“Siroe” was not one of the great successes of Handel’s London period. But the opera, with its captivating music, is well worth a rediscovery. The authoritative edition from the Complete Edition offers the basis for this.

Handel’s “Siroe, Re di Persia”, HWV 24, was premiered on 17 February 1728 in the King’s Theatre Haymarket, London. For the run of seventeen performances the composer had a high calibre group of soloists – Francesca Cuzzoni, Faustina Bordoni and Francesco Bernardi (called Senesino) – known throughout Europe, at his disposal. However, his opera was not an outstanding success with audiences because of strong competition from the “Beggar’s Opera” which was presented in London at the same time. A contemporary witness reported: “Yesterday I was at the rehearsal of the new opera composed by Handel: I like it extremely, but the taste of the town is so depraved, that nothing will be approved of but the burlesque. The Beggar’s Opera entirely triumphs over the Italian one;  I have not yet seen it, but everybody that has seen it, says it is very comical and full of humour.”

The libretto of “Siroe” is based on the third version of the text by Pietro Metastasio, in which Handel’s librettist Nicola Francesco Haym made only minor interventions. At the time the subject was very well-known and popular, so that there are settings of the “Siroe” libretto by composers such as Leonardo Vinci, Nicola Porpora and Johann Adolph Hasse. The historical background, against which the plot of the opera unfolds, is the forced deposing of the Persian King Cosrau II in favour of his son Siroe, the future Kavadh II, during the 7th century AD. With its wealth of love affairs, intrigues and misunderstandings, the libretto offers a proverbially magnificent “stage” for Handel’s singing stars, for whom he wrote captivating arias and ensemble pieces.

But after 1728, “Siroe” received no further performances in London. Instead, there were performances at the Hagenmarkt in Brunswick in August 1730 and 9 February 1735 conducted by Georg Caspar Schürmann. It is noteworthy that the opera was given in the Italian original and largely in the version of the first performance in London. Hamburg and Brunswick are regarded as having been centres of early Handel reception on the continent. Of the twelve Handel operas which were performed in Brunswick between 1723 and 1743, no performance material evidently survives. However, a manuscript score of Siroe does survive, which could relate to the Brunswick performances. It has been established that the main copyist was the Brunswick chamber musician Georg Heinrich Ludwig Schwanberg, who took lessons from Johann Sebastian Bach in Leipzig for a time.

Taking numerous manuscript and printed sources into consideration (including the autograph composition score and the conducting score), the main section of this scholarly-critical edition in the “Halle Handel Edition” offers the version from the premiere, plus the reconstruction of Handel’s shortened version in the first appendix. This is based on pencil entries which Handel made in a copy – a harpsichord score – now preserved in the Bibliothèque royale de Belgique. Handel evidently made preparations for a revival of the work which did not come to fruition. At any rate, Handel’s preparations (which are essentially limited to cuts in recitatives and the omission of the B section ritornelli in several arias) did not extend very far. This version is therefore interesting both from a documentary point of view as well as for dramaturgical considerations, because it was Handel himself who clearly shortened his opera (incidentally, this is the work with the longest proportion of recitatives in his output).

The second appendix contains a shortened version of aria no. 3, “D’ogni amator la fede”, an early version of the famous aria no. 13, “Sgombra dall’anima”, and an ornamented version of aria no. 18, “Non vi piacque, ingiusti dei”. These ornaments in the vocal part which seldom survive in Handel’s operatic output are contemporary, and contain valuable suggestions about the evidently very different performance of opera arias by Handel’s group of singers.

Phillip Schmidt
(translation: Elizabeth Robinson / from [t]akte 2/2024)