On 29 December 1789 Mozart wrote to his friend Michael Puchberg inviting him to a rehearsal at his house two days later: ‘On Thursday I am inviting you (and you alone) to come to my apartment at ten in the morning for a little opera rehearsal – I am inviting only you and Haydn’. Given that the opera being rehearsed was his Così fan tutte, the experience must have struck Haydn with a powerful sense of déja vu, one that can only have increased as, the following month, he accompanied Mozart to a further rehearsal and probably also one or more of the ensuing performances. The similarities between Così and Haydn's own Le pescatrici of twenty years earlier are palpable, and extend far beyond the similarities of plot, involving two sisters betrothed – in Haydn's case – to each other's brothers. The alternating duo writing in a number like the reconciliatory quartet, following – in reversed Così mode – the disguised seduction by the male leads of their own lovers, is just one of many moments that stand to give anyone familiar with both works a sense of déja vu.

However, when Opera at Rutgers (director, Pamela Gilmore) and the period-instrument ensemble Musica Raritana (conductor, Andrew Kirkman) presented Le pescatrici on 30 and 31 October 2009 at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University, the biggest surprise, for many, would have come from the lyrical beauty and sheer power of the music – ranging from the touching deftness of Frisellino's ‘Fra cetre e cembali’ (his character portrayed in our performance by Chia-Tien Lin) through Burlotto's (Daniel Foltz-Morrison) agitated ‘Vi cerca il fratello’ and Lesbina's bragging ‘Che vi par’ to the extraordinarily heightened drama, shot through with Sturm und Drang, of the extended D minor scena that conjures forth the plot's dénouement. Elsewhere few would fail to detect foreshadowings of Rossini, and even Donizetti, as in the basso buffo patter of ‘Compatite la vecchiezza’, sung by the father figure Mastricco (a character hilariously inhabited in this show by Sam Levine). Certainly, the ‘Cinderella’ strain of the story, with its hero prince seeking out the long-lost heroine princess through the smoke screen thrown up by the two sisters – their heads turned by his gold and his social status and a hoped-for life of dolce far niente – has more than a hint of La Cenerentola.

To anyone familiar with Haydn's work in the operatic field, the obscurity of Le pescatrici can only seem astonishing. And even those steeped only in his much more familiar instrumental music must surely, on reflection, consider it unlikely that Haydn, the master of comic timing and dramatic nuance, could have been anything other than a natural for the comic stage. A natural he indeed was; anyone familiar with Le pescatrici should not be surprised to learn that this was, in its composer's own words in 1776, among his works that had ‘received the most approbation’, a creation that (as expressed in the report quoted below) revealed his ‘flaming and creative genius’. One can only hope that the time is approaching when modern commentators will finally give up attempting to explain Haydn's still relative operatic obscurity by reference to the supposed inferiority of his works in this genre compared to those of Mozart. Of course, Haydn's operas do in some respects reveal a sensibility different from Mozart's, yet to characterize that difference in terms of quality is to indulge in a reductionism that succeeds only in perpetuating their unjustified neglect. Had Haydn, like Mozart, been a man of the commercial theatre, one might surmise that his operas would still be rubbing shoulders with the familiar gems of his younger contemporary.

Most of the Eszterháza operas were written for specific family occasions, and Le pescatrici was no exception: the opera formed part of the three-day wedding festivities for Prince Nikolaus Esterházy's niece, Countess Lamberg, in September 1770. A report in the Pressburger Zeitung and Wiener Diarium notes that, after the wedding ceremony,

Certainly the theme, of marriage and inherent nobility, which must always shine through in the end, was closely tailored to the event it was written to grace. But the choice of this plot can hardly have been an onerous one for Haydn; as revealed also in the delicious (and more familiar) Il mondo della luna, Carlo Goldoni, the author both of that play and of Le pescatrici, was a dramatist with whom Haydn felt an instinctive affinity. Certainly, the Rutgers cast, of undergraduate and a few young graduate-student singers, revelled in the (frequently salacious) witticisms that abound throughout the libretto, and Haydn's often wickedly naughty musical responses to them.

Many of the barbs, as might be expected in this transplanted Cinderella tale, are aimed at the two girls, Nerina (played respectively on the two nights by Hongkyung Kim and Elizabeth Murphy) and Lesbina (rendered by Eileen Cooper and Yoona Park), and the airs and graces they affect in imagining themselves to be of noble birth. Here is the classic lampoon of the character type vividly depicted in a contemporary description of the ‘female Viennese dandy’: ‘She loves any man who pretends to be a count or a baron; everyone who wears boots and spurs, and understands horses; and every male hand bearing a diamond ring’. By contrast, the two aristocrats Prince Lindoro (sung by Vincent Grana) and Eurilda (Barbara Mergelsberg and Minji Kim), express themselves with a dignified nobility, being the only characters who – as a colleague pointed out to me after one of the performances – have their utterances heightened by accompanied recitative.

Le pescatrici is the victim of a particularly sad irony resulting from the comparative isolation of Haydn's operas: its source, in the Esterházy archives, lacks a substantial portion of its original music. That lack was redressed in a reconstruction by H. C. Robbins Landon, and – notwithstanding the many cuts that we were forced to make in our production – we believe ours is the first recorded performance of his replacement confession aria for Prince Lindoro. The Rutgers show, set in the environs of ‘Mastricco's clam shack’, offered a 1950s take on the story, one that frequently had the audience in stitches of laughter. The inexperienced student cast truly excelled itself, and this was the fourth collaboration between our opera programme and Musica Raritana, an ensemble I established to provide experience for our graduate instrumentalists in performance on period instruments – on this occasion under the coaching of Cynthia Roberts (violin), Arthur Haas (harpsichord), Marc Schachman (oboe) and Loretta O'Sullivan (cello). More will certainly follow, with a celebration of the tercentenary of Thomas Arne, including his lovely Thomas and Sally, planned for this coming fall semester (November 19 and 21). A particular pleasure on this occasion was that we were able to record the performances for broadcast on the local classical station, WWFM, and to make a high-quality, professionally packaged two-CD recording, copies of which are available from me (kirkman@rci.rutgers.edu ) for $15.