1699–1783 · Baroque
Johann Adolph Hasse (1699–1783) was a German composer, singer and teacher, baptised in Bergedorf near Hamburg. He won fame for his Italian operas and sacred music, led the court chapel in Dresden for many years and was a friend of the librettist Metastasio. The site has an aria from his Artaserse at the Advanced level.
Johann Adolph Hasse came from a dynasty of German musicians. He was baptised in March 1699 in Bergedorf, near Hamburg, a place where members of his family played the organ in church across three generations. His great-grandfather Peter Hasse was a well-known organist and a pupil of Sweelinck, and stood at the source of the north German organ school, while his grandfather Nicolaus, also an organist, became famous throughout Germany. Hasse himself, however, won his fame not as an organist but as a composer of operas.
Hasse's musical career began on the stage. In 1718 he joined the Hamburg opera house at the Gänsemarkt as a tenor. In 1719 he found himself in Brunswick, and in 1721 his first opera, Antioco, was performed there. Hasse sang in that production himself.
In the early 1720s Hasse went to Italy and made his home in Naples. The city remained his main base for most of the 1720s. Later, as Johann Joachim Quantz recounts, he came into contact with Alessandro Scarlatti, who turned into both mentor and friend. Hasse also altered his style in several respects, reflecting Scarlatti's manner.
Hasse's serenata Antonio e Cleopatra was given in Naples in 1725. The leading parts were taken by Carlo Broschi, known as Farinelli, and Vittoria Tesi. The success brought Hasse many commissions from the opera houses of Naples. His standing in the city climbed sharply, and he acquired the affectionate nickname 'Il divino Sassone', the 'Divine Saxon'. For several years he had almost no spare time. His output of this period includes the opera buffa La sorella amante, presented in 1729, and a number of intermezzi and serenatas.
In 1730 Hasse married the famous opera singer Faustina Bordoni. That year he also went to the Venetian Carnival, where his opera Artaserse enjoyed a great success at the Teatro San Giovanni Grisostomo. For this staging Metastasio's text was reworked considerably, and Farinelli sang one of the principal roles.
In 1730 Hasse was invited to become court Kapellmeister in Dresden, but he arrived only in July 1731: earlier that year he had worked in Vienna, directing a performance of his oratorio Daniello for the Habsburg court. Not long after the pair settled in Dresden, Faustina sang before the court, and in September the opera Cleofide, on a strongly adapted Metastasio text, was first given. J. S. Bach may have been in the audience; C. P. E. Bach maintained that around that time Hasse and his father became close friends.
Hasse's patron at the Saxon court was Augustus II the Strong, King of Poland and Elector of Saxony, who honoured the composer with the title of Royal-Polish and Electoral-Saxon Kapellmeister. Hasse held the post, with absences in Italy, until 1764. Over thirty years of service he built up in Dresden an opera company and orchestra that were counted among the finest ensembles of their time. The orchestra was regarded as so exemplary that Jean-Jacques Rousseau published a plan of its seating in an encyclopaedia article of his own as a striking example.
The court gave Hasse and Faustina complete freedom, and they were able to keep up their contacts in Italy. For the Dresden years at least five long trips abroad by the couple are documented: in 1734–1737, 1738–1739, 1744–1745, 1746–1747 and in 1754. The centre of these journeys was Venice, where Hasse bought a house in 1735.
In October 1731 Hasse left Dresden in order to direct the premieres of his next operas in Turin and Rome; at the same time he wrote for the Venetian theatres. By the end of 1732 he was back in Naples, yet he wintered in Venice, where Siroe was mounted with exceptional splendour. His patron Augustus II the Strong died in February 1733. With the court in mourning, Hasse was allowed to stay abroad. Many of his sacred pieces for the churches of Venice date from this period.
Hasse passed most of 1734 in Dresden, but between 1735 and 1737 he lived in Italy, chiefly in Naples. The September 1735 premiere of Tito Vespasiano, which used an adapted version of Metastasio's La clemenza di Tito, took place at Pesaro, and Faustina was among the singers. It became one of Hasse's best-known stage works of the period. It was produced in many theatres across the continent, and the composer himself seriously revised it at least twice: first in 1738 for Dresden, then 21 years later for the San Carlo theatre in Naples.
After returning to the Dresden court in 1737, Hasse wrote five new operas. When the court went to Poland in the autumn of 1738, he and Faustina returned to Venice, where both were hugely popular. The next stay in Dresden, from early 1740 to January 1744, was his longest. In those years he reworked Artaserse, adding new arias for Faustina, and composed two original intermezzi. He avoided comic opera at that time, although he had once been among its first composers. Faustina seems to have been the reason: she feared that opera buffa singing would damage her voice and standing.
From the winter of 1744 until the end of summer 1745 Hasse stayed in Italy, then spent a year in Dresden again. Frederick the Great, an avid flautist, came to the court in December 1745, and numerous flute sonatas and concertos by Hasse from this time were probably meant for him. The Prussian king heard a Te Deum by the composer and himself requested a performance of the opera Arminio. After visits to Venice and Munich, Hasse came back to Dresden in June 1747 to stage La spartana generosa for the celebrations of several royal weddings. In 1748 he presented two of his operas, Ezio and Artaserse, in the unfinished opera house at Bayreuth for the marriage of Elisabeth of Bayreuth. Then, in the summer of 1750, the wedding of Princess Maria Josepha of Saxony and the French Dauphin allowed him to visit Paris, where he staged Didone abbandonata.
Nicola Porpora came to Dresden in 1748, where he became singing teacher to Princess Maria Antonia and received a Kapellmeister post. Disputes arose between the two Kapellmeisters. The court's ranks were reorganised: Porpora was styled 'Kapellmeister' and Hasse was raised to 'Oberkapellmeister'. Hasse emerged on top, and Porpora left Dresden in early 1752.
Hasse's final oratorio, La conversione di Sant'Agostino, was given on 28 March 1750 in the royal palace chapel in Dresden. Maria Antonia of Bavaria (1724–1780) wrote the libretto, and Metastasio edited it. Following the Dresden premiere it was heard in Leipzig, Hamburg, Mannheim, Rome, Riga, Prague and Berlin, evidence of how well liked it was in the later 18th century. Faustina left the stage at the Carnival of 1751. Hasse carried on staging new operas through the 1750s, Il re pastore among them, to a Metastasio text that Mozart would use later too.
A friendship tied Hasse to the poet Metastasio, and it deepened as time went on. He used to rework the poet's early texts heavily for his productions, but Frederick the Great and Francesco Algarotti pressed the composer to show his friend's work greater respect. From the early 1740s Hasse took Metastasio's new libretti as they stood, and the two men also grew noticeably closer personally. During the 1760s, whenever Metastasio produced new texts, Hasse was usually the first composer to turn them into operas.
The Seven Years' War made the Dresden court relocate to Warsaw in 1756, but Hasse chiefly stayed in Italy and visited Poland solely to oversee stagings of his operas, if he went at all. He moved to Vienna in the autumn of 1760 and lived there for two years. When he got back to Dresden in 1763, he found a large part of his house wrecked and the court opera's musical machinery in ruins. His chief patron, King Augustus III, passed away shortly after, and the successor, who himself died soon, decided that grand musical entertainments at court were not needed. Hasse and Faustina received two years of pay, but no pension.
Hasse travelled to Vienna in 1764, and his festa teatrale Egeria, again to words by Metastasio, was played at the crowning of Joseph II. He stayed in Vienna mostly until 1773. The majority of operas he produced in these years went on to succeed in Naples as well. Maria Theresa favoured him. Piramo e Tisbe had a triumphant premiere in September 1768, and Hasse planned to give up opera, but Maria Theresa pressed him into producing Ruggiero (1771), once more to a Metastasio libretto.
Taste in opera was shifting by then. The opera seria model established by Hasse and Metastasio was threatened by reforms associated with Christoph Willibald Gluck and Ranieri de' Calzabigi, embodied in Orfeo ed Euridice. Charles Burney, who was in Vienna in 1773, wrote about the arguments these innovations provoked.
Hasse's music came under pressure from newer 'avant-garde' trends, and he left Vienna in 1773. He lived out his remaining years, around ten, in Venice, teaching and composing church music. Faustina died in November 1781. Hasse followed a little more than two years later, in December 1783, after a lengthy bout of arthritis. He was laid to rest in San Marcuola.
After the composer's death his works were almost completely ignored. F. S. Kandler paid for Hasse's gravestone in Venice and in 1820 wrote his biography, and it was after its publication that attention to the composer revived.
Hasse is known above all as a composer of Italian operas and church music. He produced more than 60 operas, roughly two a year, along with several oratorios, a great many serenatas and cantatas, and a considerable amount of sacred music. For his operas he took libretti from well-known contemporaries: Pietro Metastasio, Apostolo Zeno, Stefano Pallavichini, Giovanni Pasquini and others. Hasse made a large contribution to the development of opera seria, and even before Pergolesi he was among those who turned to comic opera. Many of his sacred works were written for the churches of Venice.
Hasse also left a large body of chamber and instrumental music, including about 80 concertos for flute, sonatas and symphonies. A considerable part of his output was lost during the Seven Years' War and in the Allied bombing of Dresden in the Second World War.
The chief marks of Hasse's style are lyricism and a sense of melody. He attached great importance to the choice of key. Amorous feelings were usually set in A, aristocratic nobility in C and B flat, and supernatural, fear-inducing music in the keys of C and F minor. Most of his arias open in the major, move to the minor in the middle section, and return to the major for the da capo. As the years went by his arias grew longer, but the lyrical aim remained paramount.
One of Hasse's best-known stage works of the 1730s was the opera Tito Vespasiano, which was staged in many theatres across the continent. Artaserse was given with great success in Venice in 1730. After its Dresden premiere the oratorio La conversione di Sant'Agostino (1750) was heard in Leipzig, Hamburg, Rome, Prague, Berlin and other cities. Flute sonatas and concertos by Hasse from that period seem in many cases to have been written for Frederick, the King of Prussia and a keen flautist.
The site has sheet music for 'Se del fiume , Aria from Artaserse' at the Advanced level: an aria from Artaserse, the opera that was performed with great success in Venice in 1730. After Hasse's death his music was almost forgotten; attention to it returned after the 1820 biography, and today interest in it has grown markedly. In March 2015 a museum devoted to the life and work of the composer opened in Hamburg.