Christopher Ainslie Countertenor

Bernhard Forck Violin and Concertmaster
Rana Abdelwahab*, Mohammadreza Bahrami*, Paul Mejía España* Violin I 
Eduard Kotlyar, Ramez Atia*, Yalda Bagheri Farsani*, Yume Zamponi* Violin II
Clemens-Maria Nuszbaumer, Eden Meyer Khaiat*, Mafalda Costa Reis* Viola
Luise Buchberger, Ali Emir Bostancı*, Heddi Raz Shahar* Cello
Harald Winkler Double Bass
Rafaela Carvalho*, Doğa Temelli* Oboe
Hüma Beyza Ünal* Bassoon
Raphael Alpermann Harpsichord, Organ
Thor-Harald Johnsen Lute

*Students of the Barenboim-Said Akademie

George Frideric Handel (1685–1759)
Overture to Alcina HWV 34 (1735)

Pomposa – Allegro – Musette. Un peu lentement – Menuet. Allegro ma non troppo

„Otton, Otton... Voi che udite il mio lamento“
Recitative and Aria of Ottone from Agrippina HWV 6 (1708–9) 

William Boyce (c. 1711–1779)
Symphony in C major Op. 2 No. 3 (1760)

I. Allegro
II. Vivace
III. Menuetto. Allegretto

George Frideric Handel
„Già l’ebbro mio ciglio“
Orlando’s Aria from Orlando HWV 31 (1732)

Suite from Radamisto HWV 12a (1720)

Rigaudon – Gigue – Passpied – Passacaille

„Ombra mai fu“
Serse’s Aria from Serse HWV 40 (1737–8)

„Vivi tiranno“
Bertarido’s Aria from Rodelinda, Regina de’ Longobardi HWV 19 (1724–5)

Intermission

Thomas Arne (1710–1779)
Overture to The Judgement of Paris (1740)

[without title] – Con spirito – Minuet. Andante – Giga. Con spirito

George Frideric Handel
„Pena tiranna“
Dardano’s Aria from Amadigi di Gaula HWV 11 (1715)

„T’amai, quant’il mio cor“
Amadigi’s Aria from Amadigi di Gaula 

Charles Avison (c. 1709–1770)
Concerto grosso No. 5 in D minor
Adapted from Keyboard Works by Domenico Scarlatti

I. Largo
II. Allegro
III. Andante moderato
IV. Allegro

George Frideric Handel
„Inumano fratel... Stille Amare“
Recitative and Aria of Tolomeo from Tolomeo, rè di Egitto HWV 25 (1728)

The Suggestive Power of Expressivity
Opera Arias and Instrumental Music by Handel and his Contemporaries

Kerstin Schüssler-Bach


“He who is satisfied with listening to this music without seeing what it expresses—who does not feel its expressive and suggestive power, occasionally so far as hallucination, will never understand it. It is a music that paints emotions, souls, and situations, to see the epochs and the places, which are the framework of the emotions, and which tint them with their own peculiar moral tone.” Few people have offered a more vivid description of the sensual power of the operas of George Frideric Handel than the French author Romain Rolland, more than a century ago.

At Hamburg’s Gänsemarkt Opera, the young Handel had reaped his first theatrical laurels. The native of Halle, however, soon traded the sober mercantile metropolis for Italy’s overwhelming beauty of light and color. Visiting Florence, Rome, Naples, and Venice before he was even 25 taught the composer to become that seductive master of melody who would go on to entrance the opera world. The Italian audience was quick to worship at the feet of its “caro Sassone,” or dear Saxon. Handel, however, departed no sooner than he had conquered the motherland of music, finally settling in England after a short intermezzo in Hanover. With this move, he followed his employer, the Elector George of Hanover, who had ascended to the English throne as George I in 1714. From Italy, Handel took with him the extroversion, virtuosity, and sonic beauty of instrumental music, the refinement of vocal style, and the shrewd, stage-savvy gaze of the theatrical dramatist. All these fueled his meteoric career as an opera composer in London.

Handel composed almost 40 major stage works in the English capital. Unlike his oratorios, however, they fell into total oblivion for almost 200 years after his death. As early as 1785, Johann Joachim Eschenburg noted: “Our taste in opera has changed far too much to ever hope for the performance of an entire Handel opera again.” It was only the Handel renaissance of the 1920s that returned a few individual works to the stage.

Magic, Knights, and Fabled Creatures

Among those rediscoveries, Alcina was one of the earliest. Today, when Handel’s stage works have reestablished themselves as a permanent part of the repertoire, this magical opera, one of the musically richest and dramaturgically most attractive the composer ever created, ranks among the absolute audience favorites.

Handel felt enormous pressure when Alcina premiered at the Covent Garden Theatre in 1735, for expectations were high. He was starting his third commercial opera company—after the demise of two previous organizations known as the Royal Academy—and his competitors were anything but idle. Financial ruin seemed almost imminent, but Handel, of Herculean nature in stature and mind, picked up the gauntlet. Alcina was a surprise hit. The singers shone, the theater’s machinery ran like clockwork, and the box office pickings were rich. With the love entanglements in Alcina’s magical realm and music “so good that I cannot describe it in words”—as the contemporary witness Mary Pendarves wrote—Handel once again wowed his audience.

The literary model, Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, had already been the foundation of one of his previous operas, Orlando. The famous Renaissance verse epic was well known among the educated classes at the time. Magic, knights, and fabled creatures were popular with the English, who were not very puritanical. Orlando, which premiered in London in 1733, is one of Handel’s most colorful scores. Dramatic situations and exceptional emotions are combined with a story of rampant imagination. The titular hero intermittently escapes into madness. Believing that he has killed his lover, he finally falls asleep. The solo viola d’amore adds a particularly haunting note his aria “Già l’ebro mio ciglio.”

“More ingenious than any drama which Handel had yet produced…”

Still premiered in Italy, presumably in December 1709, Agrippina is the earliest Handel opera on tonight’s program, whose first performance in Venice proved a great success for the young composer. The piece’s personnel seems familiar to modern listeners from Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea: sensuous Poppea and Emperor Nero, who is devoted to her, as well as Poppea’s banished lover Ottone. The latter gives vent to the pain of an abandoned lover in the harsh, dissonant suspensions of his aria “Voi che udite il mio lament.” Nero’s mother Agrippina pulls the strings in this intrigue, finally placing her son on the throne. Unlike in Monteverdi’s version, Ottone at least wins Poppea’s hand in the end. Incidentally, the role was sung by a contralto, not a castrato, at the first performance.

Radamisto, first produced at London’s King’s Theatre in 1720, sings the praises of marital love. The Thracian prince and his faithful wife Zenobia survive war and tyranny. Handel’s first opera for the Royal Academy is characterized by a comparatively lush instrumentation; thanks to its success, the opera saw several revivals. Radamisto was declared “more solid, ingenious, and full of fire than any drama which Handel had yet produced in this country” by the contemporary witness Charles Burney. Even in Hamburg, Handel’s former place of employ, the piece was performed, albeit in an arrangement by Johann Mattheson.

In Serse—more familiar to German audiences as Xerxes—Handel managed to pull off the trick of writing an aria that would lead a highly successful afterlife, completely dissociated from the opera from which it originated: “Ombra mai fu,” the famous “Handel Largo.” Admittedly, the piece did not become a favorite of bourgeois culture until the 19th century. The context of the opera’s story is far more mundane: the Persian king Xerxes, a mercurial despot, here tenderly sings about a manicured tree in his royal garden. Charles Burney bafflingly called Serse, first performed at the King’s Theatre in 1738, a “foul score” and the work of “a mind disturbed, if not diseased”—shortly before starting the composition, Handel had suffered a stroke. The castrato Caffarelli, celebrated ecstatically elsewhere, had been unable to save the premiere; Handel’s operatic star was already waning.

How different the situation had been in 1725, the heyday of Handel’s operatic successes. Rodelinda, with its the story of intrigues at the Langobard court, was a hit with audiences. Senesino, another star castrato, shone in the role of Bertarido, the rightful ruler and Rodelinda’s husband. His aria “Vivi, tiranno!” is a crown jewel of the art of coloratura. The rediscovery of Rodelinda in Göttingen in 1920 marked the first modern performance of a Handel opera.

Among the composer’s lesser-known stage works is Amadigi di Gaula, written in 1715. The paladin Amadis of Gaul and his friend Dardanus vie for the affection of beautiful Oriana. Before Dardanus dies in a duel, he hopes for help from a sorceress—and sings the touching aria “Pena tiranna,” a desperate lament of love whose black mood is emphasized by the bassoon’s chromatic lines. For this melancholy sarabande, Handel took recourse to a number from his opera Almira, which he wrote in Hamburg. In Amadigi’s aria “T’amai, quant’il mio cor,” a virtuoso central section contrasts with the elegiac beginning and end. Handel wrote the role of Amadigi for the castrato Nicolini, while Dardanus was sung by the contralto Diana Vico.

Tolomeo, premiered at the King’s Theatre in 1728, was Handel’s desperate attempt to save his first opera company. The competition had grown too large: John Gay and Johann Christoph Pepusch’s The Beggar’s Opera, first performed shortly before, offered such a cocky, insolent persiflage of the heroic operas Handel had perfected that the audience, which had just cheered the ridiculed role model, now gave its full-hearted approval to the spoof. Not even Senesino in the title role of the exiled Egyptian ruler could turn the tide—even though Handel had written “Stille amare,” one of his longest and more expressive arias, for him, in which Tolomeo looks death in the eye after a putative poisoning.

The Next Generation

The glory of George Frideric Handel (he used this Anglicized spelling of his name after becoming a naturalized Englishman) also extended to the following generation of composers. Charles Avison, Thomas Arne, and William Boyce—born in 1709, 1710, and 1711—were born at a time when Handel was celebrating his first operatic successes. He influenced them all, whether as a role model or father figure. Before being appointed organist and conductor of the royal musicians, the London-born Boyce presumably took lessons from Handel’s rival Pepusch. Still, he had great respect for Handel. Only after the latter’s death in 1759 was Boyce able to win renown with various festive compositions for royal occasions. His Eight Symphonies Op. 2 were published in 1760. The third, in C major, takes up the tripartite form of the Italian overture which Handel also favored. Boyce had originally composed it as an overture to the play The Chaplet, commissioned by the legendary English actor David Garrick in 1749.

Thomas Arne, who was born in London’s theater district Covent Garden, was highly successful on stage, both as a composer and impresario. He wrote approximately 90 operas, masques, and pantomimes, and to this day, his chorus “Rule, Britannia” from Alfred delights not only British ears. Arne’s music for William Congrave’s masque The Judgement of Paris of 1740 even persuaded Handel to set one of Congrave’s libretti—which became his Semele.

Charles Avison presumably studied with Francesco Geminiani in London—at least that is what Charles Burney claims. First and foremost, he was an organist and music director in his hometown, Newcastle upon Tyne in the north of England. However, he never took his eyes off the south—or more precisely, Italy. Writing on music, he aimed many a poisoned dart at the omnipresent Handel—and professed to rate Geminiani higher. Avison devoted 60 works to the Italian form of the concerto grosso and composed another twelve on the basis of piano sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti, whose anthologies, printed in 1738/39, were very popular in England at the time. Deftly and imaginatively, Avison managed to transfer Scarlatti’s idiomatic piano style to the orchestra. His transcriptions were published in 1744. Avison thereby paid impressive homage to the Italian influence on England’s musical life—which brings us back to Handel’s beginnings, when he perfected the sensuality of his musical language under the southern sun.


Translation: Alexa Nieschlag

Dr. Kerstin Schüssler-Bach has worked as an opera and concert dramaturg in Cologne, Essen, and Hamburg and taught at the Hamburg Musikhochschule and at Cologne University. She is currently Head of Composer Management for the music publishers Boosey & Hawkes in Berlin. She regularly writes program notes for the Berliner Philharmoniker, Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie, the Lucerne Festival, and Leipzig’s Gewandhaus Orchestra. Her book on conductor Simone Young was published in 2022.