HANDEL OPERA ARIAS FURORE JOYCE DiDONATO LES TALENS LYRIQUES CHRISTOPHE ROUSSET Handel: Furore Semele hwv 58 (1744) 8 Hence, Iris hence away 3:39 Serse hwv 40 (1738) 1 Crude furie degl’orridi abissi 3:43 Imeneo hwv 41 (1740) 9 Sorge nell’alma mia5:21 Teseo hwv 9 (1713) 2 Dolce riposo 3:14 Ariodante hwv 33 (1735) 3 Ira, sdegni, e furore... 10 E vivo ancora?... Scherza infida 10:54 O stringerò nel sen 4:46 4 Morirò, ma vendicata 4:46 Admeto 11 Gelosia, spietata Aletto 5:00 Giulio Cesare hwv 17 (1724) 5 Figlio non è, chi vendicar non cura... Amadigi hwv 11 (1715) L’angue offeso mai riposa 5:22 12 Desterò dall’empia Dite 5:23 Admeto hwv 22 (1727) Dave Hendry trumpet 6 Lentamento Josep Domenech oboe Orride larve... Chiudetevi miei lumi 7:33 Hercules 13 Dissembling, false, perfidious Hercules!... Hercules hwv 60 (1745) Cease, ruler of the day, to rise 4:44 7 Then I am lost... 14 Where shall I fly? 6:00 There in myrtle shades reclined 4:40 total 75:08 With all the possible themes available to a mezzo-soprano, why choose such a forceful one as fury for my first aria disc? It’s simple: Handel was a genius, and exploring the tapestries of such rich, complicated, often lost characters as Dejanira, Medea or Ariodante gives us the golden opportunity to take a profoundly emotional, vulnerable and ultimately human journey with these characters through the vivid pulse of his music. Why are these characters so mad? They have been scorned, betrayed, or abandoned and find themselves in the depths of despair; and through it all Handel evokes raw fire from their fury, and elicits haunted, tortured, beautiful pathos from their despair. It’s the perfect window into the human, albeit complicated, soul. Joyce DiDonato FURORE George Frideric Handel 1685–1759 Opera Arias Joyce DiDonato mezzo-soprano Les Talens Lyriques Christophe Rousset conductor 4 HANDEL Opera arias Handel first arrived in England in the autumn of 1710 when he was twenty-five years old, soon after being appointed Kapellmeister to the Elector of Hanover (the future King George I of Great Britain). He briefly returned to Hanover in the summer of 1711, but by mid-October 1712 he was in London again. He seems to have preferred the British capital for the opportunities it offered for new music, especially operas for the Queen’s Theatre (renamed the King’s Theatre after the Hanoverian succession in 1714). He spent the remainder of his life writing, performing, arranging, revising and reviving music theatre works in London. Handel’s third London opera, Teseo (1713), is dominated by the enchantress Medea, who has fallen obsessively in love with the title-hero Theseus. Dolce riposo shows her envying the peaceful innocence of her confidant Fedra (a silent role): she complains that her heart has been stung by Cupid’s arrows and will never heal. Handel borrowed his music from Aure soavi, e liete (hwv 84), a chamber cantata written in Rome in May 1707, but rearranged the material for gently pulsing strings and a solo oboe, which serve as a counterpart to Medea’s melancholy. When Medea discovers that Teseo will not return her love she vents her fury in the defiant accompagnato Ira, sdegni, e furore, promising that she will invent new tortures and enchantments for him, and boldly proclaims that she will either win him or destroy her rival (O stringerò nel sen). Her attempts are futile: bitter and spiteful at being scorned, she plots to persuade Egeo (Aegeus) into passing Teseo a poisoned cup (Egeo does not yet realise that Teseo is his long-lost son). In Morirò, ma vendicata, Handel again uses a solo oboe alongside the vocal line, but here the vivid G minor aria contrasts Medea’s vulnerable, heartbroken state with venomous and implacable fury. Medea was sung by the Italian sopra- no Elisabetta Pilotti-Schiavonetti, who seems to have specialised in performing wrathful sorceresses: Handel later composed the role of Melissa in Amadigi for her. In Desterò, dall’empia Dite Melissa has been rejected by Amadigi, but her determined D major aria (with a sparkling dia- logue between solo trumpet and oboe) conveys a confident and imperious woman as she commands the blackest ghosts to ascend from their tombs to torment Amadigi and his true love Oriana. In 1719 a group of aristocratic patrons founded the Royal Academy of Music, a company devoted to producing Italian operas in London. Handel was appointed the Academy’s music director, and hired some of the greatest Italian singers of the era. He had first collaborated with the soprano Margherita Durastanti at Rome in 1708, and she became a mainstay of the Academy during the first half of the 1720s. Her voice had lowered in range by the time she sang Sesto in Giulio Cesare: L’angue offeso mai riposa shows the young man driven by his desire to avenge the murder of his father Pompeo. He compares himself to an angry serpent and Handel’s illustrative string-writing coils around as though preparing to strike its victim. One of the most important star singers to work with Handel in London was the castrato Senesino. He was particularly famed for his power- ful acting, especially in melodramatic accompanied recitatives which convey moments of extreme crisis before they resolve into cathartic arias. One of the finest such scenes was the opening of Admeto: an orchestral introduction (marked ‘Lentamento’) is played as the audience sees the king Admeto on his deathbed tormented by Furies, having been cursed by the gods to die unless a faithful subject offers to die in his place (Orride larve... Chiudetevi miei lumi). As the drama proceeds, Admeto’s beloved wife Alceste sacrifices her own life for his. She is rescued from Hades by Hercules, but is provoked into a jealous rage when she hears that Admeto – unaware of her return – is already contemplating remarriage (Gelosia spietata Aletto). This agitated aria was tailor-made for the soprano Faustina Bordoni, who later married the opera composer Hasse. The Royal Academy dissolved in 1728, and during the 1730s Handel introduced English oratorios to his theatre seasons. He relocated to John Rich’s recently-built Theatre Royal at Covent Garden for the 1734–5 season, and his next new opera was Ariodante: the eponymous hero (sung by the castrato Giovanni Carestini) is tricked into believing that his fiancée Ginevra, daughter of the King of Scotland, has betrayed him with the schemer Polinesso (who desires both Ginevra and the Scottish throne for himself). The distraught Ariodante decides to kill him- self, but vows that his ghost will haunt Ginevra (Scherza infida). Some of Handel’s most ravishing slow music, with a telling contribution from bassoon, illustrate his devastation. 5 Handel was back at the King’s Theatre for the 1737–8 season, and his last opera for this theatre was Serse. The title-role was written for the castrato Gaetano Majorano, known as Caffarelli. Serse’s schemes to steal his brother Arsamene’s fiancée Romilda are thwarted by their marriage, and his furious outburst at the end of the opera is close to insanity (Crude furie degl’orridi abissi). It was also in 1738 that Handel started composing Imeneo, but he did not perform it until the 1740–1 season (his last to feature operas) at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The best-known musical material in Imeneo is to be found in Tirinto’s Sorge nell’alma mia, an impassioned reaction to fears that his lover Rosmene will choose to marry Imeneo (who rescued her from pirates, disguised as a woman). Music originally intended to convey Tirinto’s jealous frustration, with energetic rising string figures, was rewritten the following year for the bass aria ‘Why do the nations’ in Messiah. After 1741 Handel neither wrote nor performed another Italian opera in London, but during the mid-1740s he created two unstaged English music dramas based on Greek mythology. Semele was set to an old English opera libretto by William Congreve: Jupiter is having a sordid affair with the mortal Semele; when news of this reaches his wife Juno, she determines to destroy her rival, and proclaims that she and her companion Iris will seek the aid of Somnus, the god of sleep, to put an enchantment on the dragons which guard Semele (Hence, Iris hence away). This was composed for the mezzo-soprano Miss Robinson. Little is known about her, but she must have been a remarkably dramatic singer, not least if we judge from the role Handel composed for her in Hercules: Dejanira is a devastating example of the fatal effects of unbridled (and unjust) jealousy. When Hercules fails to return promptly from his attempt to conquer Oechalia, a ‘dreaded oracle’ shows him to be dead, and Dejanira tenderly anticipates her reunion with him in the afterlife (There in myrtle shades reclined). However, he returns home alive and well, accompanied by the lovely young Oechalian princess Iole, which causes his insecure wife to fear that he has lost interest in her (Cease, ruler of the day, to rise, which Handel omitted from his performances). The formidable conclusion to Dejanira’s tragedy is the so-called ‘mad scene’: long ago the centaur Nessus, as he lay dying after a fight with Hercules, convinced Dejanira that she should dip a cloak in his blood, and that she should make Hercules wear it if she ever desired to ‘revive the expiring flames of love’; she sends the cloak to Hercules for him to wear at thanksgiving sacrifices, but the garment is poisoned and he dies in agony.