Conference Agenda

In the early nineteenth century, Austrian Count Heinrich Wilhelm Haugwitz sponsored numerous operatic performances at his Moravian castle in Náměšť (Namiest). For these performances, Haugwitz created his own German adaptations of operatic works by composers he admired. Among his favorites was Antonio Salieri, with whom he was personally acquainted. Haugwitz was particularly drawn to Salieri’s Tarare, with a libretto by Beaumarchais, which premiered in Paris in 1787, and its 1788 Viennese Italian adaptation Axur, re d’Ormus, with a libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte.

Archival records at the Moravian Museum and Archive show that Haugwitz repeatedly returned to this work over several decades. He purchased his first manuscript scores of Axur in 1806, soon after attending a performance at Vienna’s Kärntnertortheater. In 1810, he created his first German adaptation of Axur, followed in 1813 by a German rendering of the prologue to Tarare—a section that Da Ponte had omitted from Axur. In 1831–32, he compiled a new German adaptation that mixed Italian and French portions of the opera. Haugwitz discussed these adaptations and their musical qualities in previously overlooked introductory essays and in his correspondence with Ignaz von Mosel, Salieri’s first biographer.

This paper argues that Haugwitz’s adaptations sought to preserve Salieri’s music within Beaumarchais’s original dramaturgical framework while stripping the work of any political and social views associated with French enlightenment liberalism—ideologies that had initially rendered the opera controversial and had become taboo in post-Napoleonic Habsburg Europe. This ideological neutralization is particularly evident in his 1813 revision of Tarare’s prologue and his 1831–32 mixed adaptation, where he systematically omitted passages critical of monarchy and the church, as well as those advocating greater social equality. By continually reviving Salieri’s eighteenth-century operas—many of which had largely disappeared from early nineteenth-century operatic stages—and by emphasizing their musical qualities, Haugwitz became an early contributor to the construction of the musical canon. His efforts to reframe Tarare/Axur as a work of timeless aesthetic beauty, rather than one with provocative ideological content, anticipate later processes in Western music canon formation, which often prioritized abstract musical values over politically charged themes.