Why are Haydn’s operas so lousy? La fedelta premiata reviewed

There’s a book about musicals that every opera lover should read. Not Since Carrie by Ken Mandelbaum is a history of musical theatre’s greatest flops: a comprehensive study of the thousand ways in which a collaborative artform can crash and burn. It’s unbelievable stuff. The Broadway cast of 1961’s Kwamina participated in a voodoo ritual to neutralise the show’s critics (English National Opera is rumoured to be planning something similar). Adverts for Jule Styne’s Subways Are for Sleeping were banned from New York public transport after vagrants took them as an invitation to spend the night on board. And the prize exhibit: the RSC’s Carrie, whose star Barbara Cook was nearly decapitated on opening night, but whose director, Terry Hands, could not be fired because… well, one simply does not fire the artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

The point — and I promise, this genuinely does have something to do with Joseph Haydn — is that many of these fiascos had wonderful music. And in no case was the music alone sufficient to save the day. The principle is the same whether it’s Parsifal or Wicked: to work, every element of a musical drama has to pull together. A near-miss is still a miss, and in the operatic repertoire no near-misses are more frustrating than the 11 operas that Haydn wrote between 1766 and 1783 for the private theatre of his employer, Prince Esterhazy.

Here we have a composer of undisputed genius — more than that, the artist whose flair for vivid, characterful musical dialogue made Mozart’s Da Ponte’s operas possible. But Mozart took drama lessons from Haydn’s string quartets, not his operas. And whatever the reason — second-hand librettos, effect-laden set-pieces, or just the lack of commercial pressure at a court where, after a few glasses of Tokaj, aristocratic guests would applaud pretty much anything — the fact remains that Haydn’s music is never quite enough to get his operas off the ground.