Joseph Haydn, Orlando Paladino (1782)

Haydn is an extremely well-regarded composer. Perhaps you've heard of a little thing called The Creation?  And yet for some reason nobody thinks about his operatic career. But he wrote sixteen operas (the first of which is lost), so, I mean...why wouldn't you be interested?

As you would anticipate, this is based on bits of Orlando Furioso. The plot's a big baggy, and fudges of lot of the details of Ariosto, but basically, Angelica and Medoro are happy together, but Orlando, having been driven furioso with unrequited love, is after them, and Rodomonte (from whom, of course, the word "rodomontade") is there to stop him. Also, there's a shepherdess, Eurilla, and Orlando's erstwhile squire, Pasquale. Oh, and a sorceress, Alcina, who makes sure that there's a happy ending. Of course, the poem had a happy ending too, but it's funny to me that Haydn or the librettist felt the need to make it even happier: there, Rodomonte is a villain who dies; here he's just a comic blowhard who...doesn't.

It's pretty terrific. As you might expect, it sounds a lot like Mozart, or, it would probably be more accurate to say, Mozart sounds a lot like this. It's more or less equally divided between romantic drama and comedy. The latter is, to my ears, a lot better than the former: it involves Rodomonte's blustering and the comedy couple of Eurilla and Pasquale, and those latter two--as played here by Sunhae Im and Victor Torres--absolutely run away with the show and refuse to give it back. There's some great patter-song-type stuff which seems to prefigure the likes of Donizetti (at one point, Pasquale remarks "not even a castrato sings as well as me," which I thought was really culturally interesting). I love it. The drama is a bit uneven, especially because Medoro as a character is pretty gormless. Angelica (Marlis Petersen, I believe the only singer here I've seen before, as the title role in Lulu and Susanna in Figaro)does have a good aria near the end when she thinks he's dead, and Orlando himself certainly has his moments.

This production (part one,part two--not available in the US, unfortunately) is kind of goofy but really good, I think. It does a great job of bringing out the humor in the opera. Everyone's fine, although as noted above, some roles are clearly more rewarding than others. Sunhae Im definitely gets best-in-show as Eurilla. The point is: if Haydn's other operas are anything like this, the neglect of this aspect of his work is criminal.