Philidor: Les Femmes Vengées

Opera no 110

Philidor: Les Femmes Vengées

Soloists

Opera Lafayette

Ryan Brown

This is another of those French operas from the peril between the end of Rameau and the opera of the French Revolutionary period. It has neither the richness of Rameau or the intensity of Cherubini, but what it does have is real charm and grace. The style is typical of the early classical era with relatively simple harmonies and straightforward melodies with largely unobtrusive orchestral support. This does sound like damming with faint praise but taken on its own terms this was enjoyable to listen to - not everything has to be a major masterpiece. The vaudeville towards the end , where each characters has a solo verse, had a really catchy tune and one can almost imagine the audience singing along with the soloists when the tune comes round yet again.

Benda: Ariadne auf Naxos

Opera no  108

Benda: Ariadne auf Naxos

Soloists

Prague Chamber Orchestra

Christian Benda

This only just makes it into this year’s project becuase it is not an opera in the traditional sense. There is no singing - the three characters are speaking roles. But this is not like a play with incidental music between scenes - the dialogue and the music are coordinated and the the actors speak over the music or interject spoken words between short musical sections. Benda’s melodramas make it into the music history books partly because of their curiosity value but also becuase Mozart saw performances of Benda’s works and expressed admiration for the idea. He did some experiments with melodrama in his unfinished Zaide but it was Beethoven and Weber among others who brought the idea into the mainstream.

I found this rather a curious work. The music itself was clearly in the tradition of Mozart and Haydn - some of it wouldn’t have been out of place in The Creation - and was consistently inventive and well crafted. But the melodrama form meant that nothing really got developed. It was all very bitty with too many short fragments leading nowhere. At times it felt that we were getting the introduction to an aria but then it all moved on again. I suppose that the form lends itself much more to accompanied recitative-type music than it does to full arias. 

So I am glad that I heard this after having read about Benda in my musical studies, but I can see why the melodrama as he conceived it was a dead end. The melodrama passages in Fidelio and elsewhere are effectively precisely because they come as a contrast to the prevailing style of the rest of the opera. Without that contrast the melodrama has nowhere to go.

Haydn: L'incontro improvisso

Opera no 10

Haydn: L'incontro improvisso

Soloists

Lausanne chamber orchestra

Antal Dorati

This is Haydn's version of the same text as set but Gluck in my previous post. Haydn's libretto expands the text as set by Gluck and in particular includes a number of ensemble.  It is a much longer work than Gluck's taking up 2 1/2  CDs.

Although I am great Haydn enthusiast his operas are virtually unknown territory as far as I am concerned. I did see La Fedeltà premiata years ago but I don't really remember much about it. Other than that I will probably have heard the odd aria or two but that is about it.

The biggest issue with Haydn's operas is that they are not Mozart! By that I meant that although the musical substance is very similar Mozart's mastery of the stage and of dramatic development is not something that Haydn can match. But of course that is an unfair comparison because Haydn wasn't really trying to do that. His conception of opera was much more of individual numbers in their own right rather than as part of a dramatic sequence. But taken in its own right there is some wonderful music here and I thoroughly enjoyed listening to it.  Yes there are some passages of rather stilted coloratura for the soprano and the tenor but these are more than outweighed by music of great humour and lyricism. The highlight was probably the extraordinary trio in Act 1 for three female voices. In purely dramatic terms it is probably overlong but in musical terms it is full of wonderful touches, with some remarkable moments of chromatic inflection.

Robbins Landon singles this trio out for special praise in what are otherwise a fairly perfunctory few pages about the opera in his masterful five volume biography of the composer. I get the sense that he didn't really engage with the operas and was far happier discussing the string quartets, symphonies and particular the late choral music. Perhaps he was right. I can't see Haydn's operas ever becoming part of the repertory  - they just aren't Mozartian enough - but now that I have heard this I am keen to explore more of Haydn't operatic output.