Essays on Handel and Italian opera
In this valuable collection of essays, published to coincide with the tercentenary of Handel's birth and available here for the first time in English, Reinhard Strohm examines the relationship between Handel's great operas and the earlier European Baroque tradition, focusing on the Italian school, to which they are so crucially indebted. Handel's immediate heritage included the figures of Scarlatti, Gasparini and Vivaldi; this book establishes that context, concentrating on contemporary operatic practice, and proceeds to analyse three of Handel's best-known works. It shows how they elaborate and develop the style and method of the Italian operatic theatre, embracing previous traditions and synthesising them with a new and exciting accentuation
Criticism, interpretation, etc
x, 303 pages ; 24 cm
9780521264280, 0521264286
11210695
Heritage: Handel's Italian journey as a European experience ; Alessandro Scarlatti and the eighteenth century ; Handel and his Italian opera texts ; Francesco Gasparini's later operas and Handel
Operatic practice: Towards an understanding of the opera seria ; An opera autograph of Francesco Gasparini? ; Vivaldi's career as an opera producer ; Handel's pasticci
Answers to the past: Leonardo Vinci's Didone abbandonata (Rome 1726) ; Handel's Ezio ; Metastasio's Alessandro nell'Indie and its earliest settings ; Comic traditions in Handel's Orlando