Acide e Galatea

Composer: HAYDN, Joseph
  • Haydn’s one-act “festa teatrale” Acide (“Acis and Galatea”) was composed in 1762. (“Acide” is actually the piece’s full title.)1
  • This work premiered in July 1763 during festivities surrounding the marriage of Anton, the eldest son of Haydn’s patron Prince Paul Anton [Pál Antal] Esterházy.2
  • Acide was adapted from Pietro Metastasio’s Galatea.3 Metastasio was the preeminent writer of opera seria libretti and his texts were set repeatedly from the Baroque through the end of the Classical period.
    • A few of the composers who set Metastasio’s libretti: Haydn’s teacher Nicola Porpora; Scarlatti, Vivaldi, Handel, J.C. Bach, Cherubini, Gluck, Cimarosa, Mozart.4
  • Haydn revised Acide in 1773. The revised manuscript is incomplete, but it does contain this overture.5
  • The overture is in three movements, like a short classical symphony. This was common among Italian opera seria overtures at the time6 (in fact, opera overtures were among the ancestors of the Classical symphony)7
  • Fun fact: The hero, Acis, is turned into a fountain in this opera, but that doesn’t stop him (the fountain) from singing in the closing quartet.8

Sources

  1. H.C. Robbins et al, “Joseph Haydn,” Encyclopædia Brittanica (May 27, 2019), accessed October 22, 2019, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Joseph-Haydn.
  2. Ibid.
  3. Georg Feder and James Webster, “Haydn, (Franz) Joseph,” Grove Music Online (2001), accessed October 22, 2019, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000044593.
  4. Don Neville, “Metastasio [Trapassi], Pietro,” Grove Music Online (2001), accessed October 22, 2019, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000053181.
  5. Karl Geiringer, Irene Geiringer, Haydn: A Creative Life in Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 239.
  6. Ibid.
  7. Harvard Dictionary of Music, 4th ed., s.v. “Symphony” (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003).
  8. Geiringer and Geiringer, Haydn: A Creative Life in Music, 239.

Cut IDs

21552