Nicola Francesco Haym

Nicola Francesco Haym (Rome, 1678 – London, 1729) was an Italian cellist, composer, librettist and theatre impresario, a key figure in the Italian opera performed in London during the first decades of the eighteenth century. His importance lies less in his own music than in his work as an adapter of libretti and in his role within the Royal Academy of Music, the great London opera institution of the period.

He trained in Rome, where between 1694 and 1700 he worked occasionally as a cellist for Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni, a patron who also commissioned his two surviving oratorios, probably his earliest known works. Around 1701 he arrived in London in the company of the violinist Nicola Cosimi, invited by the second Duke of Bedford. There he served as chamber music master to the Duke and consolidated his reputation with two sets of Corellian trios published in Amsterdam and with a collection of cantatas.

With the arrival of Italian opera in London in 1705, Haym acted as continuo cellist and as representative of his wife, the soprano Joanna Maria. His adaptations of Camilla (1706) and Pyrrhus and Demetrius (1708) were notably successful, and he soon became a regular adapter of pasticcios and of libretti for Handel, Ariosti and Bononcini. Between 1722 and 1728 he was secretary of the Royal Academy, a post in which he oversaw the staging of the institution's twenty-four productions. According to Giuseppe Riva, his texts were pragmatic and set aside long recitatives in favour of arias and melodramatic episodes; Riva himself judged him harshly, although his versions suited what English audiences demanded.

From 1719 onwards his activity turned towards scholarship: he published Il tesoro britannico on ancient medals, edited works by Tasso and Maffei, and became a member of the Society of Antiquaries in 1724. His legacy is twofold: his adaptations, largely anonymous in their sources, document how opera was transformed to suit London taste, and his project for a general history of music, which was never preserved, would have provided valuable information on Baroque opera.