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Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Haydn; Il Ritorno di Tobia
Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:
The genre of oratorio began in Italy in the seventeenth century. Oratorio is the twin sister of the Italian opera. When the opera houses closed, oratorio took over as a sacred Lenten musical entertainment. In the eighteenth century, oratorio was taken up all over Europe. Everybody knows the two choral masterpieces of Joseph Haydn's old age: The Creation (1798) and The Seasons (1801). There is, however, a third great religious oratorio Haydn wrote earlier in his career while he was still in the service of his super-rich patron, the Hungarian Prince Eszterhazy.
Il Ritorno di Tobia (1775/1784) was calculated to appeal to a Viennese audience. The story, derived from the Old Testament Apocrypha, was popular in Vienna at the time. The Viennese also wanted to hear oratorio in Italian, the language of opera, rather than in their native German tongue. "The Return of Tobias" has only very occasionally been performed or recorded in our time. It was recorded in co-production with Deutschland Radio in 2006 in the broadcast auditorium of Radio Cologne. Andreas Spering directs the period instrument players of the Capella Augustina and the choral forces of the VokalEnsemble Köln. The 2007 Naxos CD release of that Cologne recording was aired on Sunday, February 28, 2010.
Il Ritorno di Tobia was given again in a benefit concert as part of the 2013 Salzburg Festival and was recorded live-in-performance in August of that year in the hall of the old Riding School. The aging Nikolaus Harnoncourt was conducting the Zurich-based period-instrument Orchestra La Scintilla and the Arnold Schönberg Choir, with five vocal soloists. This triumphal performance was the last hurrah for Harnoncourt, a true pioneer in the historically-informed performance practice movement, since he retired for health reasons in 2015 and died not long thereafter in 2016. Orfeo Records, the record label of ORF Austrian Radio, issued the oratorio on two silver discs in 2018. Harnoncourt made some cuts in Haydn's score for the Salzburg production.