Overture (La clemenza di Tito)

The Bohemian Estates commissioned an opera for the coronation of Leopold II as King of Bohemia, and Mozart wrote La clemenza di Tito in the weeks before the ceremony, with Die Zauberflöte and the Requiem also on his desk. Caterino Mazzolà compressed Metastasio's fifty-year-old libretto into two acts; the secco recitatives are generally credited to Süssmayr. The premiere took place at the Estates Theatre in Prague on 6 September 1791, three months before the composer's death. Dismissed through much of the nineteenth century as a backward-looking court piece, it returned to the repertoire only after the 1970s.