Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Mayr: I Cherusci

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

It was a German composer, Johann Simon Mayr who brought Italian opera from the eighteenth into the nineteenth century. Born in Bavaria in 1763, Mayr was a little younger than the Austrian Mozart and a little older than the Rhinelander Beethoven. He long outlived both of them, dying in 1845. Mayr's career was spent largely in Italy. He Italianized his name. His operas continued to be performed in Italy and elsewhere up to circa 1850. For a while his works rivaled in popularity those of Rossini. It is therefore hard to believe how Mayr's operas in later times could be so completely forgotten.

Now in the twenty first century a conductor from Bavaria, Franz Hauk has championed the cause of Mayr's music. In 2017 the Naxos record label came out with Hauk's recorded interpretation of Telemacho (1797), an opera seria in the style of Gluck. That recording I broadcast on Sunday, November 12, 2017. Mayr also composed works in the genre of the Italian opera buffa. In 2016 Naxos released the world premiere recording of the comic opera Amore non soffre oposizione ("Love Will Not Tolerate Opposition," 1810), which went over the air last year on Sunday, August 12th. We return to a serious Italian dramma per musica by Mayr this Sunday, one which also received its world premiere recording through Naxos.

Hauk conducts from the harpsichord the Concerto de Bassus period instrument orchestra and members of the Bavarian State Opera Chorus, with vocal soloists in I Cherusci (1808). This opera is set in ancient Germania around the time of the birth of Christ. The Teutonic tribe known to the Romans as the Herusci annihilated two entire Roman legions led by the general Varus in 9 AD. The leader of the tribe was a certain Germanicus or Hermann. In Mayr's opera the king of the Cherusci is named Treuta. He falls in love with a captive slave girl from another tribe, and tries to save her from the Druids, who would make her a sacrificial victim.

Mayr's music for I Cherusci has some conservative features harking back to the eighteenth century. There's a lot of secco recitative with harpsichord accompaniment, and the male role of Tamaro was originally written for a castrato. In this studio recording the role is handled by a female soprano. Without knowing who actually wrote the music, the listener might well wonder: Is this very late Mozart, or very early Rossini? Mayr's style in opera bridges the gap between the two of them. I think you will discover I Cherusci to be a barbarian delight.