Amadigi di Gaula Opera in three acts

Music by George Frideric Handel Libretto: anonymous First performance: The King’s Theatre, London, May 25, 1715

Cast, in order of appearance: Amadigi di Gaula, knight, in love with Oriana (alto) Dardano, prince of Thrace (alto) Melissa, sorceress, in love with Amadigi (soprano) Oriana, daughter of the King of the fortunate isles (soprano) Orgando, uncle of Oriana (soprano)

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Program note by Martin Pearlman

Why is Handel's Amadigi di Gaula (Amadis of Gaul) so rarely heard? Written not long after Handel had settled in England, it is a youthful, exuberantly inventive work, full of love, magic and brilliant arias. The great historian Charles Burney, writing later in the century, called it "a production in which there is more invention, variety, and good composition than in any one of the musical dramas of Handel which I have yet carefully and critically examined." Whether it is due to its small cast, the fact that it has only high voices or some other reason, Amadigi is produced much less frequently than most other works of this caliber.

The opera originally opened on May 25, 1715 at the King's Theatre in London in a production that was full of spectacle and magical effects. The Daily Courant warned ticket buyers about all the stage machinery: "whereas there is a great many Scenes and Machines to be mov'd in this Opera, which cannot be done if Persons should stand upon the Stage (where they could not be without Danger), it is therefore hop'd no Body, even the Subscribers, will take it Ill that they must be deny'd Entrance on the Stage."

Amadigi was a triumph and helped cement Handel's reputation with the London public, which still remembered the sensation of his opera Rinaldo written some four years earlier. With these two operas alternating in the repertory, the season was a great success. The king himself attended several performances, and Handel earned enough to be able to invest £500 in the speculative frenzy of the South Sea Company (on which he made a good return on his money before the bubble burst).

Amadigi was brought back in the 1716 season and yet again in the following season, when it was once more in the repertory with Rinaldo. But then it disappeared. Handel never revived it, although he did adapt some of its music for use in later works. Aside from some performances in Germany over the next few seasons, the opera was not heard again for over 200 years.

Handel's unknown librettist -- there are several candidates, but none is certain -- adapted the story of Amadigi from earlier models. Derived originally from a medieval Spanish epic, the subject had been set as an opera by Lully, whose Amadis de Gaule (1684) presented a rather different version of the story from the one in Handel's setting. The immediate source of Handel's libretto was a five-act tragédie-lyrique set to music by the French composer André Destouches. His Amadis de Grèce (1699) replaced the original evil magicians with Melissa, a character out of Ariosto's epic Orlando furioso, and created a story close to the one that Handel used. Destouches's opera was revived at the Paris Opéra only a few years before Handel wrote his own Amadigi.

Here, as in many other works, Handel's music seems less inspired by the magic in the story than by the emotions of his characters. His most inventive musical ideas and unusual orchestrations tend to be reserved for moments of deep despair or great joy, rather than for magical transformations and spells. Amadigi's beautiful soliloquy at the fountain of truth, the extraordinary orchestration of Dardano's lament in Act II, or Melissa's brilliant rage aria at the end of that act tell us a great deal about these characters. Through the music, we develop some sympathy even for the evil sorceress Melissa.

Handel achieves a tremendous range of colors with relatively limited forces. All the voices in this small cast are high voices, but they have different qualities that delineate their characters. While the orchestral score makes beautiful use of the oboes, bassoon and recorders, there are no timpani and there is only a single trumpet. Where we might expect two trumpets, the oboe plays the second part. But what might seem like a limitation (perhaps for financial reasons) becomes, in Handel's hands, an interesting and unusual orchestral effect.

As always, Handel borrows ideas and even whole arias from some of his own earlier music and reuses some of this music in later pieces. One major source of music for Amadigi is his opera Silla, which he had written two years earlier for a private occasion. Since there is no record of that opera ever having been performed, it is not surprising that the young composer might have wanted to salvage and recycle some of the best music from that work. Among the pieces originally written for this opera, we recognize in Amadigi's final aria the music that would soon become the popular hornpipe in the Water Music.