When we think of Haydn, what comes to mind? Maybe the two late, great oratorios: The Creation and The Seasons. Or his vast number of symphonies, or his string quartets, or the masses. Not, perhaps, the baryton trios (of which there are more than 125); nor, for that matter, the operas, though again there are plenty. To a degree Haydn’s operas – and those by a host of his late-18th-century contemporaries, successful in their day but obscure in ours – have been sidelined due to our understandable fascination with Mozart’s and, to a lesser degree, our admiration of Gluck’s. Many composers of the Classical period specialised in opera. Though in his enormous and comprehensive output, Haydn could be said – paradoxically – to have specialised in everything, he would have regarded his operas as representing an important strand of his work.
