Reputedly Mozart’s own favourite among his operas, Idomeneo is a work of unique extravagance and daring that constantly challenges 18th-century ideas of what a serious opera should be. True, its sheer reckless abundance of musical invention throws up problems in stage performance, as Mozart himself recognised when he drastically pruned the third act before the 1781 Munich premiere. But with this Enlightenment allegory of the passage of power from age to youth, superstition to reason, Mozart created a new kind of opera seria, unprecedented in its dramatic continuity (achieved in part through a web of recurring motifs), psychological truth, and unflinching exploration of emotional extremes: “a secular Passion, with a power to chasten and uplift a distracted age,” as David Cairns eloquently put it in his book Mozart and his Operas