PROGRAM NOTES by Phillip Huscher

Joseph Haydn Born March 31, 1732, Rohrau, Austria. Died May 31, 1809, , Austria.

Overture to L’isola disabitata (The deserted island)

Haydn composed his L’isola disabitata (The deserted island) to a libretto by Pietro Metastasio, in 1779. The first performance was given on December 6 of that year, at Eszterháza, the palace of the Esterházy family, in Hungary. The overture calls for an orchestra consisting of one flute, two oboes, one bassoon, two horns, and strings. Performance time is approximately eight minutes.

These are the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s first subscription concert performances of the overture to Haydn’s L’isola disabitata. Our only previous performance of this overture was given on a popular concert at Orchestra Hall on December 1, 1956, with Izler Solomon conducting.

It is easy today to forget that Haydn—the “father of the symphony,” a decisive figure in the development of the piano sonata and the string quartet—also wrote . In all, he composed more than two dozen works for the stage. And from 1766 to 1780, during the time he was employed by the Esterházy family, the richest and most culturally astute of all the Hungarian nobility, opera dominated Haydn’s musical life in a way that is hard for us to imagine today, particularly since so little of this music is still performed. In that period alone, he composed fourteen major works for the stage, including nine Italian operas, at the same time that he was writing groundbreaking symphonies, chamber music, and works for the church. Arguably the most impressive year of all was 1779, the year Haydn oversaw the premieres of three of his operas, including one in German, Die bestrafte Rachbegierde, since lost; and two in Italian, La vera costanza and L’isola disabitata, the opera from which this overture is drawn, which was to be premiered on December 6, the name day of Prince Nikolaus of Esterházy, the composer’s boss.

On November 18 of that year, a fire broke out in the magnificently appointed Chinese ballroom at Eszterháza, the family palace—it was said to be modeled after Versailles—when two Chinese stoves, “more for show than for actual use,” as the Pressburger Zeitung put it, were lit to prepare for a wedding festivity and overheated. Flames quickly spread to the adjoining opera theater, which was totaled. The damage was devastating. “Two beautiful clocks,” the paper reported, “the magnificent theatrical costumes; all the music collected at great effort and expense; the musical instruments, including the beautiful harpsichord of the famous Kapellmeister Haiden [sic] . . . all were lost to the flames.” Although many of Haydn’s manuscripts were destroyed in the fire, the music to L’isola disabitata, which he was still working on, was in his four-room apartment in another wing, and so the premiere, which was set for December 6, went on as planned.

The only complete text by Pietro Metastasio, the extraordinarily popular eighteenth-century Italian poet, that Haydn set to music, L’isola disabitata tells the unlikely tale of two sisters who have lived alone on a island for thirteen years, after being stranded there during a storm at sea. (The opera ends well, when one sister’s husband, coincidentally imprisoned by pirates for the past thirteen years, returns to save his wife, conveniently bringing with him a mate for the other sister.) The opera was performed a few times during the composer’s life and rarely since (L’isola disabitata wasn’t alone in this fate: the other operas staged at Eszterháza that same season, by Paisiello, Astaritta, Anfossi, Gazzaniga, Sarti, Naumann, Franchi, Piccini, and Felici, also have all disappeared from the repertory).

The overture, one of Haydn’s best, was even published separately in the composer’s lifetime. It works perfectly as a typical curtain-raiser of the period, but, unlike many other wildly popular opera composers of the day, Haydn understood that the symphony was the future, and so his dramatic and impassioned overture, with its shifts in tempo and subject matter, reflects the style of the Sturm und Drang symphonies he also was composing at the time.

Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

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These notes appear in galley files and may contain typographical or other errors. Programs subject to change without notice.