Handel: three operas and an oratorio
2008; Oxford University Press; Volume: 36; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/em/cam142
ISSN1741-7260
Autores Tópico(s)Theater, Performance, and Music History
ResumoOne of the fascinating things which emerges from the circumstances surrounding the genesis of two of these operas is the range of difficulties which Handel had to face as a composer of Italian opera in 18th-century London. Between bitter inter-company rivalries, the threat of being superseded in a fickle public's favour by some currently more fashionable composer, and even the vagaries of a prima donna's health, anything could happen to torpedo the smooth progress of a new work—and, it seems, all too often did. Handel: Floridante (Archiv 477 6566, rec 2005, 164′), composed for the Royal Academy of Music's 1721–2 season, had a particularly troubled gestation. Not only was Handel having to respond to the challenge presented by the success of his fellow composer-in-residence, Giovanni Bononcini, while setting a less than satisfactory libretto by the Academy's secretary Paolo Antonio Rolli (a better poet than he was a dramatist), but, when more than half the music had already been composed, the soprano Margherita Durastanti, cast as the heroine Elmira, was forced by illness to withdraw. Since the Academy chose to replace her with the contralto Anastasia Robinson (who just happened to be particularly favoured by the pro-Bononcini Catholic aristocratic party), her original part of the seconda donna Rossane being reallocated to a soprano, Handel was faced with an amount of rewriting and adaptation which inevitably compromised his original conception of the piece. For this recording, Alan Curtis and Il Complesso Barocco have made a most commendable and convincing attempt to re-create the opera according to Handel's first intentions, particularly where the part of Elmira is concerned.
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