Opera on the Move in the Nordic Countries during the Long 19th ...

Formed to Perform
music directors also functioned as singing masters, such as Edouard Du
Puy (Dahlgren 1866, pp. 423–424).
A close look at recruitment strategies reveals the opera directors’ interest
in foreign educational principles. All of the singing masters appointed
between 1773 and 1850 were either given opportunities to study abroad or
were foreigners who had been educated abroad. Lars Samuel Lalin (singing
master at the Royal Academy of Music from 1771 and at the opera from
1773 to1783) was a pupil of the Italian tenor Giovanni Croce (Nyblom 1923,
pp. 38–39). In 1765 he was sent abroad to collect music and perfect his singing.
Lalin stayed away for two and a half years and amassed a substantial
number of scores during that time (Personne 1913, p. 105). The music was
used during concerts at the House of Knights in Stockholm in the 1760s
(Forsstrand 1926, pp. 391–400).
In 1783 the German composer Johann Christian Friedrich Haeffner was
hired as the acting school’s second singing master. He came to Stockholm
in 1781 and worked as an organist in the German congregation, played in
the band at the opera and led the band at the Stenborg theatre (Svenska
Komiska Teatern) in the years 1781–1783. The origin of Haeffner’s vocal
education is uncertain. He may have come into contact with Johann Adam
Hiller during his studies in Leipzig, although no documentation has been
found. Haeffner had studied with the organist Johann Gottfried Vierling
in Klein-Schmalkalden. In 1787 he was appointed the first singing master
(Bohlin 1967–1969, p. 701) at the drama school. Like Lalin, Haeffner left no
vocal manual to study, but he did compose an abundance of vocal music in
which his principles can be detected. In his Chorale book for the Swedish
Lutheran Church (1819) he tried to reduce what he considered to be the
vices of Italian ornamentation, working more in the traditional Bach style.
Haeffner was replaced by an Italian, Ludovico Piccini, son of the famous
Neapolitan composer Niccolà Piccini, who trained his son as a composer and
singing master. The younger Piccini made his debut as a composer at the
Opéra comique in Paris in 1788 with the opera Les amours de Chérubin. In
1796 he was summoned to Stockholm by the king as maestro di cappella, a
position he held for six years. During this time he composed several works
for Stockholm, all of them to Swedish texts, such as the opera Sömngångaren.
In 1801 Piccini returned to Paris, where he had a succession of successful
operas performed (Ayrton 1827, p. 24). His one-act l’Amante statua
was presented in Italian by vocal students at the Stockholm <strong>Opera</strong> four
times in 1798 and 1799 (Dahlgren 1866, p. 424).
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