In its structure Handel’s “Il pastor fido” is a rather modest work. But the music and plot offer plenty of opportunities for an effective theatrical experience.
Handel’s Il pastor fido is the most modest of his Italian operas: with numbers at least half of which take their musical material from Handel’s early Italian cantatas, it consciously moves close to the Italian serenata in the pastoral style. To capture the simplicity of the pastoral formal language, Handel made use of various techniques: the conventional use of high vocal ranges (just one aria is not sung by soprano or alto), the extensive use of monothematic da capo arias, a high concentration of borrowed arias, e.g. continuo arias, all’unisono arias (violins and/or oboes double the voice part, no continuo accompaniment) and all’ottave arias (continuo doubles the strings at the distance of an octave).
Such a restrained work is easily overshadowed by Handel’s larger operas and thus runs counter to Guarini’s Tragicommedia (1590), a play which is of great importance not only for its length, but also in its significance for theatre, literature and the history of music. The difficult financial position of the London opera company in the 1712-13 season probably also contributed to the small-scale structure of Il pastor fido.
It is obvious why Il pastor fido could not serve as a more popular model for opera adaptations: shortening the original text to the length of a libretto constituted an immense task. From five acts with eighteen characters in the original, Handel’s librettist Rossi made drastic cuts which reduced the work to three acts with six roles. The libretto, now just a bare skeleton of the complex drama, was heavily criticised. But Rossi had made the best of it in order to give the story a thread running through it, and to preserve at least a portion of Guarini’s poetic language.
The simplified plot: Arcadia suffers under a curse invoked by an unfaithful nymph, whereby the goddess Diana demands the sacrifice of a virgin every year, and unfaithful wives are punished by death. An oracle prophecies that if two children of heavenly race fall in love, a shepherd will break the curse. The nymph Amarilli, a descendant of Pan, and the hunter Silvio, a descendant of Hercules, are chosen to marry in order to pacify Diana. But Silvio is only interested in hunting, whereas Amarilli in fact loves the unknown shepherd Mirtillo. When Silvio is pursued through the forests by the nymph Dorinda, the underhand nymph Eurilla, who is also in love with Mirtillo, schemes to get rid of Amarilli. She plans that the two lovers will be caught together, whereupon Amarilli will be condemned to death. Mirtillo wants to die instead of her, but is spared when it comes to light that he is Silvio’s long-lost brother. The blind prophet Tirenio recognises Mirtillo as the true shepherd who has prophesied the oracle. Mirtillo marries Amarilli, Silvio marries Dorinda, and Arcadia breathes a sigh of relief.
Mirtillo’s music is largely melancholy, and Amarilli and Dorinda touch on the tragic at times. By contrast with this, Silvio is portrayed in a slightly caricatured fashion. The most notable role, however, is that of Eurilla, whose dynamic characterisation does justice to her role as the figure driving the drama forward: she has a large proportion of the bravura arias which are orchestrated more radiantly, brilliantly and lavishly than those of the other characters. The most richly orchestrated number in the opera is, however, the overture, which was neither part of the autograph manuscript, nor in the score in Handel’s collection. It is a complete concerto in six movements which was probably written in the course of an earlier composition.
The edition in the Halle Handel Edition compares several sources which were not available to Chrysander, and is notable in this respect as it represents the first modern edition of the complete overture, likewise the complete stage instructions of the libretto, and the alternative ending for Mirtillo’s and Amarilli’s duet in the third act.
Suzana Ograjenšek
(from [t]akte 2/2019 – translation: Elizabeth Robinson)