Haydn Wrote Operas, Too!

Every six-year-old who has ever taken a piano lesson has heard of Franz Joseph Haydn, and certainly all of those young students have at some point turned to their music teacher and begged: Please elucidate the scope and musicological depth of Haydn’s oeuvre in the opera genre.

Turns out, the scope is pretty large: he hammered out something between 12 and 22 operas (depending on how you count), over about 40 years.  Some of them are one-act singspiels, some of them are nothing now but words, the music lost. But sure, that’s a lot of operas, even if you discard the ones designed as “singspiel for marionettes”, which I personally think is fair.

As far as the musicological depth, that we leave to the piano teachers, or someone, not me.

Most of the operas (and many of his other compositions) were written during Haydn’s well-known long employment by Prince Nikolaus Esterházy, in Austria / Hungary.  (Nik pressed Joe especially to write music for the baryton, which looks a little like a cello with a huge rack of strings.)

These people all spoke a form of German, but even in Austria, it was standard to write operas in the Italian language. (Handel had tried to get German into the opera mainstream earlier in the century, but only Mozart succeeded in normalizing non-Italian librettos.) So, Haydn and his many wordsmiths churned them all out in Italian, for singers, and for marionettes.

After all that work, and almost 250 years, I can find just one of Haydn’s operas online with English subtitles: Orlando Paladino.

There are a few others on video, for free, but not in a language I know. These include:

• Armida, 30 years before Rossini more famously took his turn;

• L'anima del Filosofo, which was Haydn’s version of Orpheus and Eurydice, seemingly a requirement for opera composers;

• Il Mondo della Luna, which includes a scene on the moon, with subtitles in French; and

• L'isola Disabitata (Bulgarian).

The “Classical Period” is Off and Running

Just the one, and that’s too bad.  Orlando is more than 2½ hours of lively, interesting music.  You don’t need to listen carefully to hear the baroque period coming to an end (i.e. harpsichord, now a minor contributor). But what is more entertaining is that with Haydn, you can hear, from time to time, passages that remind you of Mozart, Rossini, and Donizetti.

There’s some challenging work here for the three sopranos and for the main tenors. It’s really fun to listen to, because mostly it’s upbeat, though the songs vary in style and mood.  Also, like Seraglio and Fidelio, the music seems much more perfect than the story.  

Haydn composed Orlando without the fashionable shortcuts of recitative and modo parlato – onstage, they’re always singing – so I would probably be fine without the video at all. Back in the 1780s, it would have been standard to include a castrato or two, but there’s none of that here, all the better.

And look here: a character stops and wisecracks with the orchestra’s conductor, so there’s an idea for Magic Flute, Wolfgang!  Later, the whole cast freezes, dumbstruck, and they sing “Oh! What is going to happen?”  Take notes on that one for Cenerentola, Gioachino!  This thing is funny.

Who’s This Orlando?

I was beginning to understand that the Greek Orpheus and Eurydice story is the one used as the basis for a record number of operas (and plays, books, paintings, etc.).  It’s easy to find a list of more than a dozen operas covering that unhappy legend.

But here we have Orlando’s tale, in a strong second place, and maybe even the winner.  Look up Orlando Furioso, an epic poem from the early 1500s, and its precursor, Orlando Innamorato. (And before that, the Song of Roland, from the 11th century.)

The “Paladino” part is not a name, it just means that Orlando was a Paladin knight, a Christian who, with his crew, tried to prevent the Muslims from moving into Charlamagne’s France in the 8th century.

He’s the leader of the twelve knights of France, but he is so much in love with the princess Angelica that he goes fully crazy.  (The stories are quite uncertain about which place Angelica is a princess of – looks like somewhere in China or maybe India.)

At no point does Angelica show any interest in Orlando, and that makes his life even worse.  The other eleven knights could not help him with that. What a popular story – and certainly more generally relatable in life than the unlikely antics of Orpheus.

Let’s Get More Haydn Onto the Stage

Haydn and his librettist, Nunziato Porta, wrote up a rather amusing romance around this topic, focusing on Anglica and her guy Medoro, who mostly try to save each other from the madman Orlando.  There are a couple of other off-balance characters, and a second romance.

Aside from the completely engaging music, Haydn’s Orlando story is fun because it’s kind of goofy, probably formulated to keep all the Esterházies entertained.  The result is a light melodrama, full of threats and danger, but promising from the start to have a happy ending.

Staatsoper Berlin (2009, on Medici.tv) carries it well, requiring slight over-acting, and exaggerated makeup all around.  They even pack it with stuffed animals, flitting woodland fairies, and a picturesque backdrop that the cast pulls completely to the floor, twice.

A bit fluffy, so how is this better than Vivaldi’s woeful Il Giustino?  Fair question. My answers:

1. This music is way more interesting and less repetitious;

2. the story moves coherently and satisfyingly, and we see just two or three main plotlines (Vivaldi seemed to have about one plot per minute);

3. the humor here is aimed at a demographic much older than Vivaldi’s (so, let’s say, it’s for teens and adults);

4. the harpsichord is here, but it’s mostly used like a modern harp; Vivaldi used it like a water cannon.

If there’s a downside or two, they are (a) at the beginning where I thought I was going to get tired of the fake animals, though I settled in with that, and (b) in the middle where Haydn and Porta reveal that their take on mental illness was neither empathetic nor inclusive.  Poor crazy Orlando!  He needs help, not rejection!

That I can watch only one opera with Haydn’s music is a sad situation. I’m probably not going to struggle through these others without knowing what they are talking about; I’d rather just settle for one of his 100+ symphonies, 17 stand-alone overtures, 50 or so divertimentos, many dozens of string quartets, and so on.  This fellow Prince Esterházy kept him busy, for sure.  So, eyes open for another Haydn opera with English, while I’m working on my Italian skills.