Montezuma (Sessions opera)

Montezuma is an opera in three acts by the American composer Roger Sessions, with an English libretto by Giuseppe Antonio Borgese that incorporates bits of the Aztec language, Nahuatl, as well as Spanish, Latin, and French.

[8] The opera contains human sacrifice, burning at the stake, stabbing, stoning, rule by terror, cannibalism, a love story, war, homesickness, intrigue, a ritual dance, and the supernatural.

[11] Michael Steinberg says that it is "arguably the richest opera yet written by an American composer", and like Olmstead compares it to Wozzeck and Lulu (as well as to Les Troyens, Moses und Aron, War and Peace, and Palestrina) because, like them, Montezuma has long remained a "legend".

[12] Andrew Porter echos the "legendary" characterization and the comparison to Pfitzner's Palestrina, adding that these two operas, as well as Busoni's Doktor Faust, Hindemith's Harmonie der Welt, and Dallapiccola's Ulisse are "both personal and closely argued".

However, he does not find Sessions the match of Schoenberg's "ramrod genius", so that Montezuma "remains a tableau-oratorio" in which the salient moments (including a love duet inspired by Verdi's Otello) fail to be "drawn into a cohesive and ongoing whole."

"[18] An unnamed correspondent for the Times, reporting on the Berlin premiere, found the score "spare and mechanical", and felt that listening "requires far more application than most theatregoers are prepared to give it".

"[20] Martin Brody, on the contrary, finds the overlapping, complex vocal lines consistently reinforce "an ironic undercutting of virtually all the ethical and political positions taken by the characters", so that the portrayed events are "viewed as tragic and absurd in equal parts".