Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Mayr: Le Due Duchesse

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 Rhineland native, Beethoven. He long outlived both of them, passing away in 1845. Mayr's career was spent entirely in Italy. He Italianized his name. 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 is therefore hard to believe how Mayr's operas 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 has already recorded three of Mayr's sacred oratorios, released through the Naxos label. In 2017 Naxos came out with Hauk's recorded interpretation of Telemaco (1797), an opera seria in the style of Gluck. That recording I broadcast on Sunday, November 12 of that same year. Mayr also composed works in the genre of the Italian opera buffa. In 2016 Naxos issued the world premiere recording of Amore non soffre opposizioni (Love Will Not Tolerate Opposition," 1810). I broadcast this comic work on Sunday, August 5, 2018, with Hauk conducting.

The Naxos Mayr series continues with an opera semiseria: Le Due Duchesse (The Two Duchesses," 1814). The young Rossini would soon start composing things in this genre, like La Gazza Ladra (1817). The semi-serious Italian opera of that period was largely romantic drama, combining conflict with some comic elements, leading up to a happy ending. To this genre Mayr contributed his setting of a chivalric story set in medieval England, involving the hunting down of wolves and the arrival at the last moment of a message which brings on King Edward's forgiveness for one and all. Naxos released the world premiere recording of Le Due Duchesse in 2020. Franz Hauk plays the harpsichord and conducts the Concerto de Bassus (a period instrument chamber orchestra), the Simon Mayr Chorus and Members of the Bavarian State Opera Chorus, with a cast of eleven vocal soloists.