Music City Dresden

Program # 2 Merely „Nice and Pleasant“?: Dresden’s Court Opera in the 18th Century

Welcome! I’m Michael Rothe, taking you on another musical journey to Dresden. Although tucked away in an eastern corner of present-day Germany, it can claim perhaps the richest musical tradition of any German city. Centuries ago, the musical establishment at the court of Saxony was famous all across Europe. And in 2005, the rededication of the Frauenkirche serves to remind the world of Dresden’s former glory. In this half hour we’ll focus on opera at the Saxon court in the 18th century, as exemplified by the composer Johann Adolf Hasse and his opera “Cleofide.“

Johann Adolf Hasse (1699-1783) Cleofide, Opera: Overture (beginning) 2:11 Cappella Coloniensis Cond: William Christie LC 08748, Capriccio 10 193/96, (CD1, Take 1)

Point to a specific date symbolizing the rise to prominence of music at the baroque court of Saxony in Dresden, and that date would certainly be September 13, 1731, when “Cleofide“ premiered in the opera house of the Zwinger palace. We’ve just heard the overture. Often times in the annals of music, a certain work is associated with a certain event – say, a princely wedding in an era when all artistic life was centered at court. There was no such impetus for “Cleofide,“ yet no resources were spared in the lavish production. The guest list was impressive. Johann Sebastian Bach attended on personal invitation from the court. The venerable Cantor of St. Thomas had come from Leipzig, Saxony’s other great city, a day’s coach ride to the west. Bach was engaged to play an organ recital the following day, September 14, at Dresden’s church of St. Sophia that boasted an instrument by one of the most famous organ builders of that time, Gottfried Silbermann.

But back to the composer Johann Adolf Hasse. Thirty-three years old, he’d already notched up operatic successes during his years in Italy, but for him, this elaborate production of “Cleofide“ marked the high point thus far. And so it was also for his new wife, whom he’d brought with him from Italy, the illustrious and attractive Faustina Bordoni, a prima donna at the pinnacle of her career. She sang the title role. Hiring Hasse the year before had been a coup for the Elector of Saxony. Frederick Augustus, an enthusiast of Italian opera, was determined to acquire a permanent Italian stage ensemble at court in Dresden. So he’d bid for the services of Johann Adolf Hasse, a native of Hamburg who was making a name for himself as an opera -2-

composer in Italy. There was a competing faction at court however that favored French theater and ballet. That faction was led by the Elector’s aging father, Augustus the Strong. Although the elder sovereign is said to have made advances toward the Italian singer Faustina Bordoni, that didn’t expedite the establishment of an Italian opera company. That had to wait until Frederick Augustus II acceded to the throne after his father’s death four years later.

Anyway, the big production of “Cleofide“ in 1731 marks the beginning of the Hasse era in Dresden, an era that, despite the composer’s many lengthy foreign trips, went on for more than three decades. A golden age of opera and music culture in Dresden and in all of Germany in the 18th century. In fact, not too many people are aware of this nowadays, but after about 1840, when Handel in London stopped writing operas, Johann Adolf Hasse was the most respected and influential composer of operas in all of Europe – and he remained so until the 1760's and the advent of Gluck. And Hasse plied his art in one of the most splendid architectural and cultural establishments to be found anywhere. That was a credit to Augustus the Strong, one of the continent’s most powerful rulers. It was Augustus who’d commissioned Matthäus Daniel Pöppelmann, the architect of many of Dresden’s baroque treasures, to build the exquisite palatial residence known as the Zwinger. Augustus furthermore reorganized and expanded the Dresden court’s art collections and is responsible for the castles of Moritzburg and Pillnitz and the world-famous art of porcelain-making at Meissen. When Hasse came to Dresden, two further landmarks of the city, the Frauenkirche built by Georg Bähr and the court church by Gaetano Chiaveri, weren’t completed yet, but they would be during his tenure there. All these landmarks transformed Dresden into what is often called “Florence on the Elbe River.“

But back now to “Cleofide.“ A key work of Hasse’s Dresden years, it’s fairly representative of his overall output, so we’re taking all the music selections in this program from that one opera. In this aria, a leading character makes his entrance: none other than Alexander the Great, the legendary conqueror of the fourth century B.C. Leading male roles in the operas of that time were sung by castrati ; today we hear them sung most commonly by a countertenor. That’s Dominique Visse in this recording of the aria Vil trofeo d´un alma imbelle.

Johann Adolf Hasse Cleofide, Opera: Vil trofeo d´un alma imbelle: 3:55 aria from Act 1, No. 7 (beginning) Dominique Visse Cappella Coloniensis Cond: William Christie LC 08748, Capriccio 10 193/96, (CD 1, Take 7)

Johann Adolf Hasse’s “Cleofide,“ a three-act, four-hour opera, was a sensation at the -3-

1731 premiere. The libretto was adapted from one by the “pope“ of baroque opera librettists, Pietro Metastasio. Nearly completely lacking in choruses, the opera develops in a fairly regular alternation of self-contained recitatives and solo arias or duets that all follow the conventional da capo format, with the first part repeated at the end. The plot is almost ludicrously complex, but it does have moments of drama. It celebrates the magnanimous character of Alexander the Great, and as such was undoubtedly intended to hold up a kind of mirror to the courtly patron, Augustus the Strong, Prince Elector of Saxony and King of Poland. In his campaign of world conquest, Alexander has defeated the armies of King Poros, a ruler in India. He, however, refuses to bend to the will of the victor and insolently asks Alexander by what right he, Alexander, had ventured from his home to disturb the peace of distant lands. Something that sounds like an early criticism of Eurocentrism! Well, this particular Alexander being a somewhat unrealistic bundle of mildness and generosity, gives King Poros his freedom. Only, there’s one complicating factor: both Alexander and Poros love the beautiful Cleophis – Cleofide in Italian – who rules a different part of India. Moreover, there are factions agitating to bring about the downfall of Alexander. In the end, recognizing that Cleophis loves only Poros, Alexander magnanimously steps aside and renounces his claim on her, and even grants pardons to the “bad guys“ conspiring against him.

Clearly, it’s a libretto that stretches modern sensibilities beyond the point of credulity. But let’s hear what composer Hasse makes of it, for example in Cleophis’s declaration of love for Poros in the second act, Digli ch’io son fedele, here sung by Emma Kirkby.

Johann Adolf Hasse Cleofide, Opera: Digli ch´io son fedele 4:22 aria from Act 2, No. 40 (beginning) Emma Kirkby Cappella Coloniensis Cond: William Christie LC 08748, Capriccio 10 193/96, (CD 3, Take 2)

A musical language that breaks with the conventions of the high baroque. A new ideal of simplicity and naturalness. In Hasse’s aesthetics, more like the young Mozart than the established Handel, gallantry and emotional appeal go hand-in-hand. And the public responded warmly. So did Charles Burney, an English critic and a contemporary of Hasse:

Quote: In equal measures a friend of poetry and of the voice, he demonstrates good judgment as much as genius, in both the expressiveness of the words and in the -4-

accompaniment of the lovely and delicate melodies that he gives to the singers. He consistently regards the voice as the central focus of attention on the stage action and never overpowers it with the learned chatter of myriad instruments or elaborate accompanying movements.

But we also have a less effusive commentary on Hasse by another contemporary, Johann Sebastian Bach. After 1731, Bach made several visits to Dresden and attended opera performances there. According to Bach’s biographer Johann Nikolaus Forkel,

Quote: He would usually be accompanied there by his eldest son. And often he was in the habit of saying to him in jest, in the days before their departure: ‘Friedemann, shall we not go hear a few pretty songs of the Dresdeners again?’ But I’m convinced that this was an innocent little joke that Bach would have uttered to no-one else than his own eldest son, whose own musical sensibilities had by then ripened to the point where he could distinguish between what is great in art and what is merely nice and pleasant.

So, in the eyes of that biographer, Bach is great, but Hasse merely nice and pleasant? Well, I think Bach’s own opinion of the “pretty songs of the Dresdeners“ was more charitable than that ironic description and Forkel’s interpretation of it suggest. We do know that Bach esteemed Hasse, and that Hasse’s admiration for Bach was unreserved – in fact, together with his wife, Hasse went to Leipzig to visit him. Of course, Bach never had any aspirations of becoming another Hasse, but remained true to his own harmonically and contrapuntally complex style. At any rate, this next excerpt from “Cleofide,“ more than just a “pretty song,” shows the heights of incisiveness and depths of emotion that Hasse could achieve. From act three, it’s an aria of Cleophis in which she expresses her weariness over being torn between Alexander and Poros.

Johann Adolf Hasse Cleofide, Opera: Perder l´amato bene 5:19 aria from Act 3, No. 65 (conclusion) Emma Kirkby Cappella Coloniensis Cond: William Christie LC 08748, Capriccio 10 193/96, (CD 4, Take 11)

All good things come to an end, as did the reigns of Augustus the Strong and his son Frederick Augustus II. A golden age of cultural flowering. The decisive year was 1763, when the Peace of Hubertusburg brought the Seven-Year War to an end. Essentially a -5-

power struggle between Prussia and Austria, that war had drawn in allies throughout Europe and even in North America and had decisive consequences for all. In the final stages, Saxony suffered bitterly for having allied itself with Austria: Prussian armies laid waste to much of the principality and bombarded many of Dresden’s architectural treasures. 1763 stands out further as a historical line of demarcation by the deaths of the art-loving but politically naive Prince Elector Frederick Augustus II and of his Minister Brühl. At the same time, the Polish royal crown was wrested from the Saxon rulers. Poland’s new Russian overlords would not tolerate any more members of the house of Wettin to also occupy the throne in Warsaw. As true then as it seems to be now: in times of austerity, the arts seem to be the first to experience budget cuts. In 1763, Hasse’s entire opera company was dismissed in hasty and mysterious circumstances. Hasse moved to Venice but maintained connections to the Saxon court. He wrote some of his late masses for the church there. But the court opera didn’t recover for quite some time. It took a century before opera in Dresden reached a comparable peak – and then it was German opera, not Italian. Its new star would then be a young firebrand by the name of Richard Wagner, and his early triumphs were celebrated not in the theater of the Zwinger palace, but at a new civic opera house soon to be world famous – the Semper Opera. But that’s a topic for another program in this series. Let’s conclude this one now with another excerpt from Johann Adolf Hasse’s “Cleofide,“ where we once again find Alexander in a most noble- minded mood, having just granted freedom to Poros and Cleophis. In a final ensemble and chorus, the entire company praises the virtues of generosity, loyalty and love.

Johann Adolf Hasse Cleofide, Opera: Al nostro consolo 3:09 Chorus from Act 3, No. 69 (conclusion) Rheinische Kantorei Cappella Coloniensis Cond: William Christie LC 08748, Capriccio 10 193/96, (CD 4, Take 15)

You’ve been listening to the second installment of a ten-part broadcast series from Deutsche Welle Radio, Music City Dresden. Our focus on today’s program has been opera at the Saxon court in Dresden in the 18th century, when for a span of about twenty-five years Dresden was the center of Europe’s operatic world, thanks to the presence there of the illustrious composer Johann Adolf Hasse. All of the musical excerpts in this program were taken from a complete recording of his opera “Cleofide“ with soloists Emma Kirkby and Dominique Visse, choristers of the Rheinische Kantorei and instrumentalists of the Capella Coloniensis, all under the direction of William Christie. That recording was released on the Capriccio label. I’d like to thank author Markus Schwering, editor and producer Rick Fulker and studio engineer Thomas Schmidt for their contributions to this collaborative effort; my name -6-

is Michael Rothe. And thanks to you for listening today.