Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Mayr: Alfredo Il Grande

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

This will be the seventh time since the year 2017 that I have featured an opera by Johann Simon Mayr. It was a German composer 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 Rhineland native, Beethoven. Mayr long outlived both of them, passing away in 1845. His operas continued to be performed in Italy and elsewhere in Europe up to circa 1850. For a while his works rivaled in popularity those of Rossini. It's 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. He had already recorded several of Mayr's sacred oratorios and, starting in 2017 the Naxos record label began issuing a series of world premiere recordings of the operas. Mayr wrote at least 75 operas in his long career and had mastered all the variants of the operatic form.

Recorded in 2019 and released on compact disc in 2020 is Mayr's Italian opera seria called Alfredo Il Grande ("Alfred The Great," 1819), taking its story from medieval British history. While some aspects of Mayr's music for Alfredo look forward to the developing romantic style of Rossini and his successors, this particular work is conservative in that it retains the secco recitative of the eighteenth century, with harpsichord accompaniment. Moreover, the heroic role of Alfredo, the Anglo-Saxon king, is sung by a female mezzo: a "breeches role" that might well have otherwise gone to a male castrato.

Franz Hauk conducts the period instrument ensemble Concerto de Bassus, the Simon Mayr Chorus and Members of the Bavarian State Opera Chorus, with six vocal soloists.