Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Haydn: L'Incontro Improvviso

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

Amidst the enormous volume of music he turned out in his long career as a composer, Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) wrote at least fourteen operas. Through the 1980's I broadcast a series of recordings, some of them world premieres on disc, of Haydn's operas as issued under the Philips label. After previously recording all of Haydn's 104 symphonies, in the late 1970's Hungarian conductor Antal Dorati turned to the operas for a similarly monumental recording project.

My personal favorite in the Philips Haydn Eszterhaza Opera Cycle is L'Incontro improvviso ("The Unforeseen Encounter," 1775), the seventh of the operas Haydn wrote for the private opera theater of the palace of his patron the Hungarian Prince Nicolas Eszerhazy. It's in the eighteenth century genre of "Turkish" opera and has some of the same elements that went into Mozart's "The Abduction from the Seraglio." "The Unforeseen Encounter" is an Italian language dramma giocosa.

The libretto of Haydn's Turkish opera was translated into German and it was performed publicly as a Singspiel closer in form to Mozart's famous work. I broadcast the original 1980 LP release of L'Incontro improvviso on Sunday, May 22, 1883. It was reissued on compact disc in 1993,so I broadcast the opera again on November 7th of that same year. This Sunday I draw upon that three-CD Philips boxed set. Dorati conducts the Chamber Orchestra of Lausanne in Switzerland with a mostly British cast of singers.