Admeto

The King's Theatre, London, where Admeto had its first performance.

The German-born Handel, after spending some of his early career composing operas and other pieces in Italy, settled in London, where in 1711 he had brought Italian opera for the first time with his opera Rinaldo. A tremendous success, Rinaldo created a craze in London for Italian opera seria, a form focused overwhelmingly on solo arias for the star virtuoso singers. In 1719, Handel was appointed music director of an organisation called the Royal Academy of Music (unconnected with the present day London conservatoire), a company under royal charter to produce Italian operas in London. Handel was not only to compose operas for the company but hire the star singers, supervise the orchestra and musicians, and adapt operas from Italy for London performance.[2][3]

Handel had composed numerous Italian operas for the Academy, with varying degrees of success; some were enormously popular. The star soprano Francesca Cuzzoni had partnered with internationally renowned castrato Senesino as the leading performers in a long series of Italian operas by Handel and other composers for the Academy, and to increase audience interest, the directors decided to import another celebrated singer from Italy, soprano Faustina Bordoni, so that the operas would have not one but two leading ladies onstage. This was a common practice in opera houses of the day in Italy; Cuzzoni and Faustina (as Bordoni was called) had appeared together in various European cities without incident.[4]

The opening of the opera, with Admeto on his deathbed tormented by a ballet of demons representing his inner physical and mental agony, is very striking in its use of unusual harmonies, dissonance and chromaticism, followed by a dramatic accompanied recitative for the suffering king.[8] 18th century musicologist Charles Burney wrote that he was "told by persons who heard this opera performed when it first came out, that Senesino never sung or acted better, or more to the satisfaction of the public, than in this scene."[9] The opening of Act Two, with an orchestral piece depicting Hercules rescuing Alceste in hell, is also very unusual for Handel operas of the period. Handel's music, according to Jonathan Keates, succeeds in making the character of the king "a fully realised human figure.[10]^:150 Handel, as in Alessandro, is careful to give his two leading ladies equal opportunity to shine in their arias, which are, in the opinion of Paul Henry Lang, music of "surpassing" quality.[11]

The opera is scored for flute, two oboes, bassoon, two horns, strings and continuo (cello, lute, harpsichord).

Faustina Bordoni, who created the role of Alceste.

The opera was well-received and had nineteen performances in its initial run, a mark of success for those times.[12] Many audience members were extremely enthusiastic about the singers. One of Handel's most loyal supporters, Mary Delany, wrote to her sister that she had attended Admeto with a friend who "was driven out of her senses" by the singing of Faustina, Cuzzoni and Senesino.[6] At the conclusion of one of Cuzzoni's arias at a performance of the original run, a man in the gallery called out "Damn her: she has got a nest of nightingales in her belly", while one aristocratic patron wrote in her programme beside Cuzzoni's name "She is a devil of a singer".[6]

However, some members of the London audience had become fiercely partisan in favouring either Bordoni or Cuzzoni and disliking the other and at the performance of Admeto on 4 April 1727 with members of the royal family present, elements of the audience were extremely unruly, hissing and interrupting the performance with cat-calls when the "rival" to their favourite was performing, causing public scandal. Cuzzoni issued a public apology to the royal family through one of her supporters:

..Cuzzoni had been publicly told...she was to be hissed off the stage on Tuesday; she was in such concern at this, that she had a great mind not to sing, but I...positively ordered her not to quit the stage, but let them do what they would...and she owns now that if she had not had that order she would have quitted the stage when they cat-called her to such a degree in one song, that she was not heard one note, which provoked the people that liked her so much, that they were not able to get the better of their resentment, but would not suffer the Faustina to speak afterwards.[6]

Francesca Cuzzoni, who created the role of Antigona.

These sort of disturbances continued however, climaxing that June in a performance at the Academy of an opera by Giovanni Bononcini, Astianatte. With royalty again present in the person of the Princess of Wales, Cuzzoni and Faustina were onstage together and members of the audience who were supporters of one of the prima donnas were loudly protesting and hissing whenever the other one sang. Actual fist fights broke out in the audience between rival groups of "fans" and Cuzzoni and Faustina stopped singing, began trading insults and finally came to blows onstage and had to be dragged apart.[13][14][15] The performance was abandoned, creating an enormous scandal reported gleefully in newspapers and pamphlets, satirized in John Gay's The Beggar's Opera of 1728, and tainting the entire reputation of Italian opera in London with disrepute in the eyes of many.[16]

After the 19 performances in its first season, over the time from September 1727 to January 1732, the opera received 16 additional performances. Admeto was revived in 1754 and received 5 additional performances. The last, 6 April 1754, proved to be the last opera performance that Handel saw of his own operas in his lifetime.[17] As with all Baroque opera seria, Admeto went unperformed for many years, but with the revival of interest in Baroque music and historically informed musical performance since the 1960s,Admeto, like all Handel operas, receives performances at festivals and opera houses today.[18] Among other performances, Admeto was produced at the Handel Festival, Halle in 2006,[19] at the Göttingen International Handel Festival in 2009,[20] at the Leipzig Opera in 2010,[21] and was performed at the Theater an der Wien in 2014.[22]

The Royal Academy of Music collapsed at the end of the 1728 - 29 season, partly due to the huge fees paid to the star singers, and Cuzzoni and Faustina both left London for engagements in continental Europe. Handel started a new opera company with a new prima donna, Anna Strada. One of Handel's librettists, Paolo Rolli, wrote in a letter (the original is in Italian) that Handel said that Strada "sings better than the two who have left us, because one of them (Faustina) never pleased him at all and he would like to forget the other (Cuzzoni)."[23]

Notes

Sources

• Dean, Winton (2006). Handel's Operas, 1726–1741. Boydell Press. ISBN 1-84383-268-2. The second of the two-volume definitive reference on the operas of Handel

• Italian libretto
• Admeto: Scores at the International Music Score Library Project