Tag: Handel News 80 – May 2021

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The Ghostly Hand of Handel: Handel operas not by Handel

By Leo Duarte

The appendix to the Händel-Werk-Verzeichnis comprises a group of fifteen compositions which have been assigned the catalogue numbers HWV A1-A15; one of these (HWV A15) is a collection of keyboard minuets arranged from opera arias; two more (HWV A2 and A5) represent unfinished operas by Handel; the remaining twelve compositions are so-called pasticcio operas. Pasticcios, common in the eighteenth century, brought together selected arias from various different operas to create a new entertainment. In today’s urtext age it is easy to view the pasticcio process pejoratively. We tend to be more interested in hearing music in its original context rather than in a bastardised form, but when such a leading light as Handel is involved first-hand in the bastardisation we might take more notice. Three of the twelve pasticcios (HWV A11, A13 and A14) were put together mainly using arias from Handel’s own back-catalogue with newly composed recitatives to bind the arias into their new librettos. The remaining nine pasticcios, however, are rather different. They were performed as part of Handel’s London opera seasons, probably under his personal musical direction, although they contain hardly a note by Handel himself.

These nine operas on which we will focus can be divided into two groups – the first three, chronologically, being true pasticcios, the last six being more arrangements than real pasticcios. I say arrangements, but in effect they are heavily cut versions of full operas by Geminiano Giacomelli (Lucio Papirio Dittatore, HWV A6), Leonardo Leo (Catone, HWV A7), Adolf Hasse (Caio Fabricio, HWV A9), and three by Leonardo Vinci (Semiramide riconosciuta, HWV A8, Arbace, HWV A10, and Didone abbandonata, HWV A12). Each of these operas does include at least some musical pieces which did not originally belong to it, though the number varies from just two in Lucio Papirio Dittatore to seventeen in Semiramide riconosciuta. Handel likely attended a performance of the original production of Giacomelli’s Lucio Papirio Dittatore while he was on a headhunting mission to Italy for new singers in 1729. Evidently, he enjoyed the opera well enough to wish to stage it in London and deemed the music of a good enough quality that he hardly troubled to interfere with it except to transpose a few arias to suit his London cast and to curtail the recitatives and the number of arias in order to meet the tastes of the London audience. He did, however, allow the phenomenal bass soloist Antonio Montagnana to include two arias which he had presumably sung with great success in previous productions.

Lucio Papirio Dittatore was the only pasticcio Handel produced in London which had so little changed or added. For the rest, it seems likely that, as in the case of Montagnana, the inserted arias came from the repertories of the individual singers. Indeed, to Handel and other eighteenth-century opera producers, one of the attractions of the pasticcio form was that the cast already had the music under their belts and therefore required less time to learn and to prepare it. Handel would have been spared the labour of writing a brand new work, required rehearsal days would have been drastically reduced, and the public would still be receiving something novel and exotic – the newly emerging compositional styles from Italy. London had become accustomed to a diet of Handel’s beautifully wrought and carefully considered orchestral counterpoint; in his music, the orchestra has its own distinctive voice which reflects upon and dialogues with the voice of the singer. The new Italian fashion was often far more straightforward, with the singer bearing the full weight of the important musical material and the orchestra mainly confined to ritornellos and a much simpler accompaniment underneath the vocal line.

This new fashion was not to everyone’s taste. After witnessing a pasticcio rehearsal, Mary Pendarves – one of Handel’s most ardent admirers – exclaimed, “Operas are dying, to my great mortification”. Many of the pasticcios received as few as four performances before being taken off. This diminutive number was bested by Ariosti’s Teuzzone which received only three performances in 1727, but it is also worth noting that Handel’s own Ezio, which today is widely esteemed, received only five performances in 1732. Some of the pasticcios, however, were very warmly received by the public, particularly the first two to be produced: Elpidia, HWV A1 and Ormisda, HWV A3. Ormisda, which had so offended Pendarves in rehearsal, received a total of fourteen performances, outselling both of Handel’s new operas that season, Lotario and Partenope.

Together with Venceslao, HWV A4, Elpidia and Ormisda form the group of three true pasticcios. At the risk of mixing metaphors, I like to think of these as ‘pic ‘n’ mix’ pasticcios. ‘Pasticcio’, in Italian, literally means a ‘pie’ and has also come to mean a ‘jumble’ or a ‘mess’. These pic ‘n’ mix pasticcios are a real jumble of arias by multiple composers from different operas with at most four arias originally from an opera bearing the same title, and even these aria attributions are speculative since the music of the original operas from which they might have been sourced seems not to have survived and cannot, therefore, be conclusively traced. There is consequently more variety in these three early pasticcios than in the later group of six, though that is not to say that they lack stylistic cohesion. The vast majority of the selected arias had come from Italian operas premiered within the preceding two years or so, and had the overriding flavour of the new Italian style to bind them together. To the London audiences, they would have represented an imported entertainment of ‘greatest hits’ from the most recent foreign opera seasons. The novelty value of these pasticcios should not be underestimated and was doubtless part of their original appeal, though today their appeal, indeed the very notice of them, comes solely through their connection with Handel. But can Handel’s connection be found in any more concrete compositional aspects?

The recitatives in four of the group of the six pasticcio-arrangements are largely taken from the original operas on which they are based. Exceptions to this are to be found in the recitatives of Caio Fabricio and Semiramide riconosciuta where Handel himself seems to have taken responsibility for composing new recitatives. The three true pasticcios appear to have had entirely new recitatives composed, though by whom we do not know. Stylistically they do not betray the hand of Handel so, presumably, they were composed by one of the many musicians attached to Handel’s opera company. Indeed, in rather too many instances the recitatives seem to have been rather inexpertly handled, resulting in jarring harmonic progressions and awkward vocal phrasing. These defects can be easily rectified in rehearsal, just as they probably were when they were originally performed, and the defects do not detract from the overall impression of the works. That the recitative composition should be delegated is not all that surprising given that, in London at least, the audience would have understood little of the Italian dialogue and would have been far more interested in the arias.

Another area where we might be able to detect Handel’s influence is in certain arias with which he tinkered. In Elpidia, an aria originally from Vinci’s Iphigenia has had a two-bar phrase crossed out each time it appears (Ex. 1). It is no more than a small cadential coda to the vocal line but evidently it was deemed undesirable and was deleted. The result is a tightening of the musical form, and it is tempting here to see Handel exerting his musical influence over the material. This is not an isolated example; two more arias from Elpidia and others from the other pasticcios have received similar treatment. Handel is infamous for “borrowing” material from other composers, but whenever he does so he drastically alters it, often distilling the ideas into their most concentrated form. Perhaps here also he couldn’t resist amending the musical material to his liking.

(Ex. 1)

Two arias – one each in each Semiramide riconosciuta and Didone abbandonata – underwent even more wholesale reworking. Vinci’s aria Saper bramante in Semiramide had to be transposed down an octave to fit a change of cast. Initially Handel seems to have imagined changing very little of the substance of the aria, but as he went through he decided to alter the character drastically in places, going so far as to recompose the entire closing ritornello. In the case of the aria Se vuoi ch’io mora from Didone, Handel’s interference with Vinci’s original might have had a slightly more duplicitous motive because he had already borrowed some of the musical material for his own opera, Giustino in the same season, so altering the material in the pasticcio would have provided a smokescreen for his magpie-like tendencies.

Aside from the aforementioned musical amendments, I believe Handel’s influence can be detected, less conclusively but perhaps more tellingly, in the way the pasticcios are structured and in their dramatic pacing. For the group of six pasticcio-arrangements Handel’s hands were largely tied to the structure of the original operas. Of course he cut them heavily, and was also forced to make certain concessions on account of the relative standing and ability of his cast members, but the overall structure remained relatively unchanged. It is in the ordering of the three true pasticcios where Handel’s influence might be seen most clearly, and, particularly so I would argue, in Ormisda. Imagine the scene: Handel is presented with a libretto and a pile of his cast’s favourite dismembered arias which he has to mould into a fine new work. The result could have turned into a Frankenstein’s monster of an opera, but instead we glimpse the ghostly hand of Handel, the master of dramatic pacing, at work in the selection and sequence of the arias.

A detailed analysis of the music of Ormisda is beyond the scope of this article, but I will provide a quick tour of Act I since the variety in character and the emotional range of the drama is worthy of note. The overture and the closing chorus are by far the earliest compositions in the work, the style being decidedly antiquarian compared with the arias which form the bulk of Ormisda. The prima donna (Anna Maria Strada) is entrusted with the opening aria, a lilting 6/8 allegro in G major which is followed by a dark, threatening aria sung by the primo uomo (Antonio Bernacchi) in B minor. Next, the principal antagonist (Antonia Merighi) sings an unctuous lament in the unlikely key of B-flat major, replete with crocodile tears to deceive the title-role (Annibale Pio Fabri) who responds with a regal yet spirited aria in D major. The following aria for Strada has two alternatives, one from the original production and one which replaced it in later performances; both are soothing in character. The unwilling puppet of the antagonist (Francesca Bertolli) then sings a defiant aria full of tempo changes and with plenty of opportunities for short cadenzas before Fabri sings a fulminating piece in C minor with much challenging coloratura. Bernacchi is then given a wistful aria in the remote key of E major and Merighi is given the last word of the act in a triumphant allegro with wide vocal leaps and extravagant quadruple stops for the violins over a bassline which alone punctuates the material with brash, almost farcical octave figures.

The final act is noteworthy too for its profusion of bravura arias. The slowest tempo indication is for one of Strada’s arias, marked ‘moderato’, but the rest are high-octane display vehicles for each cast member, and Strada is also granted “The Last Song” (as it is labelled in the manuscript) which is indicated as a rapid ‘Allegro assai con spirito”. It is no wonder that this opera was such a success. In recent performances at the London and Halle Handel Festivals, the way the energy in the room crescendoed throughout the last act was palpable and truly remarkable. This effect can have been no accident on Handel’s part, which leads me to some final thoughts as to what might be important about Handel’s contributions to these poor, neglected pasticcios.

Do the HWV numbers given to these works afford them a sense of legitimacy which is perhaps undeserved? As we have seen, there is very little if anything of Handel the composer in them, and the very act of looking for Handel’s contributions to these pasticcios has recently been called into question. As a performer in an age which would much rather hear Handel than Giacomelli it is all-too-tempting to emphasise the Handelian connection, if for no other reason than to get bums on seats at performances, and it would not be entirely unfair to accuse promoters of trying to dupe the public into thinking that they’re going to hear some unknown Handel operas by publicising the events with a prominent HWV number. Even in Handel’s day, some commentators were apparently unaware that the music in the pasticcios wasn’t by Handel himself. Nevertheless, I hope I have demonstrated that these fine dramatic entertainments are worthy of renewal and of more than a passing interest. Even if Handel’s own compositional processes remained ultimately unaffected by the marked changes in style represented by his continental counterparts, he certainly felt that their music was worth presenting, and who are we to argue with the great man?

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Handel and the Mercurial Art of Theatre Dance.

Sarah McCleave (Queen’s University Belfast)

Handel’s connection with the performers of his music was profound. He understood their unique traits and responded to these in his music. The fiery Faustina, the pathetic yet powerful Strada, the uniquely eloquent Senesino – we feel we know his singers through Handel’s music. A cast change to a theatre work usually resulted in a wholesale rewriting of the affected role. Instrumentalists, too, were also favoured with the composer’s attentions: we can track when fêted performers were available for Handel’s opera orchestra by a flowering of demanding obbligato accompaniments for a particular instrument. And so, too, was it with the theatre dancers of his day: Handel responded to them with inspiration and imagination, leaving behind a body of music that tells a most interesting story.

Where to begin? Just as music of the baroque era is understood to be dominated by the contrasting Italian and French styles, so too was it with the theatre dance of Handel’s time. French style or la belle danse was the main currency, with its emphasis on smooth, sinuous movements and a supreme elegance particularly suited to portraying Gods or heroic figures. Also French was the ‘demi-caractère’ style, a lively and yet still elegant subdivision of la belle danse used to depict the most common opera characters such as shepherds or courtiers (‘the people’). Italian dance was airborne and spirited, particularly suited for depicting comic characters. Italy, too, was home to the commedia dell’arte theatre tradition, which gave rise to a specialist grotesque style of dancing that favoured exaggerated movements, extremely high jumps, tumbling tricks and contortions. In Germany the theatre dance style leaned more towards the Italian, to suit a particular taste for lively occupational or comic dances (fishermen, blacksmiths etc.). London hosted French and Italian dancers simultaneously, while cultivating native theatre dancers—the most versatile of whom brought stage acting experience into their performances. Skilled mimes worked in the grotesque, the comic, and the serious (= la belle danse) styles, developing vocabulary and techniques to tell whole stories through action alone. Variety was the order of the day in what proved to be a particularly innovative period for theatre dance. Handel’s fairly modest body of dance music (from fourteen of his operas) demonstrates an inspired response to each of the styles described here.

This journey started for Handel with his very first opera, Almira (1705), written for Hamburg’s Gänsemarkt theatre. In the style of Italian opera practised there, dances were expected as an integral part of the opera’s structure. The story concerns the tensions arising from the proposed arranged marriage of the new queen, Almira and her inappropriate inclinations for her secretary, Fernando. With the addition of a secondary couple, there is plenty of scope for ballroom intrigues in the Venetian promenade style to mark the budding courtships. The device of a pageant on the theme of the continents permits the introduction of exotic Entries for African and Asian characters. The style of sarabande seen in this opera is a local variant of that dance which Handel also evoked in some of his keyboard music. For Handel’s second Hamburg opera, Nero (1705) an episode where Rome is set ablaze was seen as a chance to indulge the local taste for occupational dances – by admitting a dance for arsonists (Mordbrennern)! Alas, the music for this intriguing dance is lost, as is most of the dance music for Handel’s remaining Hamburg works. Handel’s subsequent period in Italy produced operas for Florence (Rodrigo, 1707) and Venice (Agrippina, 1709), but no theatre dances. Italian centres at that time consigned dances to the entr’actes; this music was not supplied by the opera composers themselves. But Handel did write eight movements with dance titles for the overture to Rodrigo; these and his surviving Hamburg dances are recorded in a stylish performance by Peter Holman with the Parley of Instruments (‘Handel in Hamburg’ for CDA in 1997; now available through Hyperion).

Handel’s move to London in 1711 opened up for him a cosmopolitan city with a thriving theatre scene; Italian opera, however, was a newcomer to this environment and there was little if anything in the way of ‘tradition’ to work with. Handel therefore felt free to draw exclusively from his Italian experiences his first opera, Rinaldo, where the sole dance is a voluptuous Venetian forlana (‘Il vostro maggio’) sung by dancing mermaids intent on distracting Rinaldo from his duty to the Christian crusades. With echoes of a similar scene in Purcell’s King Arthur, the seductresses in this instance are temporarily successful, enticing the knight onto a boat that will bear him to the location of his beloved and incarcerated Almirena. It’s interesting to note that Collegium 1704’s intelligent and highly satisfying period-style production of this opera, as conducted by Václav Luks (and readily available to view on Youtube) adds dance very tastefully to some of the orchestral ritornellos, but offers no choreography (apart from some bold arm sweeps) to a duet version of this choral dance.

Returning to 1710s London, we find Handel forging his own path in terms of theatre dance practice. His Il pastor fido of 1712 contained no dances at all – perhaps a wary response to acerbic comments about ‘Frenchified’ dance-laden pastoral operas recently published in the anonymous pamphlet A Critical Discourse on Operas (1709). Teseo (1713), with a text adapted from a French opera (the original was duly laden with five full-blown danced divertissements) has but one sung chorus and an interrupted ball scene. The former marks the hero’s first entrance and parallels scenes in English tragedies such as Nathaniel Lee’s Mithridates, King of Pontus or John Dryden’s All for Love. The interrupted ballroom scene – unique to Handel’s autograph (Act 5, scene 4) – is another Venetian tradition that is highly organic to the plot (Medea interrupts this festivity that was meant to mark Teseo’s union with her rival, Agilea). Amadigi (1715), also adapted from a French opera, has a ‘Dance of Knights and Ladies’ conjured by the sorceress Melissa to distract Amadigi from his rescue of Oriana (Act 1, scene 7). There’s no music for this dance but Charles Burney makes the very sensible suggestion that Amadigi’s gavotte-like aria, ‘E si dolce il mio contento’ would have been repeated in order to stage this. It would be nice to see this done. This seductive dance at the behest of a sorceress was also in the English theatrical mode, with parallels in dramatic operas such as King Arthur or The British Enchanters; dramatic opera also furnished models for the celebratory dance of shepherds and shepherdesses at end of Handel’s opera.

The next chapter in Handel’s operatic life was as ‘Master of the Orchestra’ for the newly founded Royal Academy of Music in London (1719). The declared aesthetic of this company was to follow previous Italian reforms by privileging stories from ancient history. Further restrictions on subplots and character types effectively consigned dance to the entr’actes. Notwithstanding this intention, the company’s opening opera, Numitore (with a libretto by Paolo Rolli) references Venetian dance practices of the late seventeenth century—including dances as part of a Lupercalian games episode, and a dance for gladiators in another scene. Handel’s first composition for the company, Radamisto, includes a dance suite at the end of each act. Notable are the Germanic influences on his dance music (both style and structure), including the borrowing of a rigaudon from Keiser’s Nebucadnezar (1704) as the core for a suite of thematically linked dances plus chorus in the Act III finale. After Radamisto, we lack evidence pointing to any further dances in the Royal Academy operas for several years.

And yet during the 1720s, newspaper notices and playbills reveal London’s lively theatrical culture of danced entra’ctes and a thriving new genre of pantomime. The latter was inspired by the commedia dell’arte tradition. In 1727, theatre manager and acclaimed harlequin, John Rich suggested the production values of the Royal Academy of Music – by failing to invest in ‘Machinery, Painting, [and] Dances’ – was not taking into account English tastes. He suggested that opera in London would fare better under different management. Handel’s Admeto (also 1727) can be understood as anticipating Rich’s challenge. With a story drawn from ancient mythology, the resultant scope for supernatural characters opened the door to integrating dance once more. The opera opens with a mortally-ill Admeto beset in a nightmare by visions of ‘Spirits with bloody daggers’. Handel’s irregularly accented music in the opening ‘Ballo di larve’ suggests the ‘timorous’ and ‘uncertain’ movements ascribed to such characters by his contemporary, the Leipzig-based dancing master and composer, Samuel Behr. If we consider the implied chronology of the texts represented in the manuscript copies (i.e. the content rather than their date of creation), it seems that the extraordinary mimed sequence staged at the gates of hell involving the singing roles of Alceste and Ercole as well as two dancing furies was actually expanded for one or both revivals in the 1727-1728 season. The evidence for this expansion is a French overture movement found in two manuscript sources (Aylesford and Shaftesbury) that formed part of a danced ‘da capo’ structure. These specialist dances would most probably have been performed by one of two visiting Italian dance troupes; they would have been best placed to perform in the grotesque style of movement implied by the characters (spirits, furies) and also by Handel’s extraordinary music. The ‘Ballo di larve’ from Admeto has proved a popular instrumental foil on aria collections recorded by Andreas Scholl (‘Ombra mai fú’, Harmonia Mundi) Lawrence Zazzo (‘A Royal Trio: Bononcini, Ariosti, Handel’, also Harmonia Mundi), and Hasnaa Bennani (‘Handel: Arie per la Cuzzoni’, Ramée). Also of interest is the 2009 Göttingen Festspiel production of Admeto (currently available on You Tube) where some exceedingly timorous spirits are effectively upstaged by their own shadows.

The 1730s was a period where the native ballad opera and pantomime thrived in London, as did operas that emphasized stage action and visual symbolism. At Covent Garden theatre, the French dancer and acclaimed mime Marie Sallé had a particularly triumphant season in 1733-34, performing in two of her own creations – the ballets en action, Pigmalion as well as Bacchus and Ariadne. She enjoyed a benefit where – as a contemporary tells us – a troupe of dancing satyrs helped gather the bounty that was thrown on the stage by enthusiastic spectators. Handel joined forces at Covent Garden theatre with John Rich and the latter’s star attraction Sallé in autumn 1734, after some fruitful experimentation with dance form and style in a series of autograph sketches now held in the Cambridge Fitzwilliam Museum. French influence, perhaps unsurprisingly, is particularly marked in Handel’s works of this season. All revived and new operas included a suite of dances in or at the end of each act. Handel’s only opera prologue Terpsichore was adapted from Louis Fuzelier’s prologue to Les festes grecques et romaines as set by Collin de Blamont (Paris, 1725). Musical borrowings suggest Handel must have had access to a copy of its score. Scenes were even added to the source text for his Ariodante to admit contexts for dancing, including the close to Act 2 where the accused and bereft princess, Ginevra falls into an uneasy sleep. Handel’s subsequent danced dream sequence is derived – but also departs – from its model, a scene in Lully’s Atys (1676). Both include dances for agreeable and disagreeable dreams – but it is far easier to appreciate Handel’s character depiction, with a smoothly pleasant minuet for the agreeable dreams, and some emphatic tirades and rushing scalic passages for their disagreeable companions. Unique to Handel, too, is the delightful dance depicting the fear of the agreeable dreams, with a highly picturesque use of rests and scurrying semiquavers.

We have two contemporary accounts only of dance scenes in Handel. The dance scene in Handel’s Rinaldo is described by Anne Baker in a letter to her mother. Unfortunately, Miss Baker lacked the confidence to draw on her own words, preferring a close paraphrase of the libretto, where a description of the action is limited to ‘a mermaid in the shape of a Woman, others are seen dancing up and down in the water’. So, we get a sense the scene was of interest, but learn nothing new of it. The second account is a delightfully gossipy letter penned by Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough describing a riot that occurred when George II forbade Sallé an encore of the Act 2 dances in Alcina (these were a reprise of the Ariodante dream sequence). Marlborough gives no hint of the creative act that stimulated the encore although we learn that the riot required a termination of the performance. We can’t firmly reconstruct this repertory as none of Handel’s opera dances was preserved in the then-current Feuillet dance notation (primarily used to record social dances). Indeed, the innovative mime of Sallé could not have been captured by such a method. ‘Handel Ballet Music’ records the music to Alcina and Ariodante’s ballets in a stately and resonant rendition by Sir Neville Marriner with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields (Argo, later Decca); all the 1734-35 opera dances feature in a most polished performance recorded by John Eliot Gardiner with the English Baroque Soloists (‘Handel Ballet Music’ in 1984, for Warner Elatus).

Handel’s collaboration with Marie Sallé was a landmark season in its radical approach to integrating French-style divertissements with opera seria. Their work influenced subsequent developments – including most notably the dance-laden works of London’s Middlesex opera company in the 1740s, the music of which was published in a series known as Hasse’s Comic Tunes. The 1740s and ‘50s saw several composers and choreographers later associated with opera reform on the continent coming to London, including C.W. Gluck and N. Jommelli among the former, and P. Alouard among the latter. The 1740s and ‘50s also bore witness to Handel’s oratorios and musical dramas, which demonstrated what theatre works could do with chorus and scene structure when not shackled by the conventional recitative-aria format of opera seria. The 1740s are also of interest for two events that did not take place. The first was a reunion of Handel and Sallé for a revival of his Hercules in 1746 (see David Charlton and Sarah Hibberd’s article ‘My father was a poor Parisian musician’ for the Journal of the Royal Musical Association in 2003). The second was Handel’s dramatic opera Alcestes, which was already in preparation at Covent Garden theatre when the project was pulled, ostensibly due to a quarrel between author Tobias Smollett and John Rich. Handel’s autograph for Alcestes boasts a ‘Grand Entrée’ that displays his sublime style in full flight. It is a real pity that this innovative work has never been staged. Maybe it will come to light in the present century?

Sarah McCleave is author of Dance in Handel’s London Operas (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2013). https://boydellandbrewer.com/university-of-rochester-press/#

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Italian Poets of the Renaissance as inspiration for Baroque Opera Composers

By Mark Windisch

Handel composed about 40 operas covering a very wide range of topics, using librettists for the text from a variety of backgrounds to help him. Some operas like Il Pastor Fido and Atalanta are pastoral subjects, some deal with historical characters with which we are familiar, like Riccardo Primo, Giulio Cesare, Xerxes, Tamerlano and Alexander. In this article I should like to take a closer look at the “magic” operas which usually rely on exceptional poets who lived in Italy during the Renaissance. In particular we owe a debt to Ludovico Ariosto and Torquato Tasso.


Handel, newly arrived in London in late 1710 was offered an opportunity to stage an opera by Aaron Hill, a dramatist who had recently been appointed to run the King’s Theatre Haymarket. Hill saw opera as the means to further his ambition to make a success of the theatre. He came up with the idea of using the story of Rinaldo and Armida and chose Giacomo Rossi (fl 1710-31) to compose the libretto. The plot laid out by Hill took Torquato Tasso’s famous poem Gerusalemme Liberata but added the love interest between Argante and Armida and inserted the additional character of Almirena. The ending in which the Muslims converted to Christianity was not part of the original.


For Handel it was a wonderful opportunity. He had brought with him to England a collection of pieces already composed for other occasions. Sometimes they were not in any way apt to the plot, but their spectacular impact, delivered mostly by the famous castrato Nicolini (Nicola Grimaldi) and other top singers accompanied by some interesting orchestral effects, ensured that Rinaldo was an instant success. It ran for 33 performances and was revived several times. The novelty of Italian opera presented in London no doubt contributed to the opera’s appeal, but its success was ensured by Hill’s intervention as producer. His choice of Handel to choose the music around which Hill and Rossi then fitted the plot was one masterstroke, but also the extraordinary stage effects which included fire-breathing dragons, live birds, moving mountains and waterfalls, must have been a revelation to London audiences.


Although the music might not always have been appropriate to the subject it illustrated, Handel produced some stunning pieces. The character of Armida has the best arias with “Furie Terribile” and “Vo far Guerra”. Rinaldo has eight arias including “Cara sposa” and the spectacular “Venti turbini”.


Tasso’s poem was very successful in its own right and went on to be the inspiration to many people besides Handel. Operas and cantatas were written by others such as Albinoni, Jommelli, Salieri, Gluck, Myslivecek, Sacchini, Haydn, Sarti, Rossini, Donizetti, Brahms, Dvorak and even Judith Weir (2005). Plays and paintings were also inspired by this poem.
Handel clearly used this opportunity as a learning experience. It not only brought his talents to a wide audience but also put his music in print for the first time. (Walsh is said to have cleared £1500 by printing songs from Rinaldo.) He also got to meet J J Heidegger who introduced him to several influential people which greatly helped his career in London.
Moving forward more than 20 years, Handel’s next venture into a magic opera came in January 1733 with Orlando. Once again, there might have been some link with Aaron Hill and Heidegger for the choice of subject.


Ludovico Ariosto published his vast narrative poem Orlando Furioso (Raging Orlando) in 1532 although a partially complete version appeared 1516. Ariosto followed an earlier poet, Matteo Maria Boiardo who published a romance Orlando Innamorato (Orlando in love), and that in turn was inspired by Chanson de Roland, published in France in the 11th century.
Ariosto’s book is published in translation in two large paperbacks by Penguin, which gives an idea of its scale. The background is the war between Charlemagne’s Christian paladins against Saracen armies under Agramante, which are threatening to overthrow the Christian Empire. In the story, Orlando, a Christian knight is obsessed with the pagan princess, Angelica. A sub plot is the love between Bradamante, a Christian warrior and the Saracen, Ruggiero. Medoro, a wounded Saracen knight is healed and saved by Angelica and elopes with her.


The unhinged Orlando is assisted by another knight and they fly up to the moon (where all things lost are supposed to be stored) on a flying horse where they find Orlando’s lost wits which are then restored to him.


Handelians will recognise some of the characters and situations in Handel’s Orlando. The knight is central to the story, but we also have Angelica and Medoro. Handel introduced two more characters, Zoroastro and Dorinda. He uses the characters to build a story of power, love, and jealousy. He concentrates on the mania from which Orlando suffers, rendering him unable to reconcile his instincts as a warrior with his obsession with Angelica. The character of Zoroastro is a sort of primitive psychiatrist-cum-magician which offers an opportunity for introducing spectacular stage effects. Dorinda is the only solidly grounded character, offering an interesting contrast.


In the opera Handel breathes life into the characters by giving them music appropriate to their thoughts as opposed to their actions. He produces some astonishing arias for Zoroastro, far more convincing in my opinion than that written by Mozart for a similar character in The Magic Flute. Orlando is a deeply damaged character. He first is portrayed as a staunchly heroic character; at the sight of Angelica he is overcome by passion. By Act II overwhelming jealousy is invoked when he realises that Angelica is in love with Medoro. His is aria reflects the resultant disintegration of his mental state. In Act III the confused state of his mind comes through clearly in the music Handel has written for him to sing, especially in his duet with Angelica. Dorinda the shepherdess has several remarkable arias including her reflective soliloquy after the quite frightening encounter with Orlando at his most deranged.


This extended poem by Ariosto became very influential and had many followers including Edmund Spenser in The Faerie Queen, Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing, Lope de Vega, Cervantes in Don Quixote, Borges and even Salman Rushdie in The Enchantress of Florence.


As to musical compositions, besides forming the storyline of Handel’s Orlando, Ariosto was mined by Caccini, Agostino Steffani, Vivaldi, Lully, Rameau, Hasse and many others. Many artists including Delacroix also drew inspiration from Ariosto with his painting, Marphise.
In 1735 Handel was moved to use Ariosto’s poem again for Alcina. This was another instance of Handel and his producer needing a magic opera to display special effects. The libretto came to Handel via Riccardo Broschi, brother of the singer Farinelli and a composer himself. The characters are from the Ariosto but Broschi changed a few things. He added Oronte, retained Melissa but changed her into Melisso (a bass) and developed Bradamante and Morgana from their relatively minor roles in the poem.


Handel’s genius again was to imbue the characters with human feelings and reactions as opposed to Ariosto’s concentration on just producing a narrative. Alcina, for all her magic powers, is a mature woman needing to love and be loved. Finally, when she cannot find this love, her character disintegrates and her powers are lost. The child, Oberto shows considerable feeling for his father who has been transformed into a lion by Alcina. Ruggiero starts as a puppet figure controlled by his passion for Alcina, but as he realises that Ricciardo is really his beloved Bradamante in disguise, he rejects Alcina. His status as a warrior and hero is then reflected in his music.


I wonder what the famous authors of the poems which inspired Handel and his librettists would have thought of the way their creations came to life in the Baroque opera form. Even the earliest operas, which were little more that recitals with music, did not take place until 1597. Monteverdi, who can be said perhaps to be the first composer to produce an opera approximating to a modern format, only produced his first opera Orfeo in 1607.
Handel was very versatile and flexible in his approach and magic operas form only a very small part of his huge output of Italian opera. All were well received and allowed him to produce some of his most memorable music.