Joseph Haydn: Sämtliche Ouvertüren auf 2 CDs

This collection of the 22 extant overtures by Joseph Haydn charts the course of the composer’s creative career from its beginnings in the late baroque, via Classicism to the onset of a wholly new, Romantic musical idiom. From Acide (1762 / 63) to The Seasons (1801), the programme comprises overtures to operas, German Singspiele and oratorios, testifying to Haydn’s unwavering creative power and his seemingly infinite potential for development. Although his operas remain largely unknown today, producing operatic entertainments – by himself or other composers – was one of Haydn’s main tasks during his long employment at the court of the Esterházy family. Especially after an opera house was built at the family’s estate at Eszterháza – the ‘Hungarian Versailles’ – these productions became famous, and even the Empress Maria Theresia is reported to have remarked: ‘If you want to hear a good opera, you must go to Eszterháza!’ The death of Prince Nikolaus Esterházy in 1790 marked the end of the wide-ranging musical activities at Eszterháza, and Haydn’s last opera, Orfeo ed Euridice, was in fact intended for production in London. The overtures of the later years were composed as introductions to the great oratorios. In these works, as Manfred Huss writes in his liner notes to this release, ‘Haydn opened the musical gates far into the nineteenth century.’ The Representation of Chaos, the overture to The Creation, was hailed by its contemporaries as the most revolutionary and modern music of its time, and in his last major work, The Seasons, Haydn continued along the same path, most clearly in the introduction to Winter. This development is particularly striking in the present recordings, which are based on the original parts used at the first performances, and not on the later, published versions. Haydn Sinfonietta Wien’s acclaimed recordings of these works were originally produced and released by the Koch / Schwann label, and have been remastered by BIS Records for this collection.