HAYDN SALZBURGER HOFMUSIK BRUNNER - WEDDING ON THE ALPINE PASTURE CD

SKU/Barcode: 881488606126

When the ci-hitty gets into a bu-hoys sy-hist-em, he loses his a-hankerin' for the cou-huntry. So intones W.C. Fields in his Yukon-based Victorian absurdist two-reeler The Fatal Glass of Beer (1933). However, if the city you lived in was Salzburg, Austria, the idea of "a-hankerin' for the cou-huntry" was a popular one, and Salzburg's court composer Johann Michael Haydn paid tribute to it through these two little "Abbey operettas" written not for a civic theater, but for the theater at the Benedictine University in Salzburg. Haydn's singspiel Die Hochzeit auf der Alm (The Wedding on the Alpine Pasture, 1763) was intended as a mere opener to Salzburg scribbler Florian Reichssiegel's ponderous five-act Latin tragedy Pietas conjugalis in Sigismundo et Maria; however, it was the singspiel that won the day. Die Hochzeit auf der Alm proved a major hit, performed widely throughout Bavaria and Austria, mostly in theaters attached to seminaries. It was revived several times in Haydn's own lifetime and widely circulated in manuscript, published both in whole and in part, though the "in part" editions generally wound up being presented as symphonies and accredited to Michael Haydn's older brother Joseph. Die Hochzeit auf der Alm does include four instrumental movements that can be extracted into a symphony in the very order they appear in the work. One thing it does not include is a wedding, nor for that matter does Reichssiegel's story make much sense at all, and he further clouded the issue by adding unnecessary set pieces of which no more than the melodies now survive. Salzburger Hofmusik's musical director Wolfgang Brunner has rectified the situation by reconstructing orchestral parts to these sections. The appeal, nevertheless, was not in Reichssiegel's convoluted story but in Michael Haydn's lively, countrified fiddle music and in the settings, which decked out the modest university theaters in the manner of a Bavarian Inn. To fill out the program, Salzburger Hofmusik has paired Die Hochzeit auf der Alm with an amusing lustspiel, Der Bassgeiger zu W rgl (The Bass Player of W rgl, 1773 or so), in which drunken stock character Bartl tricks his way into the house even though Silly Liesl refuses him entry owing to his inebriated condition. There is nothing serious about either of these works; they constitute the lowbrow, popular entertainment that was enjoyed in German-speaking lands in the mid-to-late eighteenth century. It is a pity that Profil did not see fit to include texts, or even Internet links to texts, for these works and the recording has a burnished, rather narrow sound quality. The performances, though, are very good, and as usual, soprano Dorothee Mields is excellent in both works in terms of singing and characterization. Profil's Joseph Michael Haydn: Die Hochzeit auf der Alm is a highly enjoyable piece of rural froth and fluff, a draught that perhaps even W.C. Fields might have found amusing.