The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (6 page)

A relatively simple plot, without subsidiary strands, makes this one of the most immediately enjoyable of Handel operas.
ENO’s production, directed by David Alden and designed by Ian MacNeil, presented the piece in a decaying baroque palace.
At the back sat a small picture-frame space within which the characters’ inner thoughts were dramatized; the flamboyant costumes mixed Renaissance and baroque styles.

Recordings

CD: Anne-Sofie von Otter (Ariodante); Marc Minkowski (cond.).
Archiv 4572712

DVD: Ann Murray (Ariodante); Ivor Bolton (cond.).
ENO production.
Arthaus 064

Alcina

Three acts. First performed London, 1735.

Anonymous libretto

Handel’s second opera for Covent Garden, like its predecessor
Ariodante,
is a lavish affair, drawn from an episode of Ariosto’s
Orlando
Furioso
and rich in opportunities for both spectacular stage effects and dance sequences.
The latter were provided as a vehicle for Covent Garden’s star attraction, the French ballerina Marie Sallé.
But her appearance as Cupid in
Alcina
was disastrous – her male admirers did not care to see her dressed as a boy, and their booing and hissing forced her to leave Covent Garden for ever.
For a later revival of the opera, Handel cut the dance music and today it is rarely included at length.
Those who find the second and third acts somewhat long-winded will be interested to know that Handel also sanctioned cuts in these acts.

A contemporary review held
Alcina
to be ‘a beautiful and instructive allegory’, designed to prove that ‘neither the Council of Friends, nor the example of others … can stop the giddy head-strong Youth from the Chase of imaginary or fleeting Pleasures’.

 Plot

The enchantress Alcina lures men to her beautiful magic island and its magnificent palace.
Once she wearies of her victims’ amorous attentions, she transforms them into rocks, trees or animals.
As the opera opens, she has fallen in love with the knight Ruggiero, who under her spell has become equally infatuated and forgotten his betrothed Bradamante.
Disguised as Ricciardo, Bradamante arrives on the island in the company of her wise old tutor Melisso with the aim of rescuing Ruggiero from Alcina’s spell.

Alcina’s sister Morgana encounters Bradamante–Ricciardo and falls in love with ‘him’.
Morgana’s lover Oronte, the commander of Alcina’s army, is appalled, and in revenge tells Ruggiero about Alcina’s sorcery, fabricating a story that she is now in love with ‘Ricciardo’.
Bradamante reveals her true identity to Ruggiero, but he does not believe her, assuming this is a ploy by ‘Ricciardo’ to hide his love for Alcina.

But Melisso enlightens Ruggiero as to the extent of Alcina’s trickery, and Ruggiero prepares to flee the island with Bradamante, whose true identity he now acknowledges.
Morgana reports back to Alcina, who jealously summons her evil spirits to thwart Ruggiero’s escape, but they refuse to obey her and she mourns the loss of her magical powers.

Alcina confronts Ruggiero, and pleads with him to return to her; when he refuses, she vows revenge.
But Morgana is rejected by Oronte, who joins forces with Ruggiero and Bradamante to defeat Alcina, smashing the urn which holds the source of her magical power.

Alcina and Morgana vanish and her enchanted lovers are transformed back to human shape amid general rejoicing.

What to listen for

Alcina is both heroine and anti-heroine of this opera – a woman gripped by hopeless love and a ruthless sorceress who will stop at nothing to get what she wants.
Handel seems more than half in love with her himself: at least, he provided her with some of his most rapturously and lushly beautiful soprano arias – in Act I, the gently seductive ‘Sì, son quella’; in Act II, the lament ‘Ah!
mio cor’ and ‘Mi restano le lagrime’, as well as the nervously intense ‘Ombre pallide’, a dramatic invocation of infernal powers which do not respond.
Some interpreters of the role, Joan Sutherland included, have also appropriated Morgana’s ‘Tornami a vagheggiar’, a coloratura showstopper (with a melody taken from an earlier cantata) which ends Act I.
There is justification for this inasmuch as Handel himself allocated Alcina the aria in a revival which recast Morgana as a mezzo-soprano.
The role of Alcina lies extremely high, and most sopranos today prefer to sing it at the original lower baroque pitch.

The role of Ruggiero was written for Giovanni Carestini, the castrato who sang Ariodante, and their arias are similar in several respects.
‘Verdi prati’, an aria in Act II in which Ruggiero celebrates the beauties of Alcina’s island, shows Handel at his most warmly lyrical – Carestini complained
that it failed to show off his virtuosity, much to the composer’s disgust.
As if to compensate, ‘Stà nell’Ircana’ is rousingly brilliant, with duetting horns providing a whooping accompaniment.
Today, the role is sung by a mezzo-soprano.

Handel inserted the minor role of Oberto into the opera at a late stage of rehearsal as a way of incorporating the talents of a boy treble called William Savage.
Today, Oberto is sung by a soprano, or cut altogether.

In performance

Franco Zeffirelli’s 1960 staging of
Alcina
– primarily mounted as a vehicle for the vocal talents of Joan Sutherland in the title role – was much criticized for the fussy splendour of its
faux-
baroque sets and costumes as well as the cuts, transpositions and alterations freely made by the conductor Richard Bonynge.
But Zeffirelli’s approach was true to the extravagance of the original 1735 performances, and for all its inauthenticity, the subsequent Sutherland and Bonynge recording brought the great beauties of the score to wider public notice.
More recent productions, such as Robert Carsen’s at the Paris Opéra (with Renée Fleming in the title role) and Jossi Wieler’s and Sergio Morabito’s at the Stuttgart State Opera, have interpreted the story in terms of modern sexual obsessions, bringing a surrealist flavour to the fantasy in the plot.

At ENO, David McVicar’s staging appeared to pick up on a remark made by one of Handel’s lady friends after she watched him conducting a rehearsal of this opera; ‘whilst Mr Handel was playing his part, I could not help thinking him a necromancer in the midst of his own enchantments’.
At ENO, Alcina’s magic was not controlled by a wand but her singing voice, and the urn which contained her power was represented by a bust of Handel.

Recording

CD: Renée Fleming (Alcina); William Christie (cond.).
Erato 857 80233 2

Serse
(
Xerxes
)

Three acts. First performed London, 1738.

Anonymous libretto

Handel came close to mental and physical breakdown in 1737, the result of overwork and the stress of keeping the Covent Garden Opera alive against competition from the King’s Theatre, Haymarket.
Serse
is the result of his convalescence, and responds to the vogue for satirizing the excesses of the Italian opera style, provoked by John Gay’s
The
Beggar’s
Opera
and John Lampe’s pantomime
The
Dragon
of
Wantley:
Serse
is shorter and more wryly comic than the operas Handel was writing three years previously.

Yet despite the presence in the title role of the sensational castrato Gaetano Caffarelli,
Serse
was unsuccessful.
Perhaps audiences wanted opera to be either outright burlesque or the traditional recipe, and the tone of
Serse
is more subtle than that.

In the twentieth century, however,
Serse
has become one of Handel’s most popular and frequently performed operas – partly because it is relatively easy to cast and sing, and partly because of ‘Ombra mai fù’, sung by Serse at the opening of the opera and commonly featured on lists of the World’s Best Tunes as ‘Handel’s Largo’.
The manuscript score is actually marked ‘Larghetto’, indicating that Handel did not wish the melody to proceed at the funereal pace at which church organists customarily play it.

The libretto is very loosely based on an episode of Herodotus’
Histories,
as elaborated by other contemporary Italian opera librettos.

Plot