Continuing with my traversal of Dorati's recording of the Esterhazy operas, tonight I am listening to La Vera Constanza, and I am very much reminded of a certain dude named Wolfgang as I listened, for the first time in this set.
Which made me wonder how much of Mozart's output would Haydn have known. So I turned to Wikipedia for dates, and found this
The work was written for the Eszterházy court and first performed on 25 April 1779. It was revived there in April 1785 when Haydn apparently had to re-create much of the opera from memory, the original having been largely lost. It was given in Bratislava, Budapest, Vienna and Brno between 1786 and 1792 under the title Der flatterhafte Liebhaber.
Now, in 1779 Mozart was probably not very much on Haydn's radar. But by 1785 the two had met, and Mozart had written the first two of his operas which are heard with at least some regularity today: Idomeneo and Abduction from the Seraglio. Plus of many of the piano concertos and symphonies and chamber music.
So now I have a double question
First, was the original score "largely lost" as Wikipedia says.
Second, how faithful a reproduction of the original was Haydn's 1785 version? Might he have rewritten it and used some Mozartian influence picked up in the intervening years?
Even the Wikipedia article picks up on the Mozartian tinge
Haydn's finales for Acts 1 and 2 aspire to the Mozartian ideal in their attention to details of textual structure, characterization, location and stage events, pointing to Haydn’s capable dramatic technique.
