No sooner had I drafted my review of Simon Mayr’s Medea in Corinto, recently posted on OperaToday.com, than the world-premiere recording of Mayr’s
Telemaco nell’Isola di Calipso reached me, an opera from 16
years earlier, when Mayr was 34 years old. Franz Hauk, who is a conductor (and
organist) in Munich, has made numerous recordings of Mayr operas, oratorios,
and liturgical works for Naxos, and many of them have been praised by
reviewers.
Telemaco (I abbreviate the title as the jewel-case does) is a
three-act work first performed in 1797 at the famous La Fenice theater in
Venice. It is freely based on a didactic French novel (1699) by François
Fénelon that was intended as a sequel to Homer’s The
Odyssey. Numerous other creative works, in the intervening century before
Mayr came along, had been inspired by Fénelon’s novel (e.g.,
operas by Gluck and by Berlioz’s teacher Lesueur; also several famous oil
paintings).
Source: Opera Today
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