Of the various singers that inspired the arias in this recital, the most internationally celebrated was Francesco Benucci, star of Joseph II’s Italian opera company in Vienna. Renowned both for his beautiful, rounded bass voice and his comic panache, Benucci brought the house down as the first Figaro and as Leporello in the Viennese revival of Don Giovanni in 1788. His gifts were later crucial to the role of Guglielmo in Mozart’s third Da Ponte collaboration. Così fan tutte, premiered in Vienna on 26 January 1790. As originally planned, a highpoint of Act one was Guglielmo's mockheroic aria "Rivolgete a lui"; an absurdly over-the-top paean to the two "Albanians", replete with references to mythical figures and even to the famous French ballet master Charles Le Picque (cue here for a mincingly elegant gavotte). During rehearsals, tlmugh, Mozart evidently decided that the aria was too long and showy for its position. So out it went, to be replaced by the much simpler patter-song, "Non siate ritrosi".
As one of the most celebrated Viennese-based composers, Mozart was often asked to provide substitute or “insertion” arias for revivals of operas previously performed in the imperial capital and elsewhere. And, although he once vehemently denied it, as a born competitor he surely delighted in the superiority of his own contributions to operas by Cimarosa, Anfossi, Martín y Soler and Paisiello. One such insertion number is the "arietta" (Mozart’s own description) "Un bacio di mano", written for another Italian buffo bass, Francesco Albertarelli, when Anfossi’s comedy Le gelosie fortunate was revived in Vienna in May 1788. Sung by a worldly Frenchman, the aria takes a highly sceptical view of women's fidelity, à la Così fan tutte. Shortly afterwards Mozart was to pilfer its jaunty tune for, of all pieces, the first movement of the “Jupiter” Symphony.
In Vienna Albertarelli sang Don Giovanni opposite Benucci's Leporello. He also probably took the role of Count Almaviva in the 1789 Viennese revival of Figaro. If so, he must have had a brilliant top register, as evidenced by the newly written final section (at Albertarelli’s request?) of Almaviva's D major “revenge aria” in Act Three. With or without its revised ending, the aria, in grand opera seria, is a masterpiece of controlled aristocratic fury. Here, for the first time in the opera, the Count becomes truly dangerous as he sees his honour and privileges threatened.
The other three Mozart numbers in this recital were designed for less starry singers. In February 1788 the Austrians declared war against their old enemy, the Turks; and Mozart was quick to capitalise on the current jingoism with the "German war song" "Ich möchte wohl der Kaiser sein!", with its battery of bellicose "Turkish" instruments - piccolo, cymbals and bass drum. The premiere was given by the popular singer-actor Friedrich Baumann in the Leopoldstadt Theater on 7 March. "Mentre ti lascio", a much greater piece (1787), was prompted by Mozart’s close friendship with Gottfried von Jacquin, a tine amateur bass who, from Mozart’s letters to him, seems to have shared the composer's zany sense of humour. With its sumptuous colouring for flutes, clarinets, bassoons and horns, and (in the final, Allegro, section) its piercing chromaticism, this agonised farewell of a father to his daughter (the text comes from Paisiello's opera seria, La disfatta di Dario) is one of the noblest of all his concert arias. The Jacquin connection continues with another sad valediction, "Io ti lascio". Indeed, Constanze Mozart suspected that this was written by entirely by Jacquin. Recent research, though, has revealed that the aria, probably dating from summer 1791, was almost certainly a collaborative effort, with Jacquin supplying the vocal line and the bass, and Mozart the three upper string parts.
At around the same time, the young Beethoven was cutting his teeth as a composer of operatic arias with two pieces for Joseph Lux, a bass at the Elector's court in Bonn who specialised in comic numbers. Both these charming, unpretentious pieces mingle a homely German Singspiel idiom with a more sophisticated italianate style. (As a violist in the Elector’s orchestra, Beethoven had already got to know many Italian operas, including Figaro and Don Giovanni.) "Prüfung des Küssens" begins with a mock-demure Andante con moto, then quickens to Allegretto as the boy's indignation grows, before the orchestras tongue-in-check ending. For "Mit Mädeln sich vertragen" Beethoven chose his first Goethe text, from the play with music Claudine von Villa Bella, a sort of Comedy of Errors set among bandits in medieval Sicily. After the roistering opening and a lyrical, serenading contrast ("Ein Lied, am Abend"), Beethoven has plenty of fun depicting the imagined fight with the jealous interloper.
For over a decade from the mid-1770s Haydn’s life in the service of Prince Nicolaus Esterházy was dominated by opera. He alone was responsible for engaging singers and rehearsing and directing performances, not to mention writing operas of his own and adapting those of other composers. And like Mozart in Vienna, he often provided additional narias to suit a specific singer in opera revivals at Eszterháza, the Prince’s opulent summer palace in the remote Hungarian marshes. In 1780 Haydn revived Salieri's comedy La scuola de' gelosi, a recent hit in Italy; and for the buffo bass Luigi Rossi, he wrote the humorous aria "Dice benissimo", in which the servant Luinaca expounds a cynical, Don Alfonso-ish philosophy of women, reinforced by cuckold’s horns. In more serious vein is the eloquent cantabile aria "Un cor sì tenero", composed for the tenor/baritone Benedetto Bianchi, a leading light in the Eszterháza troupe, in a 1787 revival of Francesco Bianchi's (no relation) Il disertore francese.
Like Mozart before him, Schubert sought above all to make his name in Vienna as an opera composer. Buoyed by the support of the famous baritone Johann Michael Vogl and the growing success of his songs, he spent the autumn of l821 in the country with his wealthy dilettante friend Franz von Schober drafting a "heroic romantic" opera, Alfonso und Estrella. Set in medieval Spain, the plot has affinities with As You Like It - a usurped King living in sylvan tranquillity, the children of usurped and usurper in love with each other. The opera was finished by the spring, submitted to the Viennese court theatre, and rejected. Schober’s hopelessly untheatrical libretto was one of the problems; but in any case, try the 1820s German opera had little chance in a Vienna intoxicated by Rossini. To Schubert’s chagrin, Vogl shared the theatre management's lukewarm response to Alfonso, despite the superb music the composer had provided for him in the role of the exiled King Froila. Both the arias on this disc occur within the long, static pastoral scenes that, however redundant drammatically, inspired Schubert's most beguiling vein of lyricism. The Act One scena, "Sei mir gegrüßt, o Sonne", moves from a hymnlike paean to the sun, full of ravishing woodwind colour, through a gently lilting 6/8 movement, to an increasingly exultant Allegro where Froila looks forward to the day when his son will be king. At the opening of Act Two Froila sings, at his son Alfonso's request, the "ballad of the cloud maiden", "Der Jäger ruhte hingegossen". As the vision lures the huntsman towards the rocky summit ("Er folgte ihrer Stimme Rufen"), Schubert introduces an insouciant new tune that he borrowed five years later to evoke the phantom, flickering light in "Täuschung" from Winterreise.