Around the corner from the venerable Academy of Music on Broad Street is a sprawling, brightly-lit space at Academy House, where recently I dropped in as a fly on the wall for a glimpse of Mitridate, re di Ponto, a rarely performed opus by Mozart that opens the 2026-27 season for Opera Philadelphia next week.
The rehearsal covered the end of Act II, when the opera’s trickery and betrayal reach a climax as two of the main characters, Aspasia and Sifare (sopranos Lauren Snouffer and Meredith Wohlgemuth) make a pact to die together. Over the course of an hour, amid the duo’s impressive vocal prowess, conductor Corrado Rovaris kept a hawk’s eye on the score, with the company’s head of music staff, Grant Loehnig, at the piano. Renowned director Emma Griffin carefully coached the two singers, helping them choreograph body movements and stage placement to amplify the characters’ motivations. Their conversations were illuminating: Should the singers stand upstage or down, closer to the audience? Should they retreat into the intimacy of a corner? No consideration was too small: a seemingly benign gesture, like placing a hand on a piece of furniture, produced a few minutes of collaborative discussion.
Based on a 1673 Jean Racine play about a king in the first century B.C., Mozart’s early masterwork premiered in 1770, but didn’t resurface until 200 years later, when it arrived in 1971 at the Salzburg Festival. Except for subsequent versions at the Santa Fe Opera (2001) and Boston Lyric Opera (2024), it has not been produced by any other opera house in the country, until now. (A concert version appeared in 1992 at Lincoln Center, as part of its Mozart Bicentennial Festival to mark the 200th anniversary of the composer’s death.) And despite the complexity of the plot and the opera’s length (about three hours), the scarcity of performances is confounding. The score is filled with shimmering music that — astonishingly — Mozart wrote when he was 14 years old.
Griffin, whom Philadelphia audiences may recall from her savvy 2025 staging of Candide for the Curtis Opera Theatre, offers historical context: “Mitridate was a cultural figure who would have had the name recognition that Cleopatra or Julius Caesar has for us today. But he has faded away. No one knows who he is anymore.” She compares the plot of the opera to the hit television series, Succession, and its cynical web of family power struggles, and sees many of the show’s characters mirrored in Mozart’s opus, an analogy that vaults the ancient story into the present day.
“The opera’s structure is unusual, and it’s a big ask for the singers; you absolutely need to be an actor as well. It’s also fiendishly difficult, partly because the extreme vocal range required shortens the list of people who can do it. We’re lucky to have a world-class cast.”
In addition to Snouffer and Wohlgemuth, that world-class cast features superstar tenor Lawrence Brownlee, who also assumed the title role in the Boston production. (In 2022 he delighted Philadelphia audiences in another Opera Philadelphia rarity, Rossini’s Otello. In 2015 he sang the title character in Charlie Parker’s YARDBIRD.)
“Mitridate sees his power slipping through his hands,” reflects Brownlee. “He’s trying to hold onto it for dear life, fighting mortality and reality, and when he understands that his elder son, Farnace, is a traitor, he spends a lot of energy damning him.” Mozart brings that energy to life with a parade of sustained high notes that underline Mitridate’s emotions. Brownlee chuckles: “I have five arias, and I’m angry for four of them.”
Contemporary audiences could benefit from a bit of background on the opera’s convoluted plot. Mitridate, fighting against the Roman empire, is presumed dead. But as it turns out, he has faked his death to gauge the reactions of his two sons, Farnace and Sifare. In the meantime, rather than mourning their father’s demise, the duo leaps into the fray to compete for their father’s fiancée, Aspasia. (Normal family behavior, of course.) Their machinations are stymied when to everyone’s surprise, Mitridate turns up alive and kicking, which throws a bit of a wrench into the plans. Eventually Aspasia makes her own decision, the two sons may or may not learn some life lessons, and as is often the case in opera, someone dies.
Those curious to preview the score can choose from a handful of recordings, such as one from 1999 conducted by Christoph Rousset, or a more recent 2020 version with Marc Minkowski. Either demonstrates the composer’s miraculous invention, with the wunderkind stepping squarely into the limelight. Commenting on the Minkowski recording, critic Robert Levine praised both the vocal writing and the orchestration, and marveled at the young composer’s versatility with the arias, “using each opportunity to create a small world, different from the previous one.”
Since his Boston engagement, Brownlee has further studied and refined the role, and recognizes the preparation needed to sell the show to modern audiences. With Griffin and the rest of the cast, he has spent hours discussing the connective tissue, and how to clarify the work’s unusual structure. “As opera singers, we have five or six weeks to get used to it,” he says, referring to rehearsals, “but the audience has to try to understand it in one go. Our job is to try to tell the story as well as we can.”
Anthony Roth Costanzo, the company’s president and general director, confirms the score’s brilliance, and commensurate with his seemingly inexhaustible energy reserves, he also appears in the cast as the scheming elder son, Farnace. The role is almost a shoe-in to display his lustrous countertenor to maximum effect.
“I’ve known about this opera for a long time, and the music is extraordinary,” he says. “The youth of Mozart really comes across in the vigor, especially when you hear the orchestral writing and the vocal writing, which is impossible. But Larry wrote me, saying, ‘You can sing it, and I can sing it,’ and with the rest of the cast, it seemed like a no-brainer.”
On the all-too-topical plot, Costanzo added: “The opera is about the spoils of war, honor versus pride, and all kinds of themes that feel uncannily relevant. The power struggle — these two sons vying to take over the family empire — feels very much like something we recognize.”
Costanzo has helmed the company since 2024, and this latest inspiration is one of the high-water marks in a fertile period. Last season he oversaw another rarity, Joseph Bologne’s The Anonymous Lover, as well as the company premiere of Rossini’s Il viaggio a Rheims, and — in line with the company’s dedication to contemporary works — the world premiere of Sleepers Awake by composer Gregory Spears. In August, the company released a recording of Complications In Sue (on the BCM+D Records label, affiliated with Temple University), an ambitious tapestry created by TONY Award-winning playwright Michael R. Jackson and starring MacArthur Fellow Justin Vivian Bond, with music by 10 different composers.
In October, the company will continue its momentum with another world premiere, Suddenly Last Summer by composer Courtney Bryan and librettists Gideon Lester and Daniel Fish, based on the Tennessee Williams play. (Fish will direct.) That same month, Pentatone will release the Chicago Lyric Opera recording of The Listeners, a striking portrait of cult behavior by composer Missy Mazzoli and librettist Royce Vavrek. Opera Philadelphia, one of the opera’s co-commissioners (along with CLO and Norwegian National Opera), presented the American premiere in 2024.
And since last season, Costanzo’s innovative, $11-or-pay-what-you-wish ticket pricing gamble continues to pay off, enabling a wider audience to experience Opera Philadelphia’s often groundbreaking work. Ticket access encourages many listeners to experience an art form that can still feel confounding.
But back to the forthcoming vocal fireworks and familial treachery, dreamed up by a precocious talent the likes of whom we are unlikely to see in our lifetime. Audiences may be astounded to learn that this teenage composer wrote the opera in a mere two months. This youthful burst of energy came at the request of the Teatro Regio Ducale in Milan, where he was traveling with his father, using texts by Vittorio Amedeo Cigna-Santi, the theater’s chief librettist at that time.
“This is one of Mozart’s great scores, and it’s very unusual to be able to hear it live, fully staged,” enthuses Costanzo. “I hope that people get drawn into the excitement of what he created — it feels almost like rock ‘n’ roll — since he was a rockstar in the classical world, even at 14.”
He adds, philosophically: “In this time, we’re all getting a little numb as we scroll through the news — as we look through our phones and our computers. We need opera to kind of wake us up, to reconnect us to what it means to be human.”
Opera Philadelphia presents Mitridate, re di Ponto at The Academy of Music on Sept. 9 and 10 at 7 p.m., and on Sept. 13 at 2 p.m.; tickets and information.
