Premiered at the King’s Theatre in London on February 24, 1730, Partenope was an unusual work in Händel’s catalogue: not a traditional Baroque opera seria, but an appetizing mixture of comedy with hints of tragedy. Not since his Agrippina of two decades earlier had Händel written an opera like this, and the opera manager Owen Swiney disliked its slightly risqué plot of romantic complications—including a woman character playing a man—and hesitated to produce it. But its first London audiences loved it, and today it is one of Händel’s most popular operas.
The title character is the queen and founder of Naples, who is besieged by multiple suitors for her hand. Partenope’s favorite, Prince Arsace of Corinth, arrives trailed by his girlfriend Rosmira, who has disguised herself as the male “Eurimene” and is determined to win back her lover. Händel treats the continual intrigues between the characters—including another suitor, who after being turned down, declares war on Naples!—with a light hand.
The spirit of tragi-comedy is captured in the opera’s opening Sinfonia. Beginning in D minor and featuring the grand gestures of the French Baroque overture style, it also contains a playful fugato in a bouncing gigue rhythm. And paying tribute to the opera’s Neapolitan setting, Händel adds a lively closing dance in the style of a Neapolitan tarantella.
Paired with Händel’s overture, we will hear another for an opera based on the same libretto: the Sinfonia from La Rosmira fedele (Partenope) composed in 1725 by the now largely forgotten Italian Leonardo Vinci (1696–1730), who, upon the death of Alessandro Scarlatti, became vice-maestro of the Royal Chapel at Naples. Beginning as a composer of operatic commedie in the Neapolitan dialect, Vinci also wrote many opere serie in his short lifetime. The influence of the Neapolitan commedie can be heard in his Sinfonia, which contains three brief sections and no traces of the solemn French overture style. It opens with a whirlwind dance in duple meter urged on by comic hammering motives from the harpsichord. Then an interlude follows that features the improvisations of a solo violin. Finally, a vivacious triple-meter dance merrily sets the mood for an opera in the light-hearted Neapolitan style.
Rodelinda, regina de’ Longobardi was the last of the triumvirate of masterpieces Händel composed in his miracle year of 1725. Aided by an exceptional libretto by the composer’s close colleague Nicola Haym, its beleaguered heroine is one of the most finely drawn of all Händel characters. With her husband robbed of his throne and believed dead, Rodelinda must single-handedly battle the tyrant Grimoaldo and try to save the life of her young son while longing for her beloved Bertarido. Händel’s arias for this intelligent and faithful woman reveal all facets of her courageous and loving nature.
In Act 2, Rodelinda at last learns that Bertarido is still alive but in hiding and that she will soon see him. Händel’s ineffably beautiful aria “Ritorna, o caro e dolce mio tesoro” shows her softer side and how deeply she loves Bertarido. Set to a lilting siciliano rhythm, it is one of those elegantly simple Händelian melodies that cling in the memory, and it embodies the elusive quality of happiness veiled by tears as she realizes the perils still awaiting them.
Händel was only one of many composers who wrote operas for this compelling story. We will also hear two arias from Carl Heinrich Graun’s Rodelinda, written a little later in 1741 for Frederick the Great’s court in Berlin. Having received a thorough musical training as a choir boy at the famous Dresden Kreuzschule, Graun began his career as a tenor soloist in Brunswick, where he often rewrote arias he didn’t like. Soon he was composing his own operas for Brunswick, which brought him to the attention of the then Prussian Crown Prince. When Frederick assumed the throne in 1740, he immediately made Graun his royal Kapellmeister. And Frederick also built a new opera house—the lovely Oper unter den Linden, today the headquarters of the Berlin Staatsoper—for which Graun wrote some 36 operas under the king’s strict supervision. (Frederick even wrote some of the librettos himself.) Although little-known today, Graun may also be remembered as the great-great-great-great grandfather of the renowned writer Vladimir Nabokov.
In Graun’s opening aria for Rodelinda, “Risolvere non oso,” which receives its New York premiere on this evening’s program, she is caught between her loyalty to her missing husband and the imperative to save her son as she ponders Grimoaldo’s proposal. In this da capo aria’s first section, Graun describes her impossible dilemma with two contrasting types of music. First we hear tragically imperious music driven by jagged orchestral rhythms, then her hatred of Grimoaldo spit out in quick explosions of anger. A third type of music then appears in the B section: a beautifully lyrical prayer to the gods for assistance, concluding with a poignant violin solo linking to the da capo.
Another of Rodelinda’s arias in Act I, “L’empio rigor del fato,” displays the queen’s strength of character as a formidable opponent for Grimoaldo. Graun makes this a blistering rage aria taken at a fierce pace. Both the A and B sections are so larded with elaborate coloratura it seems there will scarcely be room for embellishment in the da capo reprise, but Ms. De Bique shows there is.
From 1734–1735, a decade after writing Rodelinda, Händel created another trio of masterpieces, the last and greatest of which is the fantasy opera Alcina. Also among Händel’s greatest female characters, Alcina is a cruel sorceress who lures men to her island retreat and, once she tires of them, transforms them into beasts for her menagerie. As the opera opens, however, she has herself fallen in love with one of her captives, Ruggiero, and that love turns out to be the weakness that will destroy her.
In an effort to outshine his competitors in London, Händel and his producers emphasized spectacular scenery and special effects for Alcina’s magical kingdom. He even hired a ballet troupe from France to perform several sequences of dances. Concerto Köln will play one of these ballets, Act 2’s Ballo: Entrée des songes agréables (Ball: Entry of the Pleasant Dreams). In his instrumental music, Händel often used the Baroque suite form of standard dances, conceived as abstract music to be listened to but not danced. However, this suite of short dances was designed to show off the dancers’ virtuosity.
Over the course of six magnificent arias, the composer charts the many facets of Alcina’s personality and the erosion of her magical powers. Her vulnerable self appears in Act 2’s “Ah! Mio cor” when she hears the news that Ruggiero seeks to escape from her. Built on an orchestral ritornello representing the painful beating of a breaking heart, it opens with a great sigh of anguish, which becomes more poignant at the da capo return. The spectacular B section is a miniature rage aria showing she is still dangerous.
If one had to select the greatest of Alcina’s numbers, it would surely be the scena of accompanied recitative and aria “Ah! Ruggiero crudel … Ombre pallide” that closes Act 2. Händel saved the more arioso-like accompanied-recitative form for only very special moments, and “Ah! Ruggiero crudel” is one of his most remarkable, dramatizing the undoing of a woman of great stature and power. In this scene of tragic grandeur, Alcina is reduced to pleading with her supernatural powers to aid her, amid impotent cries of “perchè?” (“why?”).
On this program’s second half, three instrumental pieces, all by Händel, showcase the expertise of the musicians of Concerto Köln. The first is the Suite from Rodrigo from very early in Händel’s career, when he was learning his craft and building a career in Italy. Setting a story about the eponymous Spanish medieval hero, Rodrigo was Händel’s first opera for Italy, premiered in Florence in 1707. Little is known about the audience reception to this work, and it is very rarely heard today. Nevertheless, it was a step toward his mastery of Italian opera and would be followed two years later by his first major success, Agrippina. The Suite contains a set of high-spirited and attractive dances, the finest of which is the minuet featuring virtuoso parts for solo violin and bassoon.
During Händel’s sojourn in Italy, he became strongly influenced by Arcangelo Corelli, whose elegant trio sonatas changed the course of Baroque music. And the Trio Sonatas of opus 5, which Händel published much later in 1738, surely pay tribute to Corelli’s sonatas. They are also examples of the composer’s habit of borrowing from and elaborating on music he had written in the past. For example, the Sonata in G Major, Op. 5, No. 4, uses dance music from his recent operas Alcina and Ariodante. Other sources were overtures to the oratorio Athalia and the opera Radamisto, as well as the famous Chandos anthems of 1718.
In the trio sonatas that make up his opus 5, this orchestral music was revised for two melody instruments and basso continuo. Often considered this sonata’s highlight is the third movement, Passacaille (Passacaglia), borrowed from Radamisto. Over a repeating ground-bass pattern, the two violins unfurl a flowing three-beat dance. As the music continues, Händel progressively ornaments the bass pattern. Later he shifts the music from G major to G minor, giving it a lovely pensive character.
Like Alcina, Händel’s 1735 opera Ariodante about dangerous love intrigues in medieval Scotland needed special ballet music to show off the French ballerina Marie Sallé and her troupe. At the end of Act 2’s Ballo: Entrée des Songes agréables effrayés—Combat des Songes funestes et agréables (Entrance of Pleasant [and] Frightened Dreams—Battle of Doom and Pleasant Dreams), Princess Ginevra fears her fiancé Ariodante is dead and faces unjust condemnation for her alleged unfaithfulness. In a remarkable ballet sequence representing Ginevra’s tormented psyche, her happy dreams battle vigorously with her nightmares. Paying tribute to Sallé, Händel’s music echoes the French dance styles of Lully and Rameau.
Born into a musical family in Naples, Gennaro Manna was, in his day, renowned both for his sacred music and for his opere serie produced at many Italian opera houses. Beginning in 1744, he was maestro di musica for the Cathedral of Naples and later added the same position at Santissima Annunziata Maggiore in the same city. One of the leaders of the Neapolitan school, today he has been largely forgotten.
Based on an opera libretto by the prolific Pietro Metastasio set by many other composers, Manna’s Achille in Sciro (1745) is a mixture of opera seria and comedy about the legendary Greek warrior’s stay on the island of Skyros to avoid fighting in the Trojan War, where oracles have predicted he will die. He disguises himself as a woman and lives with the daughters of the island’s king. The oldest daughter, Deidamia, realizes who he really is and falls in love with him. Soon Ulysses and the other Greek soldiers track Achilles down and convince him he must join them to lead the Greeks attacking Troy. Deidamia is left in despair as he sails away from Skyros.
Such a plot yields plentiful opportunities for comic gender mix-ups alongside the more serious role of Deidamia. In Act 3, as she is about to be abandoned by Achilles, she sings the lovely aria “Chi può dir che rea son io,” in which she pleads that no one judge her harshly for falling in love with such a beautiful man. In G minor, this aria adorned with syncopations and delicate triplets is a last love song to Achilles rather than an expression of grief.
Using a different libretto by Paolo Antonio Rolli, Händel wrote Deidamia, setting this same story four years earlier. Since opera seria had fallen out of favor among English audiences by 1741, this was his last Italian opera for the London theaters. Though Deidamia has plenty of comic scenes, it also contains more sadness than Manna’s, focused on Deidamia’s real grief when she loses Achilles. For her tragic last aria, “M’hai resa infelice,” Händel throws the standard da capo form out the window. This aria fluctuates between a beautiful lament voicing her devastation and a furious rage aria in which she curses Achilles, calling on stormy seas to drown him on his voyage. Both sections are repeated; Ms. De Bique’s embellishments in the lament are gorgeously poignant.
Today, Händel’s 1724 opera Giulio Cesare in Egitto ranks as his most popular opera. In a superbly theatrical libretto by Nicola Haym, it tells the story of the young Cleopatra competing for the Egyptian throne with her rather nasty brother Ptolemy and using her seductive wiles to lure the visiting Roman hero Julius Caesar to her assistance. Not only is its plot compelling, but Giulio Cesare is also packed with many of the best arias Händel ever created, especially those he wrote for his fascinating Cleopatra. Probably the most beautiful of them all is “Se pietà di me non senti,” sung by Cleopatra in Act 2 when Caesar suddenly learns that Ptolemy’s soldiers are on their way to kill him, and he rushes off to battle. At this moment, the two of them have just pledged their love. It is also the moment when Cleopatra is transformed from a flirtatious, self-involved adolescent into a mature woman, faced with the loss of the first man she has truly loved and ready to fight to the death against Ptolemy.
This aria is part of a full scena, opening with a deeply expressive accompanied recitative, “Che sento? Oh dio!,” in which Cleopatra processes the news she has just heard and how it is affecting her. In the aria itself, darkly colored by bassoon and plaintive descending figures in the violins, she calls on the gods for help. Händel’s word setting throughout is superb, particularly of the word “morirò” (“I will die”), and his unexpected harmonic shifts intensify this beautiful melody’s expressiveness. We experience here Händel’s unparalleled ability to plumb the emotional depths of his characters and summon our engagement and empathy for them.
Graun’s Cleopatra e Cesare was composed at Frederick the Great’s command for the opening of the king’s new Berlin opera house in December 1742. Though it sets roughly the same story as Händel’s, its libretto, loosely based on Corneille’s play The Death of Pompey, is completely different. The mood of Cleopatra’s Act 1 aria “Tra le procelle assorto” is also the opposite of “Se pietà di me non senti”: At this point in the story, Cleopatra believes she is in full control of her destiny. Paced by an exhilarating orchestral part, this is a brilliant Allegro showpiece for soprano that displays her coloratura facility to the maximum. Though the B section of the da capo moves away to the minor mode, it is still as spirited and virtuosic as the A. Graun’s music here leaves behind Händel’s high Baroque style and moves to the galante style of the mid-18th century, which would eventually evolve into the musical language of Mozart and Haydn.
—Janet E. Bedell