"When the ci-hitty gets into a bu-hoys sy-hist-em, he loses his a-hankerin' for the cou-huntry." So intones W.C. Fields in his Yukon-based Victorian absurdist two-reeler The Fatal Glass of Beer (1933). However, if the city you lived in was Salzburg, Austria, the idea of "a-hankerin' for the cou-huntry" was a popular one, and Salzburg's court composer Johann Michael Haydn paid tribute to it through these two little "Abbey operettas" written not for a civic theater, but for the theater at the Benedictine University in Salzburg. Haydn's singspiel Die Hochzeit auf der Alm (The Wedding on the Alpine Pasture, 1763) was intended as a mere opener to Salzburg scribbler Florian Reichssiegel's ponderous five-act Latin tragedy Pietas conjugalis in Sigismundo et Maria; however, it was the singspiel that won the day.

Until 1750, Europe was under the spell of the Italian opera seria for about 70 years. Then the audience began to develop a taste for more drama: no more succession of arias that were loosely welded together by an overly familiar plot, but a story in which people could live with the main characters. The French, who had stubbornly refused to go along in the European mania for Italian opera seria and had developed their own national opera, could look forward to an increasing influence of French opera. This can be clearly observed in the operas of Christoph Willibald von Gluck, who has gone down in history as the great opera reformer of the 18th century. However, there were even more composers who had implemented innovations and one of them was Niccolò Jommeli (1714-74).

Agostino Steffani (1654-1728) was the most important composer ever to be appointed by the Duchy of Hannover. At the end of the 17th century this noble family embarked on a cultural offensive with the objective of having Duke Ernst August become a prince elector. To this end, the Welph dynasty obtained the services of Steffani, a master choice in itself as his works are still performed to this day in the majestic gardens of Princess Caroline of Monaco and her husband, the current Ernst August of Hannover.

A beguiling rarity. Johann Sebastian’s youngest and most cosmopolitan son composed this serenata in London in 1772. The plot revolves around the triangular relationship between Diana, her nymph Nice and Endymion, slyly manipulated by Cupid and culminating in the obligatory paean to love. In the booklet, Bruno Weil dubs Endimione ‘one of the first operettas’; but though there are touches of cruel humour, usually at Nice’s expense, the musical idiom and structure, based on a sequence of elaborate arias, are essentially those of opera seria. Bach’s suave, mellifluous style often sounds like Mozart minus the master’s dynamic impulse and control of long-range tensions.