Haydn’s L’anima del filosofo
On 28 September 1790, Haydn’s employer, Prince Nicolaus Esterházy, died in Vienna after a short illness. His successor, Prince Anton, appalled at the expense of maintaining an opera company, a full orchestra and a group of strolling players at Eszterháza Castle in Hungary, dismissed them all two days later, on 30 September (obviously he had been planning to do so for some time). Haydn received a life pension of 1000 gulden a year from his former patron, and the leader of the band Luigi Tomasini received 400 gulden. Although both were officially retained in their respective positions by Prince Anton, they were free to travel and accept other engagements.
Haydn went to Vienna, and there he was found by Johann Peter Salomon, the great German-born violinist and impresario who had settled in London, where he gave successful subscription concerts. Salomon had read of Prince Esterházy’s death while recruiting singers in Cologne and had hastened to Vienna to engage Haydn, and if possible Mozart as well (but Mozart was already committed to composing Die Zauberflöte and was not free). Salomon was a brilliant businessman and his proposal to Haydn was so attractive that the composer could hardly refuse: 3000 gulden from another great impresario, Sir John Gallini, director of the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket, for a new opera and 100 gulden for each of twenty new instrumental or vocal pieces to be conducted by Haydn in Salomon’s subscription concerts. As soon as Haydn set foot on English soil, 5000 gulden (£500 were then the equivalent of 4883 gulden) were to be deposited in Haydn’s Viennese bank, Fries & Co.
In the days before he left, Haydn was constantly with his friend Mozart. They dined together on the last day, 15 December 1790, and when Haydn boarded the stage coach which was to take him to London, Mozart suddenly said, ‘We are probably saying our last adieu in this life’. The text continues, ‘Tears welled in both their eyes. Haydn was deeply moved, for he applied Mozart’s words to himself’. After all, he was nearly sixty, although hale and hearty (‘I am vigorous and in good health’, said Haydn firmly). But in just under a year, Mozart was dead.
Haydn arrived at Dover on New Year’s Day and proceeded with Salomon at once to London, where a week later he wrote to Prince Anton Esterházy:
The new opera libretto which I am to compose is entitled Orfeo, in 5 acts, but I shall not receive it for a few days. It is supposed to be entirely different from that of Gluck. The prima donna is called Madame Lops from Munich — she is a pupil of the famous Mingotti. Seconda donna is Madame Capelletti. Primo homo [sic] is the celebrated Davide. The opera contains only 3 persons, viz. Madame Lops, Davide, and a castrato, who is not supposed to be very special. Incidentally, the opera is supposed to contain many choruses, ballets and a lot of big changes of scenery: the first opera, Pirro by Paisiello, will be given in a fortnight. The concerts will begin next month on the 11th of February, and I shall dutifully write Your Highness more about that later.Meanwhile I remain,
Your Serene Highness’
submissive and obedient
Joseph Haydn (m.p.) ria.
London, 8th January 1791
The official title of the new opera was L’anima del filosofo but it was often referred to by its alternative title, Orfeo ed Euridice, under which name it was also published in extracts by Breitkopf & Härtel in 1806.
The poet was Carlo Franceso Badini, who also wrote the words for two charming Italian duets (Guarda qui and Saper vorrei) which Haydn set to music in 1796. Badini was well known to Lorenzo da Ponte, who arrived in London in the autumn of 1792. Da Ponte describes Badini as ‘surpassing Aretin in satire and destructive gossip, [who] kept a noose around [the manager of the King’s Theatre, William] Taylor’s neck by virtue of his pen — he had learned English well and was employed as critic on a number of newspapers, whose opinions are accepted as good in London, perhaps to a greater extent than in any other country. The success of Taylor’s operas, singers, dancers and composers, depended in great part on Badini’s paragraphs.’
We have several contemporary descriptions of the two leading singers in L’anima del filosofo. Haydn’s Orfeo was to have been one of the leading tenors of the day, Giacomo Davide, the founder of a singing dynasty. He was born at Presezzo near Bergamo in 1750 and studied not only singing but also composition. W. T. Parke, an oboist who published his Musical Memoirs in 1830, wrote that Davide ‘possessed a clear and flexible voice, with an extensive falsetto, and an elegant expressive style’ while the Morning Chronicle, after Davide’s first appearance in the Salomon concerts, wrote that he ‘exhibited all the wonders of his voice, and never surely was there heard a tenor of such riches and beauty’. Another of his specialities, of which Haydn took full advantage, was Davide’s low notes.
Rosa Lop(p)s was to have been Haydn’s Euridice: at the rehearsal of Paisiello’s Pirro on 23 February 1791 the Morning Chronicle found her to be a ‘good and finished singer; she has every accomplishment but youth and beauty’, though we shall see that Haydn became rapidly disenchanted with her.
It is not known for whom Haydn intended the role of Creonte, which the composer had notated partly in the tenor and partly in the bass clef. Perhaps it was intended for Francesco Albertarelli, the baritone who had been Mozart’s Don Giovanni in the Viennese première of 1788 and who was a member of the London troupe in 1791. The role of the Genio was apparently intended for the not-very-special castrato who may have been Signor Dorelli, about whom nothing seems to be known. We learn more of the opera’s progress in the following letter of 1791 from Haydn to his Italian mistress, now settled in Vienna:
Up to now our opera has not yet opened, and since the King won’t give the licence, Signor Gallini intends to open it as if it were a subscription concert, for if he doesn’t, he stands to lose twenty thousand pounds Sterling. I shan’t lose anything, because the bankers in Fries in Vienna have already received my money. My opera, entitled L’anima del filosofo, will be staged at the end of May; I have already completed the Second Act, but there are five acts, of which the last are very short. In order to show the public his theatre, his opera and his ballet, Signor Gallini has had the clever idea of arranging, one evening a few days ago, a dress rehearsal in such a manner as if it were the real opening night; he distributed four thousand tickets, and more than five thousand came. The opera, entitled Pyhro [Pirro], by Paisiello was very successful. Only our prima donna is a silly goose, and I shan’t use her in my opera. The ballet was simply magnificent. We now await a yes or a no from the King, and if our theatre is opened, the other theatre, that is, our rivals, will have to close their doors, because the castrato and the prima donna are too old, and their opera didn’t please anyone
By the end of the 1791 season it was obvious that Haydn’s new opera was not going to be performed at the King’s Theatre, Haymarket. Haydn, in any case, scrupulously fulfilled the terms of his contract, for it seems clear that although he writes of five acts the opera was complete in the four the composer set to music.
It seems that one aria — and perhaps the greatest in the opera — was sung by Nancy Storace in Salomon’s eleventh subscription concert of the 1791 season (27 May) because there is an MS. copy of that aria written by an English copyist whom Haydn used in 1791, now in the Esterházy Archives, Budapest, on which is written ‘Cavatina — May 27. in the Opera of Orfeo’.
In 1806, as mentioned above, Breitkopf & Härtel published in full score eleven numbers from the opera, but otherwise the work remained in MS. It was first performed complete in the recording made in 1950 by the Haydn Society, and the next year first staged at the Maggio Musicale in Florence with Maria Callas, Boris Christoff, Tygge Tyggeson and conducted by Erich Kleiber.
The main source for Badini’s libretto was Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Books IX and X), especially the ending: that is, from the second death of Euridice to the tearing apart of Orfeo’s body by the Thracian Mænads and its floating away to sea. This also appears in Milton’s Lycidas (where it was also probably borrowed from Ovid). The ending as an orgiastic-tragic theme is more according to the various early legendary sources than the standard happy ending found in most of the known operatic versions (Monteverdi, Peri, Gluck, etc.).
The legend of the man who descends to the nether world to recover his woman (wife or sister) is common to the mythology of many parts of the world.
Badini’s story presupposes a certain amount of knowledge about what has happened before the curtain goes up. Orfeo, the famed singer of antiquity, son of the River God Oeagrius, is not married to Euridice, a Princess and the daughter of King Creonte. (Creonte’s kingdom is not identified in Badini’s libretto, but in other versions of this legend he generally appears as King of Thebes.) Before the opera opens, Creonte had promised Euridice’s hand to Arideo, who never appears in the opera at all. Euridice was not in agreement with her father’s plans, for she fled from Arideo’s coarse attentions. It is at this point that the first act of the opera opens.
The Genio seems to have been an invention of Badini, though the figure is evidently derived from the sibyls, or any one of the numerous soothsaying oracles prevalent in Greek mythology. It is uncertain where Badini found the sources for Creonte, but in any event he is probably the Theban king, though not the one of the Oedipus-Antigone legend. Our Creonte is indirectly connected with the Orpheus legend via Heracles, who was the husband of Creonte’s daughter, Megara, and Heracles is connected with Orpheus inasmuch as Eristeus (Euristeo) was the man who forced the twelve labours on Heracles. Arideo (= Aristeus = Eristeus) was the son of Apollo and Cyrene. He was a demi-god of various forms of husbandry, especially bee-keeping. In Virgil’s fourth Georgic, there is a reference to the fact that the other Dryads, to avenge Euridice’s death, killed off all his bees; but that he later appeased the nymphs and obtained new bees from the carcasses of bulls. He is definitely connected with the Orpheus legend and in most versions is responsible for Euridice’s death, as in our opera. Generally Euridice is found as a Dryad (tree nymph) in the sources.
No one can imagine what Haydn would have revised if his noble Orfeo ed Euridice had ever reached the stage. As it is, the presence of London is immediately felt, first, by the extraordinary number and scope of the choruses, and secondly by the huge orchestra, which includes clarinets, trombones and a solo harp, apart from Haydn’s usual scoring of the first six London Symphonies. It must be recalled that Orfeo is vastly beyond the possibilities of the Eszterháza opera house, and that the presence of the choir reflects the English Handelian tradition, still flourishing in London in 1791 (and greatly impressing Haydn, who attended the Westminster Abbey Handel Festival in May).
In fact, there are many moments in Orfeo which are quite above and apart from any other music Haydn ever composed. There is the actual beginning of Act One, where Euridice’s accompanied recitative in E flat suddenly swerves into C minor and a male chorus warns her not to enter the wood, full of people more ferocious than wild beasts. ‘Fuggi!, fuggi!, fuggi!’, sings the choir, and the music is indeed frightening in its intensity. Another kind of intensity is displayed in Euridice’s great ‘farewell’ in Act Two, where an accompanied recitative graphically describes the serpent’s venom spreading through her body.
Haydn’s greatest music for Davide is the succeeding scena, culminating in an F minor aria with extraordinary modulations (we find B double-flats, C flats, and so on).
Creonte’s music seems to have Masonic overtones, particularly in his first aria in Act One, ‘Il pensier sta negli oggetti’, couched in E major and full of harmonic subtleties, for instance when the music describes a falcon not knowing that it is chained. His second aria is a call to revenge with trumpet fanfares: it closes Act Two in a stirring fashion.
The Genio’s one aria is, with Mozart’s second aria for the Queen of the Night, the greatest soprano coloratura tour-de-force of the second part of the century: like Mozart’s, the orchestration includes trumpets and timpani, and there are long passages of great lyrical beauty, although it is, of course, the fireworks in the vocal part which entrance audiences.
The chorus dominates Act Four. The F minor opening, with its canonic entries, is one of the great choral ‘set pieces’ of the opera, and in the Furies’ chorus, we have an example of sinister power in D minor, with snarling trombones; while the final chorus, again in D minor, with its ending of ghostly flutes and a long, quiet drum-roll, is in a class of its own. Orfeo has died in agony and the Bacchae prepare to tear him into bits when Orfeo’s father, the River God, causes the River Lethe to rise and drown the frenzied women. Orfeo’s body is borne upon the waters, to find rest on the isle of Lesbos. The opera ends pianissimo, and the curtain falls on an empty stage.