Despite the assertion in Innsbrucker Festwochen's press materials for Haydn's L'Isola Disabitata (seen Aug. 14) that this "azione teatrale" from 1779 is "one of Haydn's most thematically coherent operas" — going so far as to dare compare it to Così Fan Tutte! — the work is merely eighty-two excruciating minutes of accompanied recitative interrupted by six arias, none longer than four minutes. Haydn may have been the father of the symphony and the master of sonata form, but a great opera composer he was not.

The story is familiar: Gernando and his wife, Costanza, and her sister, Silvia, are shipwrecked on a desert island. Before the opera begins, Gernando is kidnapped by pirates while he is out searching for water. Costanza believes herself abandoned, like Ariadne. Over years of isolation, Costanza teaches Silvia that all men are jerks, and Silvia develops a rather disturbing relationship with a stag (brave actor Markus Merz, in an antlered headpiece and red socks).

Who should turn up? Gernando and his buddy Enrico. Truths are revealed, Gernando and Costanza reunited, and Enrico and Silvia fall in love.

Simply constructed and with little invention or embellishment, the da capo arias are embarrassing in contrast to what Mozart had achieved by this time. They are reminiscent of Mozart's juvenilia, but Mozart would have graced them with greater musical and theatrical flair. Haydn, at forty-seven, is exasperatingly out of his element.

As if the boredom of the endless recitatives weren't enough, Haydn's cantata Arianna a Naxos was here tacked on as a prologue. Like its cousin, Beethoven's "Ah! perfido!", this twenty-minute work needs a true diva to pull it off (Cecilia Bartoli's recording comes to mind), but Stella Doufexis, also our Costanza, palely limped through it.

With the exception of young soubrette Raffaella Milanesi as Silvia, the singers were a disappointment, all ill-equipped or ill-cast (both men looked old enough to be their paramour's fathers rather than lovers).

American tenor Jeffrey Francis failed to register as Gernando, perhaps because the music gave him no opportunities to strut his stuff. Baritone Furio Zanasi was so overtaxed by the simplest music it was difficult to hear him from the eleventh row of the seven-hundred-seat house.

Had Doufexis been a great diva, able to make musical sense of this puerile mush (not one of Metastasio's greatest librettos), there might have been a chance. She sang the notes and looked rather wan, but where was her rage? One suspects little was given to her by director Christoph von Bernuth and conductor Alessandro De Marchi, whose Academia Mintos Regalis was frequently, painfully out of tune. De Marchi treated the score as if treading on eggshells, robbing it of any potential dramatic justification. I cannot recall a droopier evening. This is not festival fare (at $125 for a prime ticket).

Perhaps L'Isola Disabitata can find a place in student workshops, where unbridled youth might have a chance at discovering some life in it.

LARRY L. LASH

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