Haydn: Orlando Paladino – Jacobs

Somewhere around the second act, watching Rodomonte square off against Orlando while a chorus of cartoon soldiers mills about a castle the size of a dollhouse, you start to understand why nineteenth-century impresarios quietly let this piece gather dust. Not because the music fails — it doesn’t, not for a minute — but because Haydn wrote an opera that refuses to sit still in any single genre, and audiences, then as now, like to know what they’re supposed to feel.

Orlando Paladino is Haydn’s most ambitious stage work, composed in 1782 for Prince Nikolaus Esterházy’s name-day festivities, and it was — this bears repeating, because the piece’s obscurity suggests otherwise — a real success in its day, performed across German-speaking Europe well into the 1790s. Then it vanished. Sic transit. Haydn’s operatic reputation collapsed under the sheer gravitational pull of Mozart, whom Haydn himself, with characteristic generosity and something like awe, declared beyond comparison. Fair enough, perhaps, if you’re measuring dramatic psychology. But measure orchestral wit, measure the sheer inventiveness of the accompanied recitative, and Haydn holds his own rather better than his reputation allows.

The trouble, always, is Ariosto. Orlando furioso had already tempted Lully, Vivaldi, and Handel into various follies of adaptation, and Haydn’s librettist Nunziato Porta hacked out a version that mashes opera seria nobility against opera buffa slapstick with a shamelessness that would make Da Ponte blush. Rodomonte, King of Barbary, wants Angelica. Angelica wants nothing to do with him and enlists the sorceress Alcina instead. Orlando, meanwhile, has gone mad with jealousy over Angelica’s preference for the shepherd Medoro — mad enough that only the sudden appearance of a sea monster (rendered here, memorably, as an enormous pair of scissors trundled across the stage) can interrupt his rampage. Alcina eventually turns him to stone, which turns out to be the kindest thing anyone does for him all evening, and washes his madness away like so much stage paint. Everybody pairs off. Curtain.

Nigel Lowery and Amir Hosseinpour, directing here, clearly took one look at this plot and decided the only honest response was total surrender to its lunacy. Bearded ladies wander the sets. The castles look drawn by a gifted, slightly unhinged child. There’s a deliberate, and mostly successful, panto sensibility at work — nobody plays this for Racine-like gravity, thank goodness, because the moment a production tries to impose psychological coherence on Porta’s libretto the whole enterprise curdles.

Musically, though, this is vintage Haydn — sly, symphonic, endlessly resourceful. The overture alone tells you everything: a bustling sonata movement that keeps threatening to turn serious and then winks at itself instead. Tom Randle’s Orlando has the vocal heft for the character’s fits of rage, and he finds, remarkably, real pathos in the “mad scene” — that extended accompanied recitative where the orchestra fractures into agitated tremolandos and abrupt key shifts, Haydn’s most Gluckian pages, honestly, and among the most dramatically sophisticated things he ever wrote for the stage. Marlis Petersen’s Angelica sings with a bright, agile soprano that navigates the coloratura demands without turning brittle — no mean feat, given how relentlessly Haydn tests upper-register stamina in her big arias. Pietro Spagnoli’s Rodomonte blusters magnificently, all swagger and low comedy, a voice that seems to enjoy its own pomposity.

Is it Mozart? No — and Haydn knew it wasn’t, said as much himself, with the kind of self-effacement that historians have taken rather too literally ever since. But the comparison is beside the point. What Haydn achieves here, especially in the ensembles — those tumbling finales where seria and buffa characters collide within a single musical texture — is something Mozart himself learned from, not the reverse chronologically perhaps, but certainly in spirit. The wind writing throughout has that unmistakable Esterházy-orchestra transparency: oboes and bassoons given real conversational lines, not mere doubling.

After Orlando Paladino, and its successor Armida the following year, Haydn essentially abandoned the opera house — one more opera, L’anima del filosofo, would follow in 1791, unperformed in his lifetime, a quiet coda to a career that could have gone differently. Watching this production, alive to its own absurdity and unafraid of the piece’s genuine strangeness, you feel the loss. Not because Haydn would have out-Mozarted Mozart. But because nobody else was writing comedy quite this inventive, this generous, this strange. Recommended, with the caveat that you surrender your expectations at the door — as, evidently, the production itself already has.