Haugwitz and the patriotic opera museum at the Vienna Court Theatre

Haugwitz’s interest in reviving eighteenth-century operas by Gluck and Salieri should be understood within the context of broader patriotic tendencies that shaped the repertoire of the Vienna Court Theatre in the first decade of the nineteenth century. These tendencies originated in the 1790s, when the reintroduction of a German opera company under the directorship of Peter von Braun provoked intense patriotic debates, in which various court officials criticised Italian opera and celebrated German works as exemplary of their understanding of Austrian cultural identity.Footnote ¹¹ The construction of this new company’s German repertoire initially paralleled developments in German-language theatre throughout the late eighteenth century. As Austin Glatthorn has shown, most late eighteenth-century German opera companies relied on standardised repertoire and a balance of ‘familiarity with novelty’ to maintain audience interest.Footnote ¹² After 1806, however, the Vienna Court Theatre partially shifted toward repertoire that was archaic and unfamiliar to contemporary audiences, staging works that were decades old, had never been performed in Vienna – and did not necessarily appeal to theatre-goers.

This move carried a clear political dimension and coincided with the disbandment of the Italian opera ensemble in the spring of 1806. The political significance of this repertoire shift was tied to the profound transformations within the Habsburg monarchy. In the wake of the 1804 proclamation of Emperor Francis II as Austrian Emperor Francis I and the 1806 dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire, Viennese culture increasingly emphasised notions of cultural patriotism.Footnote ¹³ As Claudio Vellutini has noted, moreover, following Austria’s cession of its Italian territories to France in the Treaty of Pressburg (26 December 1805), Italian opera increasingly came to be regarded as a foreign import, which further intensified the focus on German-language repertoire.Footnote ¹⁴ At the Vienna Court Theatre, these political shifts shaped cultural policies under the directorship of the Gesellschaft der Kavaliere, a group of Viennese music patrons who took over management from Braun on 1 January 1807. One of the most explicitly patriotic outcomes of the Gesellschaft’s policies was the revival of Gluck’s operas, which, according to Vellutini, ‘filled the void left by Italian opera seria … in the highbrow realm of tragic opera’.Footnote ¹⁵ Gluck operas produced at the Vienna Court Theatre during this period are listed in Table A1 (Appendix A). Andreas Mayer has shown that the cultivation of Gluck’s music in Vienna, which was supported by the activities of the soprano Anna Milder-Hauptmann and her colleague, baritone Johann Michael Vogl, were part of a larger movement to promote Austrian patriotism and German cultural consciousness at the time of the wars with Napoleonic France.Footnote ¹⁶ Eric Schneeman has gone as far as to suggest that the Gluck revival at the Vienna court opera may have been intended ‘to reclaim Gluck from the French’.Footnote ¹⁷ During the first two decades of the nineteenth century, furthermore, German critics (starting with E.T.A. Hoffmann and Ignaz von Mosel) claimed Gluck’s operas as part of the German (as opposed to French and Italian) cultural heritage and viewed his French operas, and particularly Iphigénie en Tauride, as models for future German grand opera.Footnote ¹⁸

Closely related to these efforts to construct a canon of serious historical ‘German’ operas were the Vienna Court Theatre’s productions of Mozart’s Idomeneo in 1806 (originally produced in Munich in 1781 and performed in Vienna only in concert in 1786) and La clemenza di Tito in 1811. Unlike earlier traditions of German opera in Vienna and elsewhere, the Court Theatre largely presented works that – apart from Tito – did not belong to the standard German or Italian repertoire in Habsburg Central Europe.Footnote ¹⁹

Contemporary critics in Vienna and beyond initially regarded these operas as archaic and out of step with prevailing tastes.Footnote ²⁰ Such attitudes are evident, for instance, in a review of the first German production of Idomeneo in Kassel in 1802. The reviewer thought the music was perhaps too sophisticated to be appreciated by the audience:

Discussing the same Kassel production, the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung reviewer likewise emphasised the complexity of Idomeneo’s music but insisted that mainstream German audiences could – and should – be cultivated to appreciate such a work:

It is plausible that under Braun’s directorship – and even more so under the Gesellschaft – the Vienna Court Theatre presented Idomeneo and later the Gluck operas with a similar aim: to cultivate both the aesthetic sensibilities and patriotic sentiments of Viennese audiences.

It was during the first decade of the nineteenth century that Haugwitz’s operatic interests began to take shape. Although he was a Moravian count, he was clearly a product of the cultural and political developments in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Habsburg Austria. His family originally came from Silesia, one of the Bohemian crownlands, much of which the Habsburgs had lost to Prussia during the War of the Austrian Succession. Despite the Silesian origins, Haugwitz’s great uncle Friedrich Wilhelm Haugwitz (1702–62) became one of the main proponents of Maria Theresa’s centralising reforms in the 1750s, which led to his appointment as the Supreme Chancellor of the United Court Chancery.Footnote ²³ In 1752, Friedrich Wilhelm also purchased the Namiest estate, beginning the family’s association with another Bohemian crownland, Moravia. Although it was formally part of the Bohemian crown, Moravia’s aristocratic elites often pursued policies distinct from those of Bohemia proper and maintained closer ties with the Habsburg Austrian sphere.Footnote ²⁴ Heinrich Wilhelm Haugwitz himself no longer held a prominent governmental post, but he remained closely connected to Austrian elite circles and divided his time between Vienna and Namiest. His cultural activities therefore reflected a multilayered identity: he was both a member of the Habsburg Austrian patriotic elite and a Moravian patriot, with many of his operatic adaptations published in the regional capital, Brünn (Brno). In the early nineteenth century, regional patriotism among local elites in the Habsburg lands was strongly tied to the German language, although significant portions of the Moravian regions controlled by Haugwitz would later identify as Czech, and likely spoke that language during his lifetime.Footnote ²⁵ Haugwitz’s operatic activities, especially his creation of new German adaptations of musical ‘masterpieces’ by composers associated with Habsburg lands, thus aligned with the multilayered German-language-based imperial patriotism of Viennese cultural elites of the early 1800s.

Although Haugwitz’s operatic tastes were heavily shaped by the Viennese patriotic repertoire from around 1810, he gradually became more reclusive, and by the mid-1810s he no longer followed new developments in the theatres of the imperial metropolis. This shift is clearly reflected in his financial records, which provide detailed information about his purchases of musical scores and his participation in Viennese theatrical life. A comparison of two three-month periods a decade apart (1805 and 1815) illustrates the change in his interests (see Appendix B). In the first three months of 1805, the financial logs record more than twenty-five visits to Viennese theatres, sometimes even noting the specific works he attended – for example, Salieri’s Axur, re d’Ormus, Weigl’s Die Uniform, Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail and Don Giovanni. The operatic scores he purchased during this period closely mirrored the current Viennese theatre repertoire, including Salieri’s Axur, Grétry’s Raoul Barbe-bleue (Theater an der Wien in 1804), Dalayrac’s Léon, ou Le chateau de Montenero (Theater an der Wien, 1804) and Paer’s I fuorusciti (Court Theatre, 1804). By contrast, in the first three months of 1815 Haugwitz attended far fewer performances – only thirteen are recorded – and he no longer acquired scores of operas staged in Viennese theatres. Instead, his purchases focused primarily on masses and cantatas, including works by Naumann and Salieri. Although he was not purchasing contemporary works in his later years, Haugwitz kept reworking and performing some of the operas he acquired in his earlier years, especially the works of Gluck and Salieri. Thus, whereas the operas of these composers became increasingly rare at the Viennese stages, the Namiest theatre represented a time capsule of the Viennese operatic trends from the first decade of the century.

Salieri and Austrian cultural patriotism

Although Salieri’s works were not staged as part of the patriotic German repertoire at the Court Theatre, Viennese commentators, including Haugwitz and his friend Ignaz von Mosel, held the composer’s music in high regard and appropriated it for their ideological agendas. In this respect, the reception of Salieri’s serious operas was analogous to that of Mozart and Gluck, whose works came to be regarded as German masterworks despite being written in Italian and shaped by the conventions of Italian opera, conventions that German-language commentators, including Haugwitz, would later criticise. As Rudolph Angermüller has noted, in the final decades of his life, Salieri moved within a German national circle in Vienna that included Mosel, dramatist Heinrich Joseph von Collin, composer and music archivist Abbé Maximilian Stadler and Moritz von Dietrichstein, one of the directors of the Court Theatre in the 1820s.Footnote ²⁶

Salieri, moreover, was himself deeply involved in the Gluck revivals and cultivated his image as a Gluck follower. After the premiere of the first Viennese patriotic Gluck production, Iphigénie en Tauride in 1807, one reviewer praised ‘the direction of the much-accomplished Salieri’.Footnote ²⁷ Following the Court Theatre’s production of Gluck’s Alceste, Mosel emphasised that Salieri, one of the music directors at the theatre, always conducted Gluck’s operas himself and did so ‘out of commendable respect for his late friend and teacher’.Footnote ²⁸ This respect also translated into regrets that Salieri’s own music had disappeared from Viennese stages, most prominently voiced in Mosel’s 1827 biography of the composer. Discussing both the success of the 1817 Paris revival of Les Danaïdes and the opera’s original 1784 production in Paris, Mosel presents it as a national embarrassment that the work had never been produced on a German stage:

This passage is striking in that it contrasts Salieri’s Les Danaïdes – an opera written for Paris and never performed in Vienna – with ‘compositions from distant lands’, thereby suggesting that Salieri’s operas were essentially the works of a local artist, of whom Mosel and his circle could think as belonging to Austrian, Viennese and likely even German culture. Even in the late eighteenth century, Salieri’s place of origin did not necessarily mean that he was regarded as an Italian composer, instead, as Glatthorn points out, after he became a music director in Vienna the German-language journal Theater-Kalender auf das Jahr referred to Salieri as a ‘resident’ composer and did not mention his Italian background.Footnote ²⁹

Thus, although Salieri was of Italian origin, Haugwitz and his associates venerated him as a composer of central importance within Austria’s increasingly patriotic musical tradition. Numerous examples of Salieri’s portrayal as a Viennese, Austrian and even German composer appear in Mosel’s 1827 biography, where he repeatedly refers to him as ‘our master’ (unser Meister), presents him as Gluck’s artistic heir, and even claims that Axur surpasses Mozart’s operas, such as La clemenza di Tito.Footnote ³⁰ Similar ideas emerge even more prominently in Haugwitz’s writings. Most notably, in the preface – likely written in 1828 – to his collected adaptations of Salieri’s operas, Haugwitz presents Salieri as the culmination of a distinctly Germanic lineage:

Haugwitz therefore subscribed to a distinct view of music history, one that is quite different from narratives developed in later years. Already in the 1820s, for example, some critics and historians were beginning to view Salieri as an aberration within the grand narrative of music history, presenting him as the less successful opponent to Mozart.Footnote ³²

Haugwitz’s appreciation of Salieri was based on a personal relationship. As Mosel noted in his biography of the composer, Salieri frequently conducted Haugwitz’s orchestra, both in Vienna and in Namiest, ‘where nature and art in beautiful harmony granted our master many summer days full of enjoyment’.Footnote ³³ Salieri’s close relationship to Haugwitz is also attested by the fact that the composer entrusted the autograph of his Requiem to Haugwitz. In a letter dated March 1821, Salieri also asked Haugwitz to have the Requiem performed in his private chapel as prayer for his soul.Footnote ³⁴ As Jane Hettrick has suggested, moreover, Haugwitz likely honoured Salieri’s wish after the composer’s death in 1825.Footnote ³⁵ Furthermore, in many of his libretto adaptations of Salieri’s works, Haugwitz explicitly refers to him as ‘our Salieri’, further underscoring the multilayered understanding of the composer and his work as Viennese, Austrian, German and potentially also Moravian.

Haugwitz adaptations and the patriotic work-concept

The emergence of Haugwitz’s interest in creating his own German adaptation of operas by his favourite composers coincides with the rise of the patriotic repertoire at the Vienna Court Theatre. In 1808–9, Haugwitz likely staged several of Gluck works in Namiest, including Iphigénie en Aulide and Alceste. Unlike earlier operatic productions in Namiest, however, these were presented in Haugwitz’s own German adaptations. Proud of these Gluck adaptations, Haugwitz had them published in Brno.Footnote ³⁶ The prefaces to these 1809 publications offer insight into Haugwitz’s aesthetic views. In both, he critiques the original librettos – Italian for Alceste and French for Iphigénie – arguing that Gluck’s musical setting far surpasses them, which resonated with contemporary Viennese views of Gluck as a German genius. Regarding Iphigénie, he laments that the libretto ‘fell far short of the dignity of the subject as a whole, to such an extent that it is astonishing how such a text could give rise to the most consummate and greatest musical masterpiece’.Footnote ³⁷ His assessment of Alceste is even harsher, calling the Italian libretto ‘unworthy’ of Gluck’s genius and suggesting that, at times, it ‘seems to have disturbed the enthusiasm of the great master’.Footnote ³⁸

Haugwitz’s desire to create an authoritative version of Gluck’s operas that would touch on the composer’s presumed original musical conception undermined by the insufficient libretto resonated with the rhetoric and practices surrounding contemporaneous Gluck and Mozart revivals at the Vienna Court Theatre. Viennese critics, including Haugwitz’s friend Mosel, also often emphasised notions of authenticity, originality and fidelity to a composer’s intentions, while sanctioning extensive alterations to the text and music of Gluck’s and Mozart’s operas. In his review of the 1819 production of Idomeneo (a revival of the German version first performed in 1806), for example, Mosel praised Georg Friedrich Treitschke’s German adaptation for removing numbers he considered juvenile, archaic and overly Italianate. These included Arbace’s two arias (No. 10a, ‘Se il tuo duol’, and No. 22, ‘Se colà ne’ fati è scritto’), Idomeneo’s second- and third-act arias (‘Fuor del mar’ and No. 30a, ‘Torna la pace’) and Elettra’s second act aria (No. 13, ‘Idol mio, se ritroso’).Footnote ³⁹ Mosel also welcomed the addition of a male chorus to the celebrated third-act quartet ‘Andrò ramingo e solo’, claiming that ‘even Mozart himself could not have withheld his approval’.

Haugwitz’s and his Viennese contemporaries’ understanding of the purpose of operatic adaptations differs markedly from how such adaptations were typically viewed in German theatres around 1800. As Glatthorn demonstrates, although most operas on late eighteenth-century German stages appeared in substantially altered forms, critics were generally untroubled by these changes. This created a situation in which ‘local adaptations around the [Holy Roman] Empire did not preclude recognition that went beyond minor differences in titles and content to conceive of alerted pieces as essentially the same’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Haugwitz’s effort to create a version he believed best reflected Gluck’s presumed genius rested on a different premise: that certain adaptations are more ideal – more closely aligned with the composer’s intentions – than others. This approach anticipates, though does not fully embody, later notions of the work-concept and the pursuit of ‘an “original”, authoritative version that designated the piece as “intended” by its creators’.Footnote ⁴¹ Similar to many later music critics and editors, Haugwitz regarded his adaptations as superior because he believed they were more faithful to Gluck’s original concepts. His search for the perfect adaptation eventually led him to revise his earlier attempts in his later years.

Haugwitz’s adherence to a Gluck-centred work-concept in his adaptations – later extended to his reworkings of Salieri operas – is partly related to the notions of patriotic Werktreue that emerged in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Prague in connection with Mozart’s operas. According to Magnus Tessing Schneider, the idea that a performance should render a composer’s original idea with exactness and perfection can be found as early as in the 1770 preface to the printed score of Gluck’s Paride ed Elena (an opera that Haugwitz adapted in 1830).Footnote ⁴² Yet the insistence that certain operatic works be performed in ways that honoured a composer’s presumed intentions became particularly prominent in Prague’s discussions of Mozart’s operas. Various Prague critics – including Mozart’s first biographer Franz Xaver Niemetschek – used appeals to historical authenticity to channel patriotic sentiments about Bohemia’s cultural distinctiveness.Footnote ⁴³ Haugwitz and his Viennese patriotic contemporaries were similarly committed to honouring a composer’s original idea. For them, however, such fidelity did not require strict adherence to the original music and text. Rather, they operated with a more flexible concept of Werktreue, one that allowed for cuts, interpolations and other alterations to the musical and dramaturgical structures of the works they revised.

Niemetschek was also among the first opera critics to stress the need for repeated listening to Mozart’s ‘timeless masterpieces’ because of their ‘classic’ qualities.Footnote ⁴⁴ This perspective connects to the patriotic historical repertoire cultivated both in the early nineteenth-century Vienna Court Theatre and in Haugwitz’s Namiest theatre. Even the limited surviving information about musical life in Namiest presents the image of a kind of music-historical museum, centred on repeated performances of presumed masterpieces from the past. Only a single document allows us to reconstruct the performance schedule in Namiest: an undated draft programme for Haugwitz’s theatre, which Karel Vetterl has dated to 1837.Footnote ⁴⁵ The proposed lineup reveals an impressively diverse yet decidedly archaic repertoire:Footnote ⁴⁶

A visitor to Namiest in late May and early June of 1837 would thus have encountered three Gluck operas and two Salieri operas – each in Haugwitz’s German adaptations – none of which formed part of the standard German operatic repertoire at that time. The fact that two of Haugwitz’s final adaptations of these five operas had been completed more than two decades before these performances (his Alceste adaptation dates from 1814, Orfeo from 1816, Paride from 1830, Axur from 1831–2 and Palmira from 1833) suggests that he continued to revive these works intermittently from the 1810s until his death in 1842. This commitment to a historical repertoire was also noted by Mosel in his 1821 preface of a translation of an English treatise on music history, where he writes that Haugwitz ‘has the works of Handel, Gluck, Salieri and Naumann performed with great perfection on his estate in Namiest’.Footnote ⁴⁷

Haugwitz’s three adaptations of Axur

Unlike the Viennese adapters of Mozart’s works – and unlike in his own adaptations of Gluck’s operas – Haugwitz had the opportunity to discuss his approach to Salieri’s Axur with the composer himself. These conversations, together with Haugwitz’s evolving views on recreating Salieri’s ‘original’ conceptions, produced three distinct adaptations of the work between 1810 and 1832. Haugwitz likely first encountered Axur at the Vienna Court Theatre, where both the Italian opera and its German adaptation were performed frequently before disappearing from the repertoire in 1805. His financial records document his attendance at one of the final Italian performances on 5 January of that year.Footnote ⁴⁸

In 1810, Haugwitz followed his adaptations of Gluck with the publication of his German renditions of Axur and Les Danaïdes.Footnote ⁴⁹ His engagement with Axur generated an especially rich body of archival materials – including manuscript librettos and orchestral scores – allowing his activities related to the work to be dated with unusual precision. German-language opera adaptations were a common phenomenon in the early nineteenth century, and Haugwitz’s manuscripts offer a rare perspective on how an individual adapter transformed French and Italian works into German. Haugwitz’s materials are preserved in the Music History Department of the Moravian Museum (Moravské zemské muzeum, MZM) and in the Moravian Archive (Moravský zemský archiv, MZA) and are listed in Appendix C.

Haugwitz’s three adaptations of Axur were clearly based on a Viennese Italian score of the opera (Score 1 in Table C2), which he most likely purchased in 1805, a few months after attending a performance of Axur at the Court Theatre. This score contains annotations that can be linked to his later German adaptations of the opera and thus appears to have served as their starting point. He also acquired the published score of the 1787 French Tarare (Score 2 in Appendix C), a version of the opera that was never performed in Vienna. He completed his first German adaptation of the Italian opera in 1810 (as documented in Libretto 1 and Score 3 in Appendix C). Returning to the work in 1813, he combined this version with a German translation of the prologue to Tarare (as documented in Libretto 2 and Score 4 in Appendix C). He produced a final adaptation 1832, omitting the prologue but incorporating other portions of Tarare into Axur (as documented in Librettos 3 and 4 and Score 5 in Appendix C).

The linguistic and musical looseness of Haugwitz’s 1810 Axur

Although clearly initiated by Haugwitz’s reverence for Salieri, his first adaptation of Axur was shaped by a range of contradictory personal, ideological and practical considerations. Many aspects of Haugwitz’s 1810 Axur resemble other German adaptations of foreign language works from around 1800. For example, he introduced numerous cuts and substantial revisions to his 1810 Axur (see Appendix D). Some of these modifications were dictated by the specific performance conditions in Namiest, where the limited resources of a rural setting necessitated a reduced scope. An 1812 article describes the Namiest orchestra as small but balanced: eight violins, two violas, two cellos, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets and timpani.Footnote ⁵⁰ The vocal forces included two sopranos, two altos, two tenors and two bass soloists, along with a chorus of five sopranos, five altos, three tenors and three basses. Reflecting these limitations, Haugwitz’s 1810 adaptation omits many of the opera’s more demanding arias and action ensembles. In Act II, for example, he excised several virtuosic numbers: Atar’s lyrical arioso ‘Da qual nuova sciagura’ was retained, while the technically demanding aria ‘V’andrò tutto si tenti’ was omitted – likely to accommodate the limited abilities of the local tenor.

Somewhat more unusual was Haugwitz’s decision to retain Salieri’s recitatives in his adaptation, furnishing them with newly composed string accompaniment (see Appendix D). This choice clearly reflects Viennese practices and debates surrounding German adaptations. Axur, unlike most other Italian operas of the 1780s, features a fluid structure: following Gluck’s reform ideas, it intersperses shorter arias and ensembles with extended stretches of accompanied recitative, rather than relying on a strict division between recitative and set pieces. Earlier German adaptations, such as Heinrich Gottlieb Schmieder’s from the early 1790s, attempted to reshape the work into one with clearly defined musical numbers separated by spoken dialogue.Footnote ⁵¹ Haugwitz, however, followed the precedent set by the earlier Viennese German production of Axur at the Court Theatre between 1797 and 1798 and retained the recitatives.Footnote ⁵² His choice may have been informed by his familiarity with that production, but it also resonated with contemporary debates about the retention of recitatives in the post-1806 Court Theatre historical repertoire. For instance, the Viennese German adaptation of Tito, first performed at the Theater an der Wien in 1801 and later revived at the Court Theatre in 1811, replaced the original secco recitatives with newly composed ones accompanied by a string quartet. One Viennese critic objected to this change, describing the German recitatives as ‘unintelligibly delivered’ and arguing that they made it ‘harder for the listener to grasp the overall coherence of the work’.Footnote ⁵³ By contrast, regarding the 1819 revival of Treitschke’s 1806 Idomeneo adaptation, which replaced recitatives with pentametric spoken dialogue, Mosel insisted that the German Idomeneo – and, more generally, other German adaptations of heroic and tragic operas – should be performed with recitatives, since the alternation between sung numbers and spoken dialogue was ‘disgusting’ (wiederlich) and ‘disturbing’ (störend).Footnote ⁵⁴ Yet he did not call for the restoration of Mozart’s original Italian recitatives; rather, perhaps influenced by Seyfried’s earlier adaptation of Tito, he proposed that Treitschke’s iambic spoken dialogues be accompanied by strings.

In addition to the new recitative accompaniment, the 1810 adaptation score (Score 3) features substantial changes to the rhythm and melody of the vocal lines. These alterations are far more significant than the adjustments found in other German adaptations of Italian operas from the period. For example, the 1798 Vienna adaptation of Axur largely fitted the German translation into the original Italian vocal lines, as illustrated by comparing an excerpt from the 1788 Vienna Court Theatre Italian score (Example 1) to Haugwitz’s 1805 Italian score (Example 2), which includes both the Italian text of the 1805 Vienna productions and the German text of the 1798 Vienna adaptation. Haugwitz’s 1810 score (Example 3), by contrast, suggests that he did not simply fit the German text to Salieri’s music; rather, he retrofitted the music to his new German text. At one point, Haugwitz even claims authorship of these musical revisions (see below). These modifications were partly the result of Haugwitz’s inexperience with libretto adaptation. His newly created German text adhered neither to Lorenzo da Ponte’s accentuation and syllable count nor to the original meaning of his text. Consequently, the 1810 score alters pitches and rhythms not only in the recitatives but also in more measured sections of the opera.

Example 1.

Opening of Biscroma and Atar’s Duet ‘Tu sul mar la cara sposa’ in Act III scene 4 of the 1788 Vienna Axur (Austrian National Library, KT 50/2, published with permission).

Example 1. Long description

A handwritten musical score on aged paper with two distinct systems of staves.

* The top system consists of five staves. The fourth staff contains the vocal line for Biscroma, indicated by the label Biscr. The lyrics begin with menti Aspasia sola Aspasia, Aspasia Ah senti, e ti consola. Above the final measures of this line, a stage direction reads guarda sospettosamente un poco intorno. The system ends with the start of the duet lyrics Tu sul.

* The bottom system also consists of five staves, beginning with the tempo marking andte con molto moto. The fourth staff features the vocal entry for Atar, labeled Atar above a tenor clef symbol. The lyrics continue mar la cara sposa a cercar andresti in vano giusti.

* The bottom left corner of the page is marked Tutti.

* The bottom right corner of the page is numbered 23.

* The notation includes hand-drawn clefs, key signatures with flats, and various musical ornaments and articulations such as tenuto markings and slurs.

Example 2.

Opening of Biscroma and Atar’s Duet ‘Tu sul mar la cara sposa’ with an inserted German text of the 1798 Viennese Court Theatre adaptation, in Act II scene 4 of the 1805 Haugwitz Axur Score (MZM, A17082b, courtesy of the Moravian Museum, Brno).

Example 2. Long description

The score is presented across two open pages of a bound manuscript.

On the left page, there are two main systems of musical staves. The top system contains four staves with handwritten notes and dynamics such as m f. Below the notes, the original Italian lyrics are written in a cursive hand, while a secondary layer of German text in Kurrent script is inserted directly above the Italian lines. The bottom system on this page shows more complex notation with crescendo markings and additional textual annotations in the lower margin.

On the right page, the heading at the top right reads Number 2, Andante con molto moto. The left margin lists instrumentation including Clarin: in B and Fagotto. This page continues the vocal duet with five staves. The Italian lyrics Tu sul mar la cara sposa are clearly visible on the middle staff, while the German adaptation is again interlined above it. Some sections of the original text appear to have been crossed out or modified with heavier ink strokes. The bottom of the right page contains further musical notation for the accompaniment, featuring bass clef staves with ledger lines and dynamic markings.

Example 3.

Opening of Lysander (originally Biscroma) and Atar’s Duet ‘Umsonst ist deine Schiffahrt’ in Act II scene 3 of the 1810 Namiest Atar (MZM A17081a, courtesy of the Moravian Museum, Brno).

Example 3. Long description

The manuscript is divided into two main sections of musical notation on aged, cream-colored paper.

* Top Section: Consists of five staves. The upper three staves contain instrumental parts with sparse notation. The fourth staff is a vocal line with handwritten German lyrics underneath, including the words ‘bietet mir die heilige Pflicht’. The fifth staff is a bass or accompaniment line.

* Bottom Section: Separated by a double bar line and a tempo marking ‘Andante con molto moto’ written in cursive script. This section contains five staves.

* Left Margin: The start of the second section features complex key signatures with multiple flats and C-clefs.

* Musical Content: The notation includes quarter notes, eighth notes with beams, and various rests. The bottom-most staff features a series of eighth notes grouped in pairs with a continuous beam. Handwritten lyrics are interspersed between the fourth and fifth staves, beginning with the word ‘Umsonst’.

* Physical Condition: The paper shows visible texture, slight creasing, and some ink bleed-through from the reverse side. The right edge of the page shows the binding of the book.

Haugwitz later dismissed his 1810 adaptation, along with his other early works, in the preface to the manuscript collection of his Gluck opera translations, dated 1820.Footnote ⁵⁵ He also credited Salieri with teaching him more precise translating methods:

Haugwitz’s reference to sending ‘daring distortions of his works’ likely pertains to the 1810 Axur score (Score 3 in Appendix C), which contains French handwritten notes in Haugwitz’s hand at passages most altered from the Italian original (noted in Appendix D). These annotations were probably addressed to Salieri: they are in French rather than German, which Haugwitz used in correspondence with his German-speaking Viennese friends; Haugwitz refers to his recipient as ‘esteemed friend’ (respectable ami), and he even requests that the recipient rework one newly composed passage.

One such note accompanies Axur’s final monologue, just before the eponymous hero’s suicide. Haugwitz replaced Axur’s eight lines of text – originally set to fifteen bars of accompanied recitative – with fifteen lines spanning thirty-one bars. His note explains: ‘I particularly recommend this recitative to my esteemed friend – it is, for the time being, a sketch based on my feeling and the prosody of our language.’ The ‘feeling’ (sentiment) Haugwitz mentions likely reflects his desire to alter the ideological meaning of the opera’s conclusion: his rendition of Axur is far more reconciliatory, showing him offer good wishes to Atar and his people before his death, in contrast to the harsher, more vindictive tone of the original Italian. Yet the note also indicates that Haugwitz was motivated by the need to produce a passage that would sound properly poetic in German. Furthermore, although he seeks the opinion of an ‘esteemed friend’, he does not suggest any willingness to modify his revisions – his adaptation aims to create an idealised version of Salieri’s work without much concern for the composer’s input.

Haugwitz’s selective approach to fidelity becomes even more evident in his notes on the revision of the scene between Arteneo, the high priest of Ormus, and Elamir, the boy oracle. In Act II scene 5 of the original Italian score (‘D’una scelta importante oggi dobbiamo’), Arteneo attempts to persuade Elamir to appoint his son Altamor as army leader. In 1810, Haugwitz replaced this scene of political and religious manoeuvring with a more straightforward monologue in which Arteneo prays for heavenly mercy, setting the new German text to a freshly composed recitative (‘O laßt in Demuth unsers Herzens’; see Appendix D). In two autograph French notes in the 1810 score – likely addressed to Salieri – Haugwitz expresses satisfaction with this transformation. Regarding the second part of the monologue, he writes: ‘Here the High Priest [Arteneo] speaks to the child [Elamir] and has him kneel – so the recitative must remain.’ If addressed to Salieri, the note demonstrates Haugwitz’s confidence in directing the original composer on what he considered the ideal content of the opera. Another note, on the opening part of the newly composed monologue, requests an alternative setting of the German text: ‘I would like this prayer, which I only allowed myself to sketch out in recitative, to be set to a melody by my esteemed friend.’ These notes indicate that, even in his idealised adaptation, Haugwitz envisioned the possibility of further improvement – ideally with the participation of his ‘esteemed friend’. If that friend was indeed Salieri, the comment illustrates Haugwitz’s desire to arrive at a definitive version of the scene, one that both respected and revised Salieri’s original conception. While the openness to change reflects the eighteenth-century flexibility in operatic adaptations, his insistence on producing an idealised version of the scene signals the emergence of a more fixed ‘work-concept’. Salieri, however, does not appear to have complied, as Haugwitz’s recitative remained unchanged in the 1810 version and in later Namiest manuscripts containing the scene.

The politics of Haugwitz’s 1810 adaptation

Many of Haugwitz’s revisions in his Axur adaptations engage directly with the work’s controversial political elements, suggesting that politics played a central role in his flexible understanding of the work-concept. Haugwitz clearly recognised the proto-revolutionary dimensions of the 1787 French opera, as he states in the preface to the 1831–2 libretto (Libretto 4). There, he praises Salieri’s (and Da Ponte’s) 1788 Viennese Italian version for achieving a ‘highly moral’ tone by removing Beaumarchais’s ‘immoral and Jacobin’ prologue and epilogue:

Many of the revisions across Haugwitz’s three Axur adaptations can thus be understood as extending the process of political containment already initiated by Salieri and Da Ponte in Vienna in 1788.

An example of how Haugwitz goes beyond the political circumspections of the 1788 Vienna revision can be found in the scene that opens Act II of the Italian opera in the 1805 Haugwitz score, which introduces substantial changes. In both Beaumarchais’s 1787 libretto and Da Ponte’s 1788 version, King Axur (Atar in 1787) appears in conversation with the high priest Arteneo (Arthénée in 1787), who is portrayed as a pragmatic politician intent on manipulating the masses through religion. In a brief arioso, the French Arthénée openly dismisses religious belief as a mere instrument of political power:Footnote ⁵⁶

Although this passage was omitted from the Italian Axur, Da Ponte retained the section in which Arteneo proposes to control the people through sham religious practices and to manipulate the boy oracle (Élamir in 1787, Elamir in 1788 and 1831–2, Knabe in 1810) into endorsing a military leader of his choosing:

Haugwitz may well have understood the high priest’s endorsement of using religion to control the ‘superstitious and foolish’ people of Ormus as a veiled critique of Catholicism – an interpretation that could explain why he substantially reworked this scene in his 1810 adaptation:

Rather than plotting political deception, Haugwitz’s 1810 Arteneo merely urges the sultan to visit the temple to support his people in a time of danger. As in other passages of the 1810 version, this radical textual change required the composition of an entirely new recitative. The 1810 adaptation also omits Arteneo’s ensuing monologue (Act II scene 2, ‘O divina prudenza’, in the 1805 Italian opera), in which the priest reveals his plan to persuade Elamir to appoint his own son, Altamor, as leader of the army, thereby securing enormous power for himself.

Haugwitz also appears to have been uncomfortable with the arioso ‘Di tua milizia’ at the beginning of Act II in the Italian score, in which Arteneo warns the sultan of a potential rebellion. Although he retained Salieri’s music, he radically altered the text, removing any explicit reference to the threat of revolt:

Possibly influenced by his retrospective awareness of the events set in motion by the French Revolution, Haugwitz avoids portraying Arteneo as warning of a popular uprising against the monarch and shifts the focus to omens of divine displeasure.

The 1813 adaptation of the Prologue to Tarare

Haugwitz’s interest in reviving Salieri’s work came into most direct conflict with the political sensibilities of the early nineteenth century in his 1813 adaptation of Axur (documented in Score 4). This version was essentially the 1810 adaptation, but it now opened with Haugwitz’s newly created adaptation of the Prologue to the 1787 Tarare – the same Prologue that he would later describe as ‘immoral and Jacobin’. The Prologue had never been performed in the Habsburg lands: Salieri and Da Ponte had excised it from the 1788 Vienna Axur, and its score was accessible only to connoisseurs through the published Paris edition of Tarare; one such score survives in the Haugwitz archive (Score 2). Haugwitz’s decision to include the Prologue in the 1813 adaptation was clearly an expression of his admiration for the composer operatic output, comparable to the recent Court Theatre revivals of previously unperformed Gluck operas and the first staging of Mozart’s Idomeneo. One may wonder whether this decision was influenced by conversations with Salieri about the 1810 adaptation. As John Rice has noted, the omission of the Prologue from the 1788 Viennese Axur may have been motivated in part by the need to avoid ‘elements most incompatible with an opera buffa company’, including the requirement of a ballet.Footnote ⁵⁷ But the omission may also have been tied to the Prologue’s politically incendiary content, which explicitly criticises social inequality and monarchical rule. Haugwitz’s 1813 adaptation of this Prologue therefore offers a fascinating case study in how the sharp social and political critique of pre-revolutionary France could be neutralised in an early nineteenth-century Austrian context.

In his adaptation of Beaumarchais’s French text, Haugwitz softens the Prologue’s political critique and replaces it with a markedly moralistic tone. One of the central – and inherently radical – ideas in Beaumarchais’s libretto is that social rank matters less than personal merit, and that social inequality represents one of humanity’s gravest problems. This theme emerges clearly in scene 3 of the Prologue, when the allegorical figures of Fire and Nature assess human shades to assign them societal roles – specifically, who should become king and who should become a soldier. Just before making this decision, Fire reflects:

The opera then dramatises the consequences of Fire’s error in elevating an unfit ruler – Atar. Uncomfortable with this message, Haugwitz rewrote Fire’s quatrain – renaming the character ‘the Genius of the Earth’ (Genius der Erde) – in a way that removes any suggestion that fate might mistakenly bestow power on an unworthy sovereign:

A few moments later in Beaumarchais’s Prologue, Fire transforms one shade into King Atar and the other into the soldier Tarare:

Haugwitz significantly altered this scene, both textually and musically. He expanded Fire’s declaration to include Tarare’s wife Aspasia, who is abducted and mistreated by the king throughout the opera, and set the added material (in bold) to newly composed music. (In the Viennese Italian and Haugwitz’s German versions of the opera, Tarare is called Atar.)

By introducing Aspasia’s fidelity – entirely absent from the original French Prologue – Haugwitz introduces the opera as a moral tableau in which virtue is rewarded and vice punished, thereby displacing Beaumarchais’s critique of social inequality with a more conservative ethical framework.

Haugwitz also radically transformed Nature’s ensuing arioso:

Instead of Beaumarchais’s emphasis on human equality, Haugwitz presents a plea for unity:

Haugwitz fundamentally alters the meaning of the text yet remains attentive to the expressive power of Salieri’s music. For example, he replaces Beaumarchais’s contrast between grandeur and poverty with the imagery of mountains and depths to convey envy and scorn, thus still accommodating the emphatic madrigalisms of Salieri’s score. The three-bar-long high G and the downward octave leap (Prologue, bb. 346–51) suit both Beaumarchais’s ‘altière’ (grandeur) and ‘l’humble pauvreté’ (humble poverty) as well as Haugwitz’s ‘Bergen Höh’’ and ‘Tiefen’.

Beaumarchais’s concluding chorus explicitly celebrates ‘égalité’, later a key slogan of the French Revolution:Footnote ⁵⁸

By contrast, Haugwitz shifts the focus to social harmony:

In this way, Haugwitz transforms Tarare’s Prologue from a radical call for social equality into a plea for unity and the preservation of the existing order. Given his position as a member of the Habsburg monarchy’s noble elite, it is understandable that Haugwitz would be uncomfortable with the Prologue’s social radicalism. That he did not reinstate the Prologue in his final adaptation of Axur in the 1830s, nor include it in his collected edition of Salieri’s librettos, underscores this continued unease. The inclusion of the Prologue in the 1813 adaptation therefore represents yet another instance of Haugwitz’s flexible, evolving approach to composer-centred work-concept.

Striving for historical ‘authenticity’ in the 1830s Axur revision

Haugwitz’s final adaptation of Axur, dated to 1831–2, represents yet another stage in the evolution of his understanding of the essence of an operatic work. The archival materials associated with this final adaptation reveal a heightened concern with historical accuracy and textual precision, yet this meticulousness is repeatedly undermined by numerous instances of editorial looseness.

A crucial source for understanding Haugwitz’s method as an adapter in the 1830s is the autograph draft of his libretto translation (Libretto 3). In this manuscript, Haugwitz selects passages of Italian text and writes his German translation beneath them. This approach ensures that the length and accentuation of individual phrases correspond to the original, allowing them to fit the music more precisely – a marked contrast to the freer, more flexible treatment of the Italian text in his 1810 adaptation. As a result, Haugwitz no longer altered Salieri’s vocal lines extensively in his last adaptation of Axur, as demonstrated by the opening of Biscroma and Atar’s duet ‘Die Geliebte aufzufinden’ (originally ‘Tu sul mar la cara sposa’) in the 1830s Namiest score (Example 4).

Example 4.

Opening of Biscroma and Atar’s Duet ‘Die Geliebte aufzufinden’ in Act II scene 1 of the 1830s Namiest Axur (MZM A17082e, courtesy of the Moravian Museum, Brno).

Example 4. Long description

The musical score is organized into a system of eight staves.

* The top four staves are instrumental and contain only whole-measure rests indicated by thick horizontal bars.

* The fifth and sixth staves contain active musical notation with dynamic markings including m f dot, for dot, pia dot, and crescendo. These staves feature sixteenth-note runs and fermatas over the final rests of the fourth measure.

* The seventh staff is the vocal line for Biscroma and Atar. It begins with a series of eighth notes and rests. Handwritten German text is written below this staff, reading pasia? Aspasia? o hör mich Muth bewaffnet! followed by a name label for Atar near a fermata.

* The eighth and bottom-most staff is the basso continuo or accompaniment line, featuring figured bass notation with small numbers 5 and 3 stacked vertically above the notes.

The notation is handwritten in dark ink on aged, off-white paper. Vertical bar lines divide the page into four distinct measures. The right edge of the page shows the binding of the manuscript volume.

Haugwitz further emphasises his close connections to Salieri’s libretto and music in the preface to the representative copy of the 1831–2 Axur adaptation (Libretto 4). This copy is included in volume 7 of Haugwitz’s manuscript of collected libretto translations.Footnote ⁵⁹ The Axur libretto includes an extensive historical essay about the opera’s origins, containing anecdotes that expand upon the information in Ignaz von Mosel’s 1827 biography of Salieri – some of which Haugwitz likely heard from Salieri himself. Mosel’s biography briefly notes that the revision of Tarare as Axur was commissioned by Emperor Joseph II in the autumn of 1787. Salieri and Da Ponte chose to create a completely new work rather than a simple translation and aimed to complete it as quickly as possible. Mosel also describes how Salieri’s rheumatic pain, which confined him to his home, inadvertently facilitated the opera’s rapid completion:

Haugwitz’s account introduces additional details, particularly regarding the Emperor’s impatience and Salieri’s health. In Haugwitz’s telling, Salieri’s illness results from the stress under which he laboured and is framed as an obstacle rather than a catalyst for his work:

Haugwitz clearly portrays Joseph II more critically, depicting him as a petty micromanager who endangered the health of his employees. Regardless of whether Haugwitz’s preface provides a more accurate version of events, it demonstrates his intimate knowledge of Salieri’s biography and enhances the appearance of historical authenticity in his approach to the 1831–2 adaptation.

Another element of historical accuracy in the 1831–2 Axur is Haugwitz’s incorporation of sections from the 1787 French Tarare into the German adaptation of the 1788 Italian Axur – none of these, unlike the 1787 Prologue, is explicitly political. In the preface to his 1831–2 Axur libretto (Libretto 4), Haugwitz acknowledges these borrowings, stating that he took the liberty of inserting ‘a few flowers from the French Tarare in the translation of the Italian Axur’. In the autograph draft libretto translation (Libretto 3), the original text, intended for German translation, occasionally shifts from Italian to French. Each French insertion is prefaced with a reference to the published Tarare score (Score 2), indicating where the corresponding music should be inserted into the 1830s Axur. There are three sets of French insertions:

The mixing of these musical portions creates a hybrid adaptation that signals a concern for historical fidelity to Salieri’s entire output while simultaneously extending beyond Salieri’s original conception for either the French or the Italian versions of the opera.

Many other elements of Haugwitz’s 1830s adaptation undermine the semblance of historical fidelity. As in his earlier adaptations, he executed numerous cuts, many of which reflected the needs and capabilities of the Namiest musicians. In the preface to the 1831–2 adaptation, Haugwitz explains:

This passage also indicates that Haugwitz’s productions were not staged in the traditional sense but performed in a concert- or oratorio-like format, a practice also reflected in the musical materials.Footnote ⁶¹ Even in the 1830s, Haugwitz continued to transform the opera’s political elements, including Salieri’s and Da Ponte’s depiction of political machinations by a religious authority. Unlike the 1810 revision, which relied on radical textual rewritings, the 1830s adaptation achieves this primarily through extensive cuts: all politically sensitive scenes involving Arteneo at the beginning of the second act are omitted (see Appendix D).