Joseph Haydn is best known today as a pioneering, composer of quartets and symphonies, the first fully to appreciate the potential of these new genres in the middle of the eighteenth century. But, for much of his life, Haydn himself considered that his operas were far more irnportant than his instrumental music. In part, this was due to the perceived status of opera and instrumental music at the time. Italian opera, in particular, was the most international of forms and, if a composer like Haydn wanted to claim wider significance, he had to demonstrate his abilities in the opera house. Instrumental music, on the other hand, was not yet as esteemed; it ivas to be Haydn’s unselfconscious role to raise the status of the symphony, the quartet and instrumental music generally to the same level as opera. For more mundane reasons, too, Haydn would have been prompted to value his operas more than his instrumental music, because for 25 years, from the mid-1760s to 1790, the form virtually dominated his existence as a composer.
Haydn was employed as Kapellmeister to the Esterháry family, the richest and one of the most influential aristocratic families in the Austrian monarchy. Like many such families they had a palace in Vienna, in the Wallnerstraße, and a principal residence iri the countryside, in Eisenstadt, some 28 miles south-east of Vienna. Haydn served under four successive princes, the most extravagant of which was the second, Prince Nikolaus, known as "the Magnificent". Shortly after assuming the title in 1762 Prince Nikolaus Esterházy began the ambitious project of converting a small hunting lodge in marshy terrain near Ödenburg (Sopron) in Hungary into a sumptuous summer palace, formally named after the family, Eszterháza, and soon dubbed the Hungarian Versailles. The project took nearly twenty years to complete and was notable not only for the wealth and ostentation of the various buildings but for the way that the unpromising terrain was transformed into magnificent park-land.
While several aristocrats in the Austrian territories frequently presented small-scale performances of operas, usually in makeshift theatres, the extravagance of Nikolaus’s love of music prompted him to build two fully equipped opera houses on either side ofthe main palace at Eszterháza, one for Italian opera and one for marionette theatre (performed in German). From 1776 onwards, a permanent fulltime company was based at the court, which must have been one of the most isolated companies in Europe. When the Italian opera house burnt dovvn in 1779 Nikolaus promptly ordered it to be rebuilt and it was reopened two years later.
As Kapellmeister, Haydn was responsible for the smooth running of these two opera houses, helping to select the repertoire, adapting existing operas for performance, composing his own operas, rehearsing the singers and orchestra, and directing performances from the harpsichord. Most of the repertoire at the maim opera house was by the leading composers of the day, Anfossi (1727-97), Cimarosa (1749-1801), Paisiello (1740-1816), Piccinni (1728-1800), Salieri (1750-1825) and Sarti (1729-1802), with Haydn himself composing eleven maior works between 1766 and 1784. Armida was the last opera Haydn composed for Eszterháza, first performed on 26 February 1784. A few days later, full of enthusiasm, he wrote to his publisher, Artaria, in Vienna: "Yesterday my
Armida was performed for the 2nd time. It's said that it’s my best work to date." Indeed, it turned out to he the most frequently performed Haydn opera at the court, with a total of 54 performances over the next few years; it was also produced at the private opera house of the Erdödy family in Preßburg (Bratislava) in 1786, in Pest (Budapest) in 1791, and in Turin in 1805.
Although the opera company at Eszterháza had a director, a full complement of singers and orchestral players, a team of designers, painters and copyists, supplemented, as necessary, by the part-time assistance of other Eszterházy employees, rather unusually it did not have a full-time poet. As a result, Haydn was never able to profit from the sustained artistic collaboration that Mozart, for instance, enjoyed with Lorenzo da Ponte. Indeed, none of Haydn’s operas for Eszterháza sets a text specially written for the composer; instead, all were based on existing librettos, sometimes quite old ones, adapted by local poets.
The subject matter of Armida, the Saracen sorceress, and her love forthe Christian knight, Rinaldo, ultimately comes from Torquato Tasso’s famous epic poem Gerusalemme liberata, completed in 1575. In the eighteenth century the story featured in both French opera (Lully and Gluck) and Italian opera (Handel, Salieri and Cherubini). The immediate source for Haydn’s libretto was an opera, Rinaldo, by Antonio Tozzi, first performed in Venice in 1775. It, in turn, was a hybrid version that fused two separate librettos based on the story, the first written by Durandi and set to music by Anfossi (Turin, 1770), the second written by De Rogati and set by Jommelli (Naples, 1770). Although it was destined to be Haydn’s last opera for the Eszterháza court it was also a new challenge for him. With the exception of two short works, Acide and L'isola disabitata, Haydn’s operas had all been comic ones; Armida was his first full-length serious opera. He began composing it in the summer of 1783; at the same time, Travaglia (the resident designer) began planning the costumes and elabotate sets, including a throne-room, mountainside, a garden, a dark forbidding woodland and open countryside with a distant view of Damascus. It was one of the most ambitious works produced at Eszterháza requiring, in addition to the expected complement of singers and players, a stage band (with clarinets, the first time Haydn had used the instrument in a major work) and over three dozen actors dressed in Roman and Turkish costumes.
Haydn’s music has a similar sense of scale and ambition. Comprising three acts, this opera employs six singer, with a predorninance of high voices (two sopranos, three tenors and only one bass) and a basic structure of secco recitative alternating with bravura arias. The first aria, "Vado a pugnar contento" sung by Rinaldo, is typical of the enthusiastic manner in which Haydn responds to operatic convention; a standard aria di guerra (war aria) it superimposes a full sonata form on the old da capo structure, uses the orchestra to create an excitable military atmosphere and suggests the heroic valour ofthe protagonist through declamation, virtuosity and, towards the close, a cadenza.
Eighteenth-century commentators on opera frequently complained that dramatic continuity and plausibility were too readily sacrificed to displaying the virtuosity of individual singers. Haydn seems to have been aware of these concerns and, to prevent this work from being a collection of enthralling conceit arias, he elides many numbers into the following one, especially in Acts II and III, discouraging disruptive applause and promoting dramatic continuity.
From his earliest operas for the Esterházy court Haydn had revealed a striking ability to evoke natural phenomena in music - storms, bird-song, moonlight, even stomach-ache - and to a far greater extent than is normally found in contemporary Italian opera. The lengthy second scene of Act III, over 25 minutes of continuous music, is set in a forbidding forest in which the conflicting demands of love and duty are played out by the leading characters, Armida and Rinaldo - a mixture of unreal atmosphere and personal torment that anticipates a major obsession of German Romanticism. The initially unthreatening calm of the woods is well caught in Haydn's music, using the standard pastoral images of murmuring streams and bird calls, including the dove that was to feature in The Creation and the chirping quail that was to reappear in The Seasons and, even more famously, in Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony. A lengthy solo for flute and bassoon over triplet rhythms - a texture often found in Gluck's operas - accompanies the gentle cavorting of Zelmira and her allendant nymphs as they urge Rinaldo lo yield to his feelings. Equally reminiscent of Gluck is the music that follows Armida's angry departure and the entry of the Furies.
Eighteenth-century opera, whether serious or comic, usually ends positively with a united declaration of the moral lesson implied by the evening's entertainment. The most significant of the changes that were made to the libretto at Eszterháza - whether at Haydn's instigation cannot be judged - is the removal of the contrived happy ending that had featured in Tozzi’s opera in favour of something more sinister. To the sound of martial music and, in the theatre, tne sight of a marching army, Rinaldo's mixed emotions are still apparent while Armida, for her part, is consumed by vengeance.