# Haydn operas



## Durendal (Oct 24, 2018)

Haydn has a significant legacy in several categories of classical music except for opera, even though he wrote several dozen of them. I've only heard some of the overtures, and they have the typically bouncy and catchy quality that he's famous for. 

Why do you guys think his many attempts at opera failed?


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## The Conte (May 31, 2015)

Mozart. 

Why people still perform Mozart's quartets when you have Haydn's remains a mystery.

N.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Durendal said:


> Haydn has a significant legacy in several categories of classical music except for opera, even though he wrote several dozen of them.
> 
> Why do you guys think his many attempts at opera failed?


As the Conte implies (I think), it may be that Haydn's operas don't so much fail as simply recede in the shadow of Mozart. That era produced innumerable operas which were successful at the time, contain much excellent music, and prove quite enjoyable upon their infrequent revival. Many of Haydn's operas have been recorded, and that in itself is more success than many of his contemporaries have received. When have we last heard an opera by Salieri or Jommelli?


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## Durendal (Oct 24, 2018)

Woodduck said:


> As the Conte implies (I think), it may be that Haydn's operas don't so much fail as simply recede in the shadow of Mozart. That era produced innumerable operas which were successful at the time, contain much excellent music, and prove quite enjoyable upon their infrequent revival. Many of Haydn's operas have been recorded, and that in itself is more success than many of his contemporaries have received. When have we last heard an opera by Salieri or Jommelli?


Interesting theory, but surely there are other operas from the era that Mozart dominated that still get staged? None of Haydn's attempts ever entered the international repertoire as far as i know, and i don't think they were very popular even when they were new. I know many have been recorded, but they seem to be very rarely performed by the big opera houses.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Durendal said:


> Interesting theory, but surely there are other operas from the era that Mozart dominated that still get staged? None of Haydn's attempts ever entered the international repertoire as far as i know, and i don't think they were very popular even when they were new. I know many have been recorded, but they seem to be very rarely performed by the big opera houses.


I can think of no operas written between Gluck and Beethoven except Mozart's later ones and Cherubini's _Medea_ that have remained in the active repertoire of major opera houses. Even _Medea_, a somewhat bastardized Italian version of the original French _Medee,_ has become peripheral since it served as a vehicle for Maria Callas in the 1950s. Are the vast majority of Classical period operas - there must have been thousands of them composed and produced - worthless? I'd be very reluctant to assume so. Hasse, Graun, Galuppi, Salieri, Jommelli, Piccinni, Cherubini, Gossec, Mayr and Gretry were prolific and famous composers of opera, but virtually all of their works have fallen into obscurity. Occasionally we get a revival of something by Paisiello or Cimarosa, but that's about the extent of it. Haydn, of course, was best known for other kinds of music, and was kept busy by Count Esterhazy. I'm not claiming to know what all of this means, but there may be something on the dusty shelves of history worth our interest.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Woodduck said:


> I can think of no operas written between Gluck and Beethoven except Mozart's later ones and Cherubini's _Medea_ that have remained in the active repertoire of major opera houses.


Haydn's _Il mondo della luna_ (The World on the Moon) is often performed. The launch scene is a favorite.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

KenOC said:


> Haydn's _Il mondo della luna_ (The World on the Moon) is often performed. The launch scene is a favorite.


Clearly, space opera was desperately in need of Gene Roddenberry.


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## ldiat (Jan 27, 2016)

i like this one" Orlando Paladino" i posted a couple videos from you tube here on the site.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

The Conte said:


> Why people still perform Mozart's quartets when you have Haydn's remains a mystery.


I'm reminded of this excerpt from "Reviving Haydn: New Appreciations in the Twentieth Century" by Bryan Proksch, page 25:

"It is unclear exactly what about Haydn’s music the Schumanns found “monotonous,” since they never offered a detailed description. However, a section of an 1843 biography of Mozart by Alexander Dmitryevich Ulïbïshev, a German-educated Russian, might provide just such insights from almost the same point in time. Writing in 1843 on Mozart’s opus 10 “Haydn” quartets, which he favored over Haydn’s own works at every turn through direct comparison, Ulïbïshev criticized Haydn on two accounts:

[First,] in the majority of Haydn’s quartets, cantabile sections and decorative passage-work alternate with a regularity that simply cannot be tolerated in the genre, an effect which gives to thematically constructed works a false air of concertante music and enfeebles the work of the composer in the interests of the first violinist. . . . Secondly, in many places, the melodic style of Haydn’s quartets comes distinctly close to vocal music. He harks back [sic] to the The Creation and The Seasons even when he is not actually working with such archaic melodic forms. Many of Haydn’s adagios and andantes are veritable cavatinas from beginning to end, the first violin reduced to being a substitute for a singer. The only thing missing is the text.​
To be sure, there is a certain irony in Ulïbïshev calling Haydn an operatic composer while promoting Mozart as an instrumental composer. His chronology of Haydn’s compositions shows the degree to which Haydn’s biography became meaningless in the nineteenth century, as well (again ironically, even in a biography of Mozart). However, if the Schumanns heard Haydn’s instrumental works in similar operatic terms it might explain how a disdain for the oratorios could have tainted their opinion of his entire output. In that sense, length might have influenced these 1830s and 1840s listeners’ boredom less than the perception of a treble-dominated texture."


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## elgar's ghost (Aug 8, 2010)

Woodduck said:


> Clearly, space opera was desperately in need of Gene Roddenberry.


Maybe that is the audience watching an in-flight performance.


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## Seattleoperafan (Mar 24, 2013)

Several people have sung Arianna from Naxos and I had a contest featuring it's beautiful music. I love his instrumental music and we did his Creation every year at my church.


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## gellio (Nov 7, 2013)

Haydn was in the employ of the Esterhazy family for most of his career. During his time there, he did not have access to adequate resources (namely good librettists who all were working in Vienna at the time). As a result, his operas aren’t very good from a text standpoint, although the music is quite wonderful.


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## RICK RIEKERT (Oct 9, 2017)

gellio said:


> Haydn was in the employ of the Esterhazy family for most of his career. During his time there, he did not have access to adequate resources (namely good librettists who all were working in Vienna at the time). As a result, his operas aren’t very good from a text standpoint, although the music is quite wonderful.


Whatever one thinks of particular texts, Haydn employed some of the most well-known and celebrated librettists of his day: Metastasio, Giovanni Migliavacca and Carlo Goldoni, both members of a well-known group of reforming and innovative Italian librettists, Marco Coltellini, who wrote librettos for Gluck, Hasse, Salieri, Paisiello and others. Nunziato Porta was probably the least gifted of Haydn’s librettists (excepting Haydn himself who tried his hand with _La fedeltà premiata_) but he was an experienced operator who assisted Haydn in a number of ways. Haydn did not have a broad experience of the operatic world and lacked sure-footed dramatic know-how, the kind of experience a composer can pick up only by putting pieces on a public stage and seeing what works. By contrast, Mozart was a theater man through and through.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

RICK RIEKERT said:


> Haydn lacked sure-footed dramatic know-how,


to be "successful" (ie. popular) in his time? We know Le Nozze di Figaro was less "successful" in its time than Una cosa rara (1786), at least in Vienna. What did Vicente Martín y Soler have that Haydn didn't? (I'm just asking.)
Anyway, we can find Haydn's own signatures in
"Ah se dire io vi potessi" youtube.com/watch?v=D3FmutW4vJw&t=1m33s
(think of string quartet Op.76 No.5 youtube.com/watch?v=Dy5hI_M82PA&t=5m), 
"Quel tuo visetto amabile" youtube.com/watch?v=8Tjk4WZexBM
(think of the slow movement of the Military symphony),
which make them unique from Mozart's; it could (subjectively) be seen as a different style, albeit not as popular as Mozart's, today.



RICK RIEKERT said:


> a broad experience of the operatic world, the kind of experience a composer can pick up only by putting pieces on a public stage and seeing what works. By contrast, Mozart was a theater man through and through.


I doubt it. That's what a composer at the time really needed, to be a "theater man through and through" (whatever that means)? Here's opera music by a contemporary who, throughout his career, pretty much stayed in the one city, which the young Mozart (in effect) complained of its opera house and audience as being too small: Underrated or little-know operas that you like.. According to David Wyn Jones, _"the real sense of theatre is reflected in Mozart's music."_ (https://theresia.blog/2019/03/). What do you think?


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

Seattleoperafan said:


> we did his Creation every year at my church.


how kute


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## RICK RIEKERT (Oct 9, 2017)

hammeredklavier said:


> I doubt it. That's what a composer at the time really needed to be a "theater man through and through" (whatever that means)? What do you think?


I think that unless we know what we mean by a "theater man through and through" we should be reluctant to assert - or doubt, "That's what a composer at the time really needed to be".


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## Kreisler jr (Apr 21, 2021)

I think a few operas by Cimarosa (Matrimonio segreto) and Paisiello (Nina) are staged once in a while. However, nowadays there are probably more Haydn operas performed and recorded than by these two or Salieri or other contemporaries, except of course Mozart, and I am not even sure about Gluck nowadays. Gluck might have suffered a little by the renaissance of baroque opera (because unlike the 1950s he is not regarded anymore as the first opera composer really acceptable to modervn stages and tastes).

I have actually seen Orlando Paladino on stage; it is totally silly and the production was even more so but the music very good. According to my opera guide books it seems that already in the 1960s "Lo speziale" and "Il mondo della luna" were included, so I suppose they must have been at least occasionally on stage in Austria and Germany at that time and a more recent edition added La fedelta premiata.


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