Handel’s serenata “Parnasso in festa” is a true pasticcio with many re-uses from works composed earlier. Nevertheless, a staged performance, as is planned for the Handel Festival Halle in Bad Lauchstädt is extremely worthwhile.
George Frideric Handel’s wedding serenata Parnasso in festa is being performed using the musical text of the Halle Handel Edition for the first time at the 2018 Handel Festival in Halle. The HHA edition, which bears the correct title (the title Il Parnasso in festa, as frequently used in the literature, seems to derive from Chrysander’s edition of 1878), reproduces the version of the first performances in March 1734. Three supplements reconstruct the complicated history of versions of the (partly very) different revivals of 1737, 1740 and 1741 and contain rejected and altered musical movements as well as describing the alterations made to the stage characters.
Handel composed Parnasso in festa on the occasion of the marriage of Princess Anne, the Princess Royal to the Dutch Prince William IV of Orange, which took place on 14 March 1734 in London. The serenata was Handel’s contribution to the public festivities and was performed on the evening before the wedding in the presence of the bridal couple in the King’s Theatre Haymarket.
Whilst the Italian text of the serenata was a new poem probably by Giacomo Rossi, the music was largely a compilation of previously-existing pieces from different works by Handel. Of a total of 32 vocal numbers, Handel borrowed 20 from his English-language oratorio Athalia (HWV 52), which had been premiered on 10 July 1733 in Oxford and had not yet been heard in London in March 1734. Further borrowings came from Radamisto (HWV 12a), Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno (HWV 46a) and Delirio amoroso (HWV 99). Only eight vocal pieces and the Sinfonia for the beginning of Part 3 and the opening section of the overture were newly composed. This form of the work is reflected in the source material: no autograph composition score of the whole serenata exists, instead the conducting score represents a joint effort by Handel and his main copyist John Christopher Smith senior. Composition scores of individual newly-written pieces survive.
As background to the plot, a theme corresponding with the important occasion was chosen from Greek-Roman mythology: the marriage of Peleus, the King of the Myrmidons of Phthia in Thessaly, to the Nereid Thetis. Writers including Ovid, in Book 9 of his Metamorphoses verses 221–265, related the myth of the sea nymph who attempted to free herself from Peleus’ courtship by changing her form, but finally gave in sighing and conceived her son Achilles. The subsequent wedding, to which the Olympian gods were invited, was described by Catullus in his 64th poem. In the serenata Apollo now invites the inhabitants of Mount Parnassus to a celebration which is held on the occasion of this wedding. Various muses, gods, nymphs, shepherds and other mythological figures hurry past to pay homage to the bridal couple. But the celebratory mood changes twice through retrospective episodes to melancholy and pain: we are reminded of the great love tragedies of Apollo and Daphne and Orpheus and Euridice.
Teresa Ramer-Wünsche
(from [t]akte 1/2018)