Mayr Amor

Based, like Beethoven’s opera Fidelio, on the original French libretto by Jean-Nicolas Bouilly, Mayr’s opera L’amor coniugale (Conjugal Love) won considerable success at its first performance in Padua in 1805. The story of the faithful wife seeking the release of her innocent husband from unjust imprisonment and imminent death, by disguising herself as a boy and serving as assistant to the gaoler, is transposed, in Mayr’s version, from real events during the French Revolution to personal conflict and inter-personal relationships in the exotic setting of seventeenth-century Poland.

No one did more to combine in his operas the innovations of the Viennese classical composers, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, with the Italian ideal of bel canto than Johann Simon Mayr, the Bavarian composer who rose to fame in Italy. His opera Saffo, first performed in 1794, dates from his years in Venice. Not only was it his first opera but it was premièred at the Teatro La Fenice where it was enthusiastically received. It is full of surprising and striking elements, with a strong musical realisation of the text, supportive string and woodwind writing and vivid solo and choral effects. Set by the Rock of Leucas, from which unsuccessful lovers leap to their deaths, the opera deals with the poetess Sappho’s unhappy love for Phaon, finally resolved in a happy ending.

Giovanni Mayr is known today primarily as the teacher of Donizetti, but in the very late 1700s and first two decades of the 1800s, this German-born, Italian-by-adoption composer was all the operatic rage, combining the fiorature and niceties of Italian vocal writing with a German penchant for orchestration (Medea’s opening aria has a violin obbligato of the type that you simply do not find with the Italians, for instance). Medea in Corinto is considered Mayr’s masterpiece; in fact, it’s a long score, not quite as poweful as Cherubini’s, but with plenty of flavor of its own.

It is only in the last few years, largely as a result of the pioneering performances of the Simon Mayr Chorus and Ensemble conducted by Franz Hauk, that Mayr has come to be valued as one of the most significant composers of operatic and sacred music of his time. Il sagrifizio di Jefte (The Sacrifice of Jephtha), first performed in 1795, is a dramatic oratorio with a wealth of variety in both the vocal and instrumental writing, which foreshadows the operas to come.

Mayr's Telemaco was a product of turbulent political times in the Republic of Venice, which had been occupied by Napoleon's troops in late 1796. Military elements, with incorporated marches, feature strongly in a score that brought to contemporary Venetian theatre many of the innovative elements that were in vogue on the operatic stages of Paris. Taking classical Greek mythological material, Mayr fashioned an opera full of colour, interweaving instrumental interludes and dances into his arias, cavatinas and choruses, and crafting his own very personal vision of the nwe Italian opera seria.

A daring wife disguises herself in order to be hired as a prison guard and thus rescue her unjustly detained husband: the story of Leonora, taken from the French novel by Jean-Nicolas Bouilly, is familiar to us through Beethoven’s only opera.

Les Menestrels - In Gottes Namen fahren wir - Musik aus der Zeit der Babenberger (1995) {ORF "Edition Alte Musik" CD 48}
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© 1995 Les Menestrels / ORF "Edition Alte Musik" | CD 48
Classical / Medieval / Early Music / Vocal

Les Menestrels, Wiener Ensemble für Alte Musik. Great medieval music. Rare polyphony and choral. Perfect!