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George Frideric Handel (1685–1759)

Xerxes – ‘Ombra mai fù’ (1738)

Alcina – ‘Ah! mio cor!’ (1735)

For most of the two-and-a-half centuries or so since Handel died, he has been remembered chiefly for his English oratorios. For nearly four decades of his own lifetime, however, it was opera in Italian that concerned him most. His first opera was written in 1704, his last in 1741, and in between came over 40 stage works demonstrating a keen dramatic sense and a brilliantly pragmatic adaptability to performance conditions, at the centre of which was an acute awareness of the strengths and weaknesses of his singers. To these strengths were added a compassionate understanding of a broad range of human emotions and an unsurpassed talent for psychological portrayal, qualities which – shown above all in his masterly arias – help assure Handel’s position as one of the great operatic geniuses.

Serse (Xerxes) was first performed at the King’s Theatre, Haymarket on 15 April 1738. Loosely based on snippets from Herodotus’s Histories, it is concerned less with political matters than with the comical love intrigues of the Persian king Xerxes I and members of his family and court. The opera opens, however, with an aria which, standing outside the plot, seems to satirise the king’s famous love for a tree – Herodotus tells us that, while campaigning in Asia, Xerxes was struck by the beauty of a plane tree by the side of the road, and ordered it to be hung with golden ornaments. So noble and sublime is ‘Ombra mai fu’, Handel’s broadly lyrical recreation of this curiously daffy moment, that the tune itself long ago acquired a life of its own outside the opera – albeit an often distortedly lugubrious one – as ‘Handel’s Largo’. It is in fact marked Larghetto.

Alcina dates from some three years earlier, when Handel was beginning his move away from opera and towards oratorio in English, yet there is no dissipation of creative energy in this work, which stands as one of the peaks of his achievement in the genre. First performed at Covent Garden on 16 April 1735, it enjoyed a successful run of 18 performances, and, coming soon after Orlando and Ariodante, completed a trio of superb operas based on characters and episodes from Ludovico Ariosto’s great magical epic poem Orlando furioso. At its heart is one of Handel’s great tragic heroines, the sorceress Alcina, who lures men to her enchanted island, there to transform them cruelly into stones, trees or wild animals. But one young knight, Ruggiero, has attracted her love, thus escaping the fate of the others, and in Act 2 Alcina is given reason to think that he has fled the island. In the powerful ‘Ah! mio cor!’ she gives voice to a complex stew of emotions: love, grief, incomprehension, affronted pride and vengeful fury.

Programme note © Lindsay Kemp

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