In addition to the large number of song settings produced by Joseph Haydn, many of which became immensely fashionable during his two visits to London, and particularly during his later years in Vienna, he also produced a significant number of small-scale cantatas on secular or Classical themes.

Though these works are normally just for solo voice and one accompanying (keyboard) instrument, several in fact reveal all the hallmarks of fully formed dramatic concert settings in miniature. Logically, one would have expected Haydn to produce larger versions, so that he could have exploited their commercial potential to the fullest. But one such work in particular, the cantata Arianna a Naxos (Hob. XXVIb:2), which is based on that same perennial Classical myth to which Richard Strauss would return, seems to cry out for orchestral treatment more than most of its siblings.

Haydn's setting Arianna a Naxos is thought to have been written in either 1789 or 1790, though surviving materials are not dated. But significantly, however, especially given its weighty emotional substance, Haydn himself had signalled his clear intention (never actually realized) to orchestrate the work in a letter to the London publisher John Bland, dated April 12, 1790. In its extant form, for soprano voice, with accompaniment for harpsichord or piano, the cantata has four main sections. These are clearly delineated by style and key, enabling the dramatic flow to be condensed down into a short time-span.

The outline framework of this cantata consists of two alternating highly expressive accompanied recitative sections, which are juxtaposed beside two arias. The setting conveys graphically the plight of the Greek heroine, who in the first aria sings of her absent love, but gradually, as the work progresses, her happiness gives way to despair as the awful reality of her island solitude gradually dawns upon her. The depth of her plight—one of heartrending isolation—is made graphically clear in the final outburst of the closing aria, now in the Sturm und drang key of F minor.

These declamatory accompanied recitative sections and in particular, the closing F minor presto passage of the last aria seem underpowered and limited in dramatic effect when keyboard accompaniment alone is employed. This consideration, and of course Haydn's own letters about the work, has led most Haydn scholars to conclude that Arianna a Naxos was indeed a full-scale cantata for voice and orchestra in the making. Why Haydn never orchestrated it remains a mystery, not that the work is anything but charming and unusually effective in its surviving form. Finally, it is worth stating that Haydn would return to this exact format in 1795, when he replicated it, down to the last F minor outburst, in his concert aria Scena di Berenice, which features rather more daring modulations in its recitative sections.

© All Music Guide