Sarti's Giulio Sabino, Haydn's Armida, and the Arrival of Opera Seria at Eszterháza

Éponine et Sabinus (1802) by Nicolas-André Monsiau

Abstract

With the production of Giuseppe Sarti's Giulio Sabino in 1783, opera seria arrived at Eszterháza. First performed in Venice in 1781, Giulio Sabino became perhaps the best-known and most popular opera seria of the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Its dramatic accompanied recitatives and melodious arias were known not only through performances in Italy, Germany, England, Spain, Poland, Austria, and Hungary, but also through publication of the opera, engraved in full score within two years of the Venetian premiere—extremely unusual treatment for an Italian opera of any kind. Not only was the opera a clear winner; so was its author. In 1784 Sarti was appointed to one of the most prestigious and lucrative musical positions in Europe, that of maestro di cappella to the Russian imperial court. In analysing Giulio Sabino as a work that simultaneously follows in the traditions of Metastasian opera seria and embodies modern, neoclassical aesthetics, this essay compares its dramatic situations to those depicted in the history paintings of Jacques-Louis David and his contemporaries and reproduces depictions of Julius Sabinus and his wife Epponina by Jean-Baptiste Greuze and Benjamin West.

    Giulio Sabino was an immediate and lasting success at Eszterháza, performed no fewer than nineteen times during 1783 and revived in 1784, 1786, and 1787. During the 1780s the Eszterháza troupe performed many more opere serie, including Sarti's Didone abbandonata, Bianchi's Alessandro nelle Indie, and a pasticcio Motezuma. Comic operas continued to be performed. But opera seria was now an essential part of the repertory, as it certainly had not been before the triumph of Giulio Sabino. A repertorial change of direction had occurred, and Giulio Sabino had played a pivital role in that change of direction.

    More important still was the effect that Sarti's opera had on Prince Nicolaus Esterhazy's Kapellmeister. On 18 June 1783, less than a month after the first performance of Giulio Sabino at Eszterháza, Joseph Haydn wrote to his publisher Artaria: "P.S. As for the pianoforte sonatas with violin and bass, you must be patient for I am just now composing a new opera seria." 

    That opera seria was Armida, Haydn's first attempt at the genre. Perhaps he was inspired by the success of Giulio Sabino; perhaps Prince Nicolaus, impressed by Sarti's opera, commanded his composer to try his hand at the same genre. The influence of Giulio Sabino can be sensed in both the choice of the libretto for Haydn's opera in Haydn's music as well.

     It is thus fitting that when Sarti visited Eszterháza in 1784 (on his journey to St. Petersburg), he arrived just as a performance of Armida was about to begin. Sarti found a place in the theater, according to Nicholas Etienne Framery: 

During the whole  first act the beauty of the pieces that followed one another astonished, charmed, enchanted him; he applauded with enthusiasm; but toward the end of the second act he could contain himself no longer. In a sort of delirium he rose and jumped over the benches that separated him from the orchestra, and lept to embrace the astonished maestro. "It's Sarti who embraces you," he cried out. "Sarti, who wanted to see the great Haydn, to admire his beautiful works, but who had no hope of admiring anything so beautiful as this!" The prince, who, from the back of his box, saw the extraordinary and disorderly commotion, but could hear nothing, was alarmed, and shouted, "What is it? What's going on? What's happening?" "It's Giulio Sabino," answered Haydn loudly, seized by the same enthusiasm. "It's the author of that superb music; it's Sarti, who has come to see his good friend Joseph." And these two great men, these two friends, who were seeing each other for the first time, embraced and swore a friendship comparable to the esteem they held for one another.

The complete article appeared in Haydn Yearbook 15 (1984), 181–98 (on Academia.edu) and, in Italian translation, in Haydn, ed. Andrea Lanza (Bologna, 1999). For further discussion of operatic treatments of Julius Sabinus, with a review of the more recent literature, see Andrea Chegai, "Cherubini autore d'opera italiana: Percorsi di formazione," in Cherubini al "Cherubini" nel 250o anniversario della nascita, ed Sergio Miceli (Florence, 2011), 19–57 (link to article), specifically pp. 33–45; and, on Haydn's Armida, Daniel Heartz, Mozart, Haydn, and Early Beethoven, 1781–1802 (New York, 2009), 334–41.