Halbzeit Oder Hochzeit

"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.

Around the middle of it 18th century began a basic stylistic A radical change in the history of music: the Baroque took its farewell and classical music made its entrance. Georg Philipp Telemann was one of the first to perceive and enthusiastically take up the new, fresh wind. At an age at which others have long since retired, a second creative spring almost began for him: the German Singspiel had just been launched by composers of the young generation, such as Hiller and Dittersdorf, the 80-year-old Telemann sits down with a 20-year-old librettist and sets the story of "Don Quixote at the Marriage of Comacho" to music full of wit and grace.