ORLANDO PALADINO

This knight is no war hero; choosing to pursue his obsession, rather than to fight. Orlando, the illustrious crusader from Ariost‘s verse novel Orlando furioso, is in love with Angelica, though she is betrothed to another. In his erotomania, he presents a both unintentionally funny and tragic figure. Joseph Haydn described his (at that time) most internationally successful opera from 1782 as a dramma eroicomico; this categorisation already suggests what the composer, as he sat in his opera laboratory at the Palace of Esterházy, was interested in: namely, in taking seriously and musically exploring the depths of human existence in all its brokenness, regardless of how bizarre this might appear.