of the characters and by his ability to focus on their emotions and feelings. Here his model is Mozart himself, a composer who succeeded in combining vocal virtuosity and musical characterization within the narrow confines of the opera seria tradition. In the extended arias for Mitridate and Aspasia, genuine emotions come into play in a way that was unprecedented at this period. Following the first performance in Milan in 1770, Giuseppe Parini, the Italian translator of Racine's tragedy, praised the young composer for having studied beauty in nature ("studia il bello della natura") and for his resultant ability to express human passions in so vital and lively a manner ("esprimono vivamente le passioni").