“If I wish to hear a good opera,” Empress Maria Theresa of Austria and Hungary is reported to have said, “I go to Esterháza.” Her reference was to the countrified “Hungarian Versailles” of Prince Nikolaus Esterházy, a connoisseurship who had the smarts and the purse to hire Franz Josef Haydn as his court composer. In point of fact, the imperial lady came calling just once, at which time she attended L’Infedeltà Delusa (Infidelity Outwitted), in many respects the most elaborate of Haydn’s operatic achievements. His later L’Isola Disabitata (The Desert Island) is dramatically tidier and musically loftier. Only four characters appear. Two are shipwrecked sisters, who have been subsisting for many years on a desert island, imagining themselves abandoned by one sister’s husband. But no, he was detained by pirates and has only recently escaped. (Now you do the math.) What distinguishes L’Isola Disabitata from most operas of its period is Haydn’s approach to the dialogue between musical numbers. Typically, these recitativo passages would be sung in a secco (dry) style as indistinguishable as possible from plain speech, minimally accompanied by harpsichord with sketched-in gestures by the cello and double bass. Only moments of truly exceptional dramatic intensity would trigger the involvement of the full orchestra in so-called recitativo accompagnato. But in L’Isola Disabitata, all the recitativi are of the “accompanied” variety, keeping emotions constantly on the boil. A demanding assignment—and an educational one for the young artists of the Paris Opéra’s training program, who will be performing as it were under a microscope in the intimacy of an amphitheater tucked away in a corner of the vast Bastille the public seldom sees. —Matthew Gurewitsch