Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Mayr: L'amor conjugale; highlights from Beethoven's Fidelio and Cherubini's Lodoiska

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. 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, released on CD through the Naxos label.

In 2017 Naxos came out with Hauk's recorded interpretation of Mayr's Telemaco (1797), the world premiere recording of that work, the first one of the Naxos series I would broadcast, on Sunday, October 10th of the same year. Broadcasts of others in this series soon followed. Mayr wrote at least 75 operas in his long career and mastered all the variants of the genre: opera buffa (Amore non soffre opposizione from 1810, Sunday, August 5, 2018) and opera semiseria (Le due duchesse, dating to1814, Sunday, October 10, 2021). Both of these again are world premieres on Naxos discs, as well as Saffo (1794), his first opera, composed in Gluckian style, again with Hauk conducting, aired most recently on Sunday, May 22, 2022.

Another popular subgenre was the heroic "rescue opera," of which Beethoven's Fidelio (1812) is the sole remaining representative surviving in the repertoire into modern times. Mayr's L'amor conjugale (1805) predates the final version of Beerthoven's one and only operatic work. Like Fidelio, Mayr's "Conjugal Love" presents the story of the faithful wife, here named Zeliska, who seeks to free her innocent husband from prison and stop his execution. Like Leonora in Beethoven's opera, she disguises herself as a boy and inveigles employment as the jailor's assistant.

This Italian language rescue opera was revived onstage at the 2004 Rossini in Wildbad Festival, where it was recorded live in performance in co-production with Southwest German Radio, and issued on two Naxos compact discs in 2008. This time it's Christopher Franklin directing the Wurttemberg Philharmonic Orchestra with a six-member singing cast. You listeners will have the opportunity to compare Mayr's rescue opera with excerpts from recordings of Beethoven's heroic Singspiel and a French language comédie héroïque, Luigi Cherubini's Lodoïska (1791), which was aired twice before in its entirety on this program.