Last year, the Salzburg Festival staged the mother of all Mozart blowouts: It was his 250th birthday, you know. This year, things are back to normal. Mozart is still a major presence in his hometown — as lovely as ever mid the Austrian alps. But other composers are accorded the spotlight, too.

One of them is Haydn, whose opera “Armida” is being performed. We don’t think of Haydn as an opera composer: We think of him for symphonies, string quartets — even oratorios. But Haydn wrote some 15 operas, being an all-purpose composer, like most greats.

“Armida” is based on Tasso’s “Gerusalemme liberata” (“Jerusalem Delivered”), a tale of the Crusades. It involves war, love, loyalty, betrayal — perpetual themes of opera, as of human life. Time was, everyone and his brother composed an opera on Tasso’s epic: Lully, Handel, Gluck, Rossini . . .

And if I may sneak in a recommendation for your CD player (or iPod): In the 1970s, the soprano Jessye Norman recorded “Armida” with Antal Dorati, a conductor who championed Haydn. Don’t think of Miss Norman as a Haydn singer? Ah, you should, you should.

The Salzburg Festival has assembled a superb cast for “Armida.” They themselves should be recorded. The cast features not only one top lyric tenor, but two: Michael Schade (Rinaldo) and Richard Croft (Ubaldo). It’s unusual that they sing together — that there is a town, so to speak, big enough for the both of them. This is cause for celebration.

On Tuesday night, Mr. Schade was creamy, accurate, incisive, smart — in other words, his typical exemplary self. A critic runs out of words. Mr. Schade was never better than when singing soft and unaccompanied. He is a supremely confident fellow, with much to be supremely confident about. And his acting was enveloping.

Mr. Croft was in fine form too, singing from a motorized wheelchair (for that is where the stage director puts Ubaldo). If it bothered him not to stand up, it didn’t show. He was creamy and beautiful, of course — as always — but also stirring. And when he and Mr. Schade sang together: I swear, it sounded like one voice, somehow split.

In the title role of Armida was a young German soprano named Annette Dasch: clean, sensitive, and exciting. She managed to sing both correctly and gutsily. She was also a damn sexy Armida, a must. In the smaller role of Zelmira was another young German soprano, Mojca Erdmann. She, too, was both correct and gutsy — singing in the stratosphere — and not unsexy, to boot.

I mentioned two lyric tenors onstage; there were actually three. The third was Bernard Richter, a young Swiss, portraying Clotarco. He was fresh and appealing, perhaps another Croft or Schade in the making. And rounding out the cast was yet another young singer: Vito Priante (Idreno), an Italian baritone. He sometimes projected a simulacrum of command, rather than command itself — but he was adequate, and then some.

The Englishman Ivor Bolton is a major conductor in Salzburg, heading the Mozarteum Orchestra. On Tuesday night, he conducted engagingly, and his orchestra played well. The sound of the strings was sometimes scratchy, and pleasantly so — not nearly ugly enough to satisfy the “period” purists! Now and then, the orchestra got loose, but mainly they stayed together. And I might single out the oboist: She was commendably sinuous, lilting.

As for Mr. Bolton, he was what you want in “Armida,” and in Haydn at large: He was crisp and graceful, alert and energetic. He was firm where necessary, and flexible — spacious — where that was necessary, too. In the opera’s final music, he was virtually on fire. And when he was through, he acted like a football coach who had just won a great victory: congratulating and hailing the troops, exuberantly.

The production is in the care of Christof Loy, a German director, and, being a Salzburg production, there is plenty of screwiness. I could mock it at length, and entertainingly.

But, you know? In the end, it works. Individual elements are maddening, but, on the whole, the production is sincere, involving, and defensible. That may not sound like great praise. Believe me, at this festival, it is.

Tuesday night’s show was exceptionally well acted — not just by Michael Schade, but by everybody. And it was even better sung. Indeed, you can go five years without hearing an opera so well sung. And it was a pleasure to experience Haydn in a theater.