Michael Haydn - Die Ährenleserin (Singspiel); Kantate Ninfe inbelli

Michael HAYDN (1736-1807)

Die Ährenleserin (Singspiel) MH 493 (1778)

Kantate Ninfe inbelli MH 73 (1765)

Monika Mauch

Jakob Mitterrutzner

Sascha Zarrabi

Marianna Herzig

Christian Havel

Jole de Baerdemaeker

Katharina Böhme

Maria Ladurner

Salzburger Hofmusik

Wolfgang Brunner

'Haydn has no talent for musical theatre’, wrote Leopold Mozart about his Salzburg colleague Michael Haydn. Wolfgang Brunner and the period-instrument ensemble Salzburger Hofmusik beg to differ in their latest exploration of the younger Haydn’s dramatic works. Salzburg didn’t have an operatic tradition on the same level as Vienna, Venice or Milan, beyond didactic dramas created in connection with the University. Die Ährenleserin is a work along similar lines, although composed for the Benedictine abbey at Kremsmünster: a compact piece for a small cast of mixed professional and amateur singers with the abbey’s regular musicians.

The story doesn’t plumb any emotional depths. Emilie, the titular Ährenleserin, is a gleaner, permitted to collect the grain left over in the fields after harvest. She is accused by Krums, the foreman, of stealing sheaves to feed her poor mother. The children of the landowner, Von Mildenau, take sides, and when their father arrives he recognises Emilie as the daughter of his best friend, who died saving his life in battle. All get their just rewards and join in a trumpet-bedecked chorus hymning God’s bountiful goodness. The musical style is predominantly pastoral: Emilie (Monika Mauch) introduces herself with a duet of flutes, and Krums (Jakob Mitterrutzner) – although hardly painted as the villain of the piece – has more agitated music as he accuses her. It’s no Zauberflöte; come to that, it’s no Finta giardiniera, either, but it is performed with the unpretentious honesty of the music itself.

The cantata Ninfe inbelli is a somewhat different matter. Composed for the 1765 visit to Lambach Abbey of Princess Maria Josepha of Bavaria en route to Vienna to become the ill-fated second wife of Emperor Joseph II, it consists of a pair of expansive arias on a rather rambling text framed by recitatives and topped and tailed by brief choruses. It seems likely that Haydn composed the solo soprano part for his wife, Maria Magdalena Lipp, a professional singer who was the first Rosina in Mozart’s La finta semplice. Maria Ladurner (the mother in Die Ährenleserin) is equal to its demands, lyrical in the first aria, more fiery in the second. The band play with such attention and involvement that it’s hard to imagine these appealing works being performed any better.

Gramophone