The new edition of Handel’s opera “Scipione” reveals two different performance versions of a work which carries an explosive political subject in a musically shattering form.
A military commander conquers a city occupied by an enemy. He has the enemy garrison disarmed and the occupants of the city taken prisoner. The local women and children fall into the hands of his soldiers. A young woman of noble birth is presented to the commander as “war booty”. However, he refrains from raping her and lets her go free. He forms an alliance with her native betrothed who has fought against him.
When the librettist Paolo Rolli and George Frideric Handel wrote an Italian opera on this theme in 1726, these events from 209 BC had taken place almost two thousand years earlier. Since then the protagonist, the Roman proconsul Publius Cornelius Scipio (“Africanus”), had been celebrated in biographies, images, treatises and operas for having practised both sexual abstinence (continentia) and clemency (clementia) towards the losers when conquering the Iberian port of New Carthage (now Cartagena). People were evidently convinced that a warring ruler deserved exceptional praise for having held to a general moral code. Many operatic portrayals (e. g. in Francesco Cavalli’s “Scipione Affricano”, 1664) illustrated Scipio’s amorous and military successes.
Research for the critical edition of the opera „Scipione“ in the Halle Handel Edition suggested that librettist and composer had something special in mind with this traditional theme. Their opera, written in February/March 1726 for the Royal Academy of Music, was by no means, as had been previously believed, just a stopgap in the repertoire, in contrast to Alessandro, which was performed in April: the directors of the Academy had in fact commissioned Handel at the beginning of February to compose a new opera quickly, because another one had not proved successful and at the time, no replacement was available. But Handel had planned Scipione for this season anyway: he wanted to juxtapose the two most famous commanders of the classical period, Alexander the Great and Scipio Africanus, and to emphasise their (partially only apparent) renunciation of despotism amongst their glorious deeds.
Rolli used an almost unknown libretto by Antonio Salvi (1704) as a source, which Handel himself may have recommended to him. In this, Scipio was less prominent than the imprisoned lovers Berenice and Lucejo, whose despair, envy and ultimate liberation influence the plot. In Handel, the virtuoso pair Cuzzoni/Senesino captivate through highly dramatic and sometimes tragic dialogue arias. Rolli’s Scipione (the alto castrato Antonio Baldi) was the first operatic hero of this plot who does good for its own sake, and not just because he is forced to by circumstances (like Alessandro) or out of political calculation. Thus, in this seldom-performed masterpiece, Handel’s version opens up new perspectives for the musical portrayal of love, honour, power and the willingness to sacrifice.
The edition reconstructs the version of the first performance (5 March 1726) from the autograph score, which is no longer complete, and the conducting score which was altered later. Despite, or perhaps because of a lack of time, Handel had composed too much; four cut arias of the highest quality and a few early versions are published in the HHA volume, some for the first time. In 1730, Handel provided a second version of the opera – now with Senesino and Anna Maria Strada as the leading couple – with no fewer than 14 additions from his own compositions, from his contribution to the opera Muzio Scevola (1721) and elsewhere. The edition makes this second version performable in full (Appendix I). As the title role in 1730 was intended for tenor, a few recitatives missing from the conducting score have been adapted for this vocal range. Although a crucial monologue for Scipione is cut in this version, his tenor role is now more credible.
Reinhard Strohm
(from [t]akte 1/2024 – translation: Elizabeth Robinson)