The father of the symphony and the string quartet deserves to be remembered for his still underappreciated operas too, says George Hall
Composer of the month
When we think of Haydn, what comes to mind? Maybe the two late, great oratorios: The Creation and The Seasons. Or his vast number of symphonies, or his string quartets, or the masses. Not, perhaps, the baryton trios (of which there are more than 125); nor, for that matter, the operas, though again there are plenty. To a degree Haydn’s operas – and those by a host of his late-18th-century contemporaries, successful in their day but obscure in ours – have been sidelined due to our understandable fascination with Mozart’s and, to a lesser degree, our admiration of Gluck’s. Many composers of the Classical period specialised in opera. Though in his enormous and comprehensive output, Haydn could be said – paradoxically – to have specialised in everything, he would have regarded his operas as representing an important strand of his work.
Haydn’s life in professional music began, aged eight, as a treble at Vienna’s St Stephen’s Cathedral. He managed to escape ‘il coltello’ (the castrating knife) before his voice broke, so in his early teens he entered upon the career of a practical musician in the musically hyperactive city of Vienna itself. After meeting the leading composer Nicola Porpora (1686-1768) – also a vocal teacher of renown (the castrato Farinelli was one of his pupils) – Haydn became the Italian’s musical assistant, and was able to familiarise himself with the world of opera at the highest level. He would also get to know Gluck and Pietro Metastasio, the most admired librettist of the day. When scarcely out of his teens, Haydn’s own operatic debut came with the commissioning of Der krumme Teufel (The Limping Devil), a Singspiel (see panel, left) for the playwright and man-of-the-theatre Johann Felix von Kurz – known as Bernardon. Performed at the Kärntnertortheater in 1753 when Haydn was 21, its score has sadly disappeared, as is the case with many of his operas.
The real turning-point in Haydn’s career, however, came in 1761 when he was invited by Prince Paul Anton Esterházy to become assistant to the prince’s Kapellmeister, the ageing Gregor Joseph Werner. Following Paul Anton’s death in 1762, Haydn continued to work happily under Nikolaus I, succeeding Werner in the top job itself in 1766. Nikolaus was a keen music-lover and amateur musician and, following the opening of a new, well-equipped opera house at his palace at Eszterháza in Hungary in 1768, Haydn’s operatic career beg
