Luigia Polzelli

Luigia Polzelli (also Polcelli; c. 1760 – 5 October 1830) was an Italian mezzo-soprano, who sang at the Esterházy court in Hungary during the late 18th century. She was for a number of years the lover of the composer Joseph Haydn.

Luigia Polzelli was born Luigia Moreschi in Naples sometime around 1760. She married the violinist Antonio Polzelli some time before 1779. The couple apparently lived in Bologna.

Luigia arrived at the Esterházy court with her husband Antonio in 1779; both had two-year contracts. Luigia was nineteen years old at the time. Polzelli soon turned out not to be a particularly able singer. Moreover, her husband had difficulties in fulfilling his duties as a violinist, as he was in the initial stages of a long drawn out demise from tuberculosis. The reigning prince, Nikolaus Esterházy, was a great connoisseur of opera who was well acquainted with high-quality singing, and recognizing Luigia's mediocrity and Antonio's unreliability he soon moved (1780) to have them dismissed (in fact, he was willing to buy out the rest of their contracts). However, at this time it emerged that Polzelli had become the lover of Haydn, then 48, who had had a very bad relationship with his wife almost since the beginning of their marriage. The Prince, who valued Haydn's services immensely, apparently agreed to keep the Polzellis on the payroll.

Rosemary Hughes, assessing the relationship, notes that "both of them looked forward to an eventual marriage", though under the rules of Roman Catholic Church to which they both belonged, this was completely impossible until the deaths of their respective spouses.

The relationship between Haydn and Polzelli continued for over ten years, until about 1791.

Polzelli had an important influence on Haydn's musical output, for a somewhat negative reason: despite frequent tutoring from Haydn, she often had trouble with difficult parts. An important part of Haydn's job at Eszterháza was to put on productions of operas by other composers. Where arias assigned to Luigia were too difficult for her to sing, Haydn wrote insertion arias for her, replacing the originals in performance. According to Jones there were at least five such arias; possibly as many as ten; he describes them as follows.

Haydn wrote a considerable number of operas himself (see List of operas by Joseph Haydn), but only twice assigned Polzelli a role (Silvia in L'isola disabitata and Lisetta in La vera costanza).

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