It is an opera seria, a work in a highly stylized, rule-driven genre that Mozart had barely touched in his career and one that by the late 18th century had grown fusty. He may have taken on the assignment because of the prestige of the commission (not to mention the fee); it was almost as if a screenwriter in 2012 were asked for a radio play.

“La Clemenza di Tito” has also suffered in public and critical estimation because it came close on the heels of the three great operas Mozart wrote with the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte: “Le Nozze di Figaro,” “Don Giovanni” and “Così Fan Tutte.” The characters and themes of those rich, subtle, ironic works are tantalizingly close to today’s preoccupations; their tone and attitude is unmistakably ours.

“La Clemenza di Tito,” by contrast, seems staid and dated, its plot didactic and unsophisticated: The uncomplicatedly beneficent Roman emperor Titus uncovers an assassination plot against him planned by his close friend and fiancée, and he pardons them both in a grand final show of forgiveness and reconciliation.

The Mozart-Da Ponte operas also appeal to contemporary audiences because we are invested in thinking of artists as free agents, in believing that the best creative work is done under the loosest constraints. It is true that Mozart’s operatic career was largely defined by his ability to choose his own librettos. We distrust the restrictions of a rigid form like opera seria.

In this sense too “Clemenza” offends our sensibilities. Pietro Metastasio’s 1734 libretto was a classic of opera seria, its elegant poetry placed in the service of a precise, preordained series of arias. It had been set to music dozens of times in the six decades before Mozart got to it. It did not afford the rich, unique collaboration he had with Da Ponte. It seems suspiciously less like a labor of love than like, well, a job.