HASSE, Johann Adolf (1699-1783) - Sinfonia 'Alcide al bivio' (1760)

Johann Adolf Hasse (1699-1783) - Sinfonia (D-Dur) 'Alcide al bivio' (1760)

Performers: moderntimes_1800; Ilia Kοrοl (conductor)

Painting: Austrian School (18th Century) - Portrait of a singer with her accompanist

(probably Faustina Bordoni and Johann Adolf Hasse)

Further info: Johann Adolf Hasse (1699-1783) - Messe in d (1751)

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Johann (Giovanni) Adolf (Adolph) Hasse

(Bergedorf, nr Hamburg, bap. 25 March 1699 - Venice, 16 December 1783)

German composer. He was the second of five children of the organist Peter Hasse (c.1668-1737) and Christina Klessing, daughter of a mayor of Bergedorf. He studied in Hamburg before joining the opera company there. He quickly established himself as a tenor of reputation, but his career changed when his opera Antioco opened at Brunswick on 1 August 1721. Soon, he left Germany for a long tour of Venice, Bologna, Florence, and Rome, finally settling in the major opera center of Naples for six years, until 1730. There he studied with Alessandro Scarlatti and possibly Nicolo Porpora, worked with the superstar castrato Carlo Broschi (Farinelli), and his rise in Neapolitan opera was spectacular. Hasse appeared in Venice for the 1730 Carnival season, a milestone of his career. In his opera Artaserse, he set a libretto of Metastasio, later to become his most important collaborator, for the first time. He also met in Venice another famous singer, the mezzo-soprano Faustina Bordoni, whom he married in June 1730 and who created many of the female protagonists in his later operas. Sometime after Carnival but before Ascension in 1730, he was granted the title of Kapellmeister to the court of the Elector August I of Saxony at Dresden, but he and Faustina Bordoni did not arrive there until 6 or 7 July 1731. Although this appointment lasted until 1763, the couple took frequent and substantial leaves of absence to various cities of Italy and Vienna to produce operas that had been commissioned by the nobility of Europe. In 1745, King Frederick the Great of Prussia visited and heard Hasse’s Te Deum and opera seria Arminio. 

The king, a fine musician, thereafter often invited the composer and his wife to Potsdam. The Prussian bombardment of Hasse’s Dresden house in 1760, causing the loss of many manuscripts, may have soured this relationship. Porpora, possibly Hasse’s teacher in Naples, was brought to Dresden in 1748 to teach the Princess Maria Antonia of Saxony and was given the title Kapellmeister, but Hasse was promoted to Oberkapellmeister in 1750. In 1763, Hasse joined the imperial court in Vienna where he worked closely with Metastasio. In 1775, he and Faustina Bordoni retired to Venice. Although most of his work was quickly forgotten after he died, while active, he was the most renowned composer of Italian opera seria in Italy and German-speaking lands. He composed at least 58 operas, mostly seria, but also a few comedies, which were produced in many European opera centers. He was the favorite composer of the age’s most eminent opera librettist, Metastasio. Hasse composed fluently, with a particular gift for vocal melody, which he generally displayed to full advantage without distraction from contrapuntal textures. Besides the operas, he composed about 11 intermezzi, 11 Italian oratorios, 60 Italian chamber cantatas, and 33 more cantatas for voice and orchestra. His instrumental music includes 54 concertos, mostly for transverse flute and strings, and 24 trio sonatas. He also composed sacred music, most of it for four-voiced choir and orchestra: 15 masses, 2 requiems, 36 single mass ordinary settings, 10 mass offertories, 21 psalms, 18 antiphons, six hymns, and 38 motets for solo voice and orchestra.