George Frideric Handel

The vocal duets of G. F. Handel are distinguished by a greater musical and dramaturgical diversity compared to the duets of his contemporaries, but this diversity has not yet been systematically examined in different contexts. This study investigates them in two genre traditions, that of the chamber duet and that of the so-called “dramatic duet”, a component of genres such as opera, cantata and serenata. It concentrates on London in the period 1706-1724 in order to explore to which extent Handel's treatment of duets differs from the contributions by his Italian contemporaries, who were either active in London at the time (e. g. G. Bononcini) or whose works were performed parallel to his.

Victory and defeat, hope and despair, love and hate. In the operas and oratorios by George Frideric Handel, all aspects of life are explored. Spotlighting tenor Leif Aruhn-Solén, New Trinity Baroque present arias in an intimate chamber music setting.

Dryden's 1687 poem, “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day” and Handel’s 1739 musical setting of it, Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day, signify the meeting of poetry and music in the realm of the Sublime. Dryden’s poem takes music and its role in the universe as its theme, and hence invites examination against the eighteenth century’s radically evolving aesthetics of the Sublime. Handel’s musical work, setting to music a text about music itself, invites study to determine whether musical practice in Handel’s time enacted the aesthetics of contemporaneous poets and critics, insofar as they claimed to understand the Beautiful and the Sublime in music. This paper will attempt to illustrate the enormous gap between the two arts by showing that eighteenth-century British critical understanding of music was based on abstract ideas largely unrelated to musical practice, an understanding that failed to acknowledge music as an art capable of sublime effect on its own. I will use Handel’s work to demonstrate that composers achieve sublime effects — with or without text — by employing harmonic, dynamic and rhythmic techniques that constitute a kind of rhetoric. This techne, closer to the Sublime of Longinus than to that of Burke or Kant, allows music its acknowledged power even when accompanied with less-than-inspired text. I will review some of the criticism around Dryden’s poem that relates to its original 1687 musical setting, and then examine Handel’s work itself on a musicological basis.

“I vanni occulti: Sonatas, Op. 2 by G. F. Handel, between lyricism and fury”. Notas musicológicas para el CD Georg Friedrich Händel. Trio Sonatas op. 2. Al Ayre Español, Eduardo López Banzo, director. Challenge Records, CC72797, Amersfoort (Holanda), 2019, pp. 6-10 (inglés) y pp. 17-21 (español). //

Under the title I vanni occulti, ensemble Al Ayre Español, led by maestro Eduardo López Banzo, offers us its personal vision of Handel’s Sonatas Op. 2. The phrase comes from the oratorio Il trionfo del tempo e del disinganno (The Triumph of Time and Disillusion, 1707). The reference to this aria is not anecdotal, because Sonata No. 1 in this Op. 2 contains references to this music — an aspect that, hardly surprisingly, constitutes a characteristic element of the composition technique of the maestro from Halle. //

Over the course of his life, Handel composed 20 trio sonatas, 12 of which were published in London in two different collections: six sonatas were published in 1733 as Op. 2 (HWV 386–391) and another seven printed in 1739 as Op. 5 (HWV 396–402). In a disguised allusion to the vanitas allegory and the fleeting passage of time, Al Ayre Español presents, just three years after its recording of Op. 5 [Challenge Classics, CC72663], an introspective version of Op. 2, which completes and, at the same time, complements the group’s first rendition of Handel’s trio sonatas. The two recordings form a single project that offers the listener a passionate and impassioned, southern and Mediterranean version of this exquisite chamber music. This version is marked by the emergence, with particular expressive intensity, of the two aesthetic poles present in the chamber music universe of Handel (and of López Banzo himself): the most contained lyricism combined with the most explosive fury.

The article examines the first Italian translation of Ursula Kirkendale's studies about Handel's Roman years and how influential her work has been until now - Prince Ruspoli Musical and Musicological Prize being one of its most welcome effects. The translation was issued by LIM in 2017 and it is a thoroughly revised and updated version of the groundbreaking writings by Ursula Kirkendale, carefully commented by her eminent husband Warren Kirkendale. Moreover, the article proposes a new answer to an old question: why biographers (before Ursula Kirkendale) did not say much about the composer's Roman years and his departure from the Eternal City.

For my forthcoming essays and papers on Margherita Durastanti I have prepared a list of all the known operas, in which she sang and acted, and here comes the second part, 1720 to 1734, mainly her London years. This list is subject to change, as the research is still going on.

John Mainwaring's "Memoirs" (1760), the first major biography of a composer, capture the lofty reputation and immense impact of George Frideric Handel in Georgian Britain. This first modern transcription of the text incorporates comments and criticism from Handel's surviving friends.

Książka poświęcona jest twórczości Petera Sellarsa – jednego z najbardziej znanych współczesnych reżyserów operowych i teatralnych. Jej celem jest analiza wzbudzających w swoim czasie kontrowersje, obecnie uznawanych klasyczne, inscenizacji Händla i Mozarta z lat osiemdziesiątych XX wieku.

Autor stara się pokazać złożoność zabiegów teatralnych, jakim Sellars poddaje oryginalne dzieła oraz przywołać konteksty teoretyczne (m.in. teorie Pierre’a Bourdieu, Mladena Dolara, George’a M. Fredricksona, Edwarda W. Saida), dzięki którym można lepiej zrozumieć sens uwspółcześnienia osiemnastowiecznych oper.

Sellars, reinterpretując dawne dzieła, stara się opowiedzieć o bardzo aktualnych sprawach – konkretnie zaś o polityce Stanów Zjednoczonych: zewnętrznej (w jaki sposób kształtowane są stosunki międzynarodowe w kontaktach z Bliskim Wschodem na przykładzie "Giulio Cesare in Egitto" Händla) i wewnętrznej (czy rasizm i męska dominacja są jedynie przebrzmiałymi problemami i dlaczego do opowiedzenia o nich zostają wykorzystane opery Mozarta: "Don Giovanni" i "Cosi fan tutte"; w rozważaniach pominięte zostało pierwsze ogniwo trylogii Mozarta i da Pontego – "Wesele Figara").

Całość została uzupełniona o krótki rys historyczny dotyczący reżyserii operowej w XX wieku oraz zarys sylwetki twórczej reżysera.

Crowned by many as one of the immortal composers, George Frederick Handel (1685 – 1759) was the central figure in forging England's cultural identity amongst its European neighbors during the late 18 th and early 19 th century. The identity Handel forged in the crucible of the early English nationalism movement was not that of a German composer, but one of a robust, refined, altruistic, righteous, straight, Protestant Englishman. Despite numerous character flaws by 18 th century standards, this was the identity he ardently upheld in the public eye. How did Handel – a German-born, bad tempered, gluttonous, and possibly homosexual man –transform himself from a Hanoverian writing Italian opera to a true " British-worthy " through the power of his musical entrepreneurship?

Discussions of how musical genres have evoked the exotic have largely omitted the many Baroque-era serious operas that feature non-European characters. The present article studies an opera seria libretto whose plot occurs on the Indian Subcontinent — Metastasio’s Alessandro nell’Indie (1730) — and two operas (both from the year 1731) that were based on that libretto: Handel’s Poro re dell’Indie and Hasse’s Cleofide.
    Understanding how exoticism is manifest in serious Baroque opera is impossible using a narrowly stylistic approach (here called the “Exotic
Style Only” Paradigm). Much richer is a broader approach (the “All the Music in Full Context” Paradigm) that also considers sung text, staging, and cultural stereotypes. Metastasio’s libretto contains previously undiscussed references to India, its customs, and the (supposed) tendencies and behaviors of its leaders (male and female) and common people.
    Handel and Hasse enlisted various normative musical means of the day — e.g., musical devices that were considered appropriate to an angry character or to a weak-willed one — to intensify the various “foreign” characterizations in the libretto. The comic element in a scene for the two main Indian characters (Poro and Cleofide) contrasts sharply
with the dignified treatment that is consistently granted to Alexander the Great (Alessandro). And a scene involving the secondary Indian couple (Erissena and Gandarte) shows how characters supposedly living “over there” could be used to comment on European customs.
[Versions of this paper were also published in Italian and in German. Both lack the musical examples and the illustration. The Italian lacks the section on the "marriage quarrel" duet between Poro and Cleofide. The German lacks that section and another: on a comic scene between Erissena and Gandarte.

A reflection on Handel's life and and its perception from a storyteller's point of view is the topic of this paper. An outline of three major perspectives on Handel's life are suggested to have a more thorough understanding of the reality of his life. The suggested approach is demonstrated in an analysis of Handel's long-standing relationship with singer Margherita Durastanti.

It is known that George Frederic Handel often reworked own compositions or works of contemporary or earlier composers. In his oratorios, the oldest reworked composition seems to be the final chorus of Giacomo Carissimi’s Jephte from the middle of the 17th century. A well-known work, it was praised by Athanasius Kircher in his Musurgia universalis (1650) as an outstanding example for the „affectus doloris”. Handel reworked it in his Samson as „Hear Jacob’s God”.
With his reworking, Handel took recourse to an early period of the genre; he went back to an older style in order to obtain archaic moments with which to characterize the Israelites. He transferred the music of the Roman and Catholic oratorio to the modern English oratorio which was established by him, and that was aimed at a nationally conscious Anglican audience. Handel did not just copy his model. Rather he rearranged Carissmi’s composition, orchestrated it and employed a different text, putting it into a completely different context. He thus transformed not only the musical but the rhetoric, semantic and expressive construction of the chorus.

Discussions of how musical genres have evoked the exotic have largely omitted the many Baroque-era serious operas that feature non-European characters. The present article studies an opera seria libretto whose plot occurs on the Indian Subcontinent — Metastasio’s Alessandro nell’Indie (1730) — and two operas (both from the year
1731) that were based on that libretto: Handel’s Poro re dell’Indie and Hasse’s Cleofide. Understanding how exoticism is manifest in serious Baroque opera is impossible using a narrowly stylistic approach (here called the “Exotic
Style Only” Paradigm). Much richer is a broader approach (the “All the Music in Full Context” Paradigm) that also considers sung text, staging, and cultural stereotypes.
    Metastasio’s libretto contains previously undiscussed references to
India, its customs, and the (supposed) tendencies and behaviors of its leaders (male and female) and common people. Handel and Hasse enlisted various normative musical means of the day — e.g., musical devices that were considered
appropriate to an angry character or to a weak-willed one — to intensify the various “foreign” characterizations in the libretto and to contrast these with the dignified treatment that is consistently granted to Alexander the Great (Alessandro).

While most English texts set by Handel are metrical poetry, a few anthem and oratorio librettos, including Messiah, comprise direct quotations from  English versions  of the Bible devoid of metre. Such texts are traditionally viewed as prose, but I argue that they are poems, organised by the systematic use of rhetorical parallelism. This paper explores the impact of parallelism on Handel's vocal writing and examines the ways in which he realised or subverted it. Since parallelism is a type of repetition, I argue that the repeating of words and textual phrases is an expressive and rhetorical device and that parallelism is a lens through which to understand the word-patterns that emerge from Handelian song. And since parallelism often involves sameness of meaning, I suggest that its treatment represents an interpretative decision,  making the study of that treatment a useful hermeneutic tool for musicologists.

In January 1710, the Council of Ten – the Venetian magistracy in charge of public order – required to verify whether the Vespers for the Solemnity of St Sebastian, celebrated at the Benedictine Monastery of San Lorenzo with music by Antonio Lotti, had been concluded by sunset. The rapport offers a rich anthropological cross-section, in which the sound of urban ceremonial intersects with the life of some ordinary people, sketching an evocative group portrait. One of the witnesses interviewed was a greengrocer who on those evenings was playing his violin at the Theatre S. Giovanni Crisostomo, where Georg Friedrich Händel’s Agrippina was being performed.

Nell'opera di Händel Amadigi di Gaula (1715) si combinano elementi di diverse culture europee: un soggetto spagnolo ricavato dal romanzo cavalleresco Amadís de Gaula di Montalvo; un impianto dram-maturgico francese, basato sull'opera Amadis de Grèce di La Motte; un genere teatrale italiano, concepito per il pubblico inglese. Oltre a illustrare alcuni effetti di tale sinergia di elementi (narrativi, spettacolari, estetici), nel contributo si discutono le opere seicentesche basate sul romanzo spagnolo, l'assenza del soggetto nella produzione operistica italiana, e la scelta del libretto francese come testo fonte di Amadigi. Infine, analizzando le modifiche apportate alle sezioni chiave dell'opera francese, i divertissements, nell'opera italiana, si riflette sulle peculiarità delle relative poetiche drammaturgiche.

Handel's opera Amadigi di Gaula (1715) combines elements of various European cultures: a Spanish subject derived from the chivalric novel Amadís de Gaula by Montalvo; a French dramaturgy, based on La Motte's Amadis de Grèce; an Italian theatrical genre, conceived for the English audience. In addition to showing some of the effects of this synergy of elements (narrative, spectacular, aesthetic), this paper discusses the seventeenth-century operas based on the Spanish novel, the absence of the subject in Italian opera production, and the choice of the French libretto as source text for Amadigi. Finally, analysing the changes made to the key sections of the French opera (divertissements) in the Italian one, the article reflects on the peculiarities of the two dramatic poetics.

As John Dryden himself observed, the verse he wrote for composers to set to music exhibits a number of features not found in his other poetry. In the second of his Cecilian odes, Alexander’s Feast, these features reach an unprecedented level of pervasiveness and expressive importance. From stanza-ending choral refrains to word-repetition within lines and complex metrical and rhythmic ‘sound-effects’, the poem overflows with cues to the composer and ‘word-music’ that makes even a spoken performance into a sonorous display.

When George Frideric Handel undertook to set Alexander’s Feast in 1736, Edward Holdsworth observed that ‘tho’ ’tis very musical to read, yet the words […] are very difficult to set […] I hope [Handel’s] superior genius has surmounted all difficulties.’ The concern is a valid one, for how is a composer to approach a text in which the poet has already attempted to do so much of the work for them? Moreover, the poem had been set to music twice already, and its popularity would no doubt ensure that the public was well-acquainted with its lyrical qualities.

This paper explores Handel’s solutions to the metrical and stanzaic complexities of the Feast, as well as its inbuilt word-repetition, examining which poetic ‘musicalities’ the composer embraced, transformed, or rejected. It also presents evidence for the setting as a public display of musico-poetic virtuosity, strongly engaged with the English choral tradition and ‘classic’ literature, and suggests the Feast as a starting point for a musico-poetic interrogation of Handel’s wider output in English.

Here comes the beginning of a play that I am currently writing; it is based on and inspired by an incident described by singer Filippo Balatri in his yet unpublished work “Vita e viaggio”.
A big thank you goes to the Italian translator, Simona Esposito, and Italian proofreader, Margherita Facchini, for helping me with the Italian passages.

The discovery of a satirical list from 1732 helps us revisit Handel’s affairs during the early 1730s. Placing the composer among elite guests at the opening night of Vauxhall Gardens in 1732, the new document predates his known links with the venue by six years, offers a rare description of him as subservient to John James Heidegger and possibly alludes to his medical condition prior to 1737. It also invites an exploration of hidden affinities between English oratorio and John Henley’s much-abused Oratory, including a hypothesis about the strictures applied to Esther by the Bishop of London. Much more important, it helps launch a re-examination of Handel’s role in the ‘Second Academy’ as a court composer in an entrepreneurial milieu.

Performances of Italian opera have changed significantly over the last few decades. The main distinction can be drawn between those that are historically informed and those that are not. But even among historically informed performances (HIP) tendencies and various styles have emerged. The most visible (or audible) differences are not so obvious in arias, i. e. in more or less precisely scored parts, but in those that are not – recitatives. Research of selected recitatives will be conducted on the case of Georg Friedrich Handel’s operas Agrippina and Giulio Cesare in Egitto, which are both inspired by ancient Roman history. While his only Venetian opera Agrippina is part of his early operatic output, with a libretto typical for the Venetian theatre of the time, Giulio Cesare presents Handel’s different style both in composition and approach to ancient Roman history, being an opera composed for an English audience.
Exploring a selection of different commercially available recordings, published on CDs from 1990s onwards, directed by conductors that could nowadays easily be labeled as mainstream within HIP, the aim of the paper is to explore performance styles of one opera, as well as stylistically different operas of the same composer. At the same time the exploration of the subject would raise questions whether a choice of means in an interpretation can give a different meaning to the text that is performed.

This article reviews Corelli’s life, the effect of his philosophy also his works on classical music; mainly due to composing style, technics and playing aspects. The study of history of sonata, common forms of classical music of the time also his leaders are pointed here.
در این گفتار گوشه‌هایی از زند‌گی آرکانجلو کورلی، تاثیر تفکر و آثارش بر موسیقی قرن هفدهم از نقطه نظر تصنيف، تكنيك و نوازند‌گی ویلن بررسی و تحلیل شده است. تاريخِ سونات، فرم‌های رایج در موسيقی قرن هفدهم و شخصيت‌های موثر در زندگی كورلی از دیگر رویکردهای این یادداشت است.

As John Dryden himself observed, the poetry he wrote for composers to set to music contains a number of features not found in his other verse. In the second of his Cecilian odes, Alexander’s Feast, these features reach an unprecedented level of pervasiveness, performative insistence, and expressive importance. From stanza-ending choral refrains, to written-out repetitions of words and verbal phrases, to complex metrical and rhythmic sound-effects, the poem overflows with word-music that makes even a spoken performance into a sonorous display.

When George Frideric Handel undertook to set Alexander’s Feast to music in 1736, Edward Holdsworth observed that ‘tho’ ’tis very musical to read, yet the words […] are very difficult to set […] I hope [Handel’s] superior genius has surmounted all difficulties.’ The concern is a valid one, for how is a composer to approach a text whose librettist has tried to do so much of the musical work himself, providing words that ‘almost set themselves’, as was Dryden’s stated goal? Moreover, Alexander’s Feast was already well-known for being ‘most harmonious in its numbers, of any thing in the English tongue’, and some critics had felt that previous settings had ‘destroy’d […] the very harmony of the poet’.

By all accounts, then, Handel faced a formidable challenge in setting the poem, yet his contemporaries reckoned his setting a resounding success. This paper explores the composer’s approach to the most insistently rhythmic passages of Dryden’s ode, examining which aspects of its ‘harmonious number’ Handel embraced, transformed, or rejected. It presents evidence for the setting as a public display of musico-poetic virtuosity, strongly engaged with the English choral tradition and ‘classic’ literature, and suggests this ode as a starting point for musico-poetic investigation of Handel’s wider output in English, with implications for performance as well as historical and analytical interpretation.

Like most eighteenth-century composers, George Frideric Handel did not write his own lyrics. For church anthems, he or his patron usually selected excerpts from the Bible; for odes and English-language theatre pieces, he generally chose or was pointed to the work of recently-deceased authors of renown (in other words, modern classics). In the case of oratorio, however, poets seem mostly to have approached Handel with an idea for a music-drama, sometimes with a libretto already partially written, enquiring whether he would like to set it to music. If he said yes, the poet would work on completing the libretto while he set what they had already given him.

This paper focusses on two of Handel’s most frequent oratorio librettists, Thomas Morell and Charles Jennens, a focus justified not only by the frequency of his collaboration with these men, but also by their respective attitudes to the composer (which could scarcely be more different), and their thorough documentation of their working relationship with him (Morell was a prolific memoirist, and Jennens exchanged many letters with Handel, several of which still exist). Although an oratorio’s plot outline usually came from its librettist, the question of ‘which comes first, the words or the music’ rarely admits of an easy answer with Handel, whether we take ‘first’ in the chronological or value-related sense. The importance and history of text varies from poet to poet, even from work to work, and proves an interesting lens through which to understand the composer’s creative process.

While most of the English texts that Handel set are metrical poetry, a few anthems and oratorio librettos, including Messiah, comprise direct quotations from English versions of the Bible devoid of metre. Such texts are traditionally viewed as prose, but in my doctoral thesis, as well as in a recent paper and article, I argue that they are, in fact, poems, organised not by metre but by the systematic (predictable and ubiquitous) use of rhetorical parallelism (‘sameness between stretches of text’).

In this paper I explore the stylistic impact of parallelism on the composer’s vocal writing, an under-researched area in the already neglected field of Handelian word-setting. I examine the various ways in which Handel realised or subverted the parallelism of the poetry he set, much as he did with the metre of metrical poems. Since parallelism is a type of repetition, I also argue that the repeating of words and textual phrases is an expressive and rhetorical device, not a mere Baroque mannerism or means to stretch short texts over long musical movements. As such, I advocate parallelism (even non-systematic parallelism, such as sometimes is present in the texts and settings of metrical poetry) as a valuable lens through which to understand the word-patterns that emerge from Handelian song. And I suggest that, since parallelism often involves sameness of meaning, its treatment constitutes a profound interpretative decision, making the study of that treatment a useful hermeneutic, as well as formal-analytical, tool for musicologists.

In the 1990s, Katherine Rohrer noted the prevalence of dance forms in Purcell’s vocal music, arguing that the dance chosen depended on the poetic metre of the text. Rohrer also observed that Purcell and his contemporaries employed local rhythmic effects for certain types of poetic line, but she described them as transcriptions of verbal stress into music, rather than theorising a set of stereotyped musical rhythms suited to specific types of poetry. In short, Rohrer offered a theory of large-scale English Baroque musico-poetics, but saw smaller-scale word-setting patterns as text-derived rather than musically systematic.

This paper expands upon Rohrer’s analysis, filtered through Robert O. Gjerdingen’s ‘schematic’ theory of eighteenth-century composition. It begins by examining three common, small-scale rhythmic devices, arguing that each was used exclusively to set a different type of poetic line. The unidiomatic accentuation that frequently resulted is further explained as part of the schemata’s aesthetic purpose. Following Grahame M. Boone’s and Lawrence Earp’s theories of medieval musico-poetics, I describe this as ‘recitational dissonance’, and argue that it offered the composer a means to produce musical variety while remaining recognisably faithful to poetic form.

The second part of the paper examines two frequently-used, large-scale formal types which encompass specific approaches to word repetition, melisma, and dance-derived structure. These too were used exclusively for specific poetic metres and stanza-forms. The paper suggests that poetic and musical form were far more closely connected than musicologists often suppose, and that schematic theory offers new insight into Baroque aesthetics and performance practice.

Baroque vocal pieces commonly begin with an instrumental ritornello, whose return throughout the movement gives motivic coherence and stylistic unity. However, this paper is less concerned with the ritornello’s recurrence than with its frequent thematic derivation from the opening vocal phrase.

Combining Graeme Boone’s concept of ‘text-setting models’ with Hans Jauss’ theory on ‘horizons of expectation’, the first part of this paper suggests the opening ritornello as the site of complex musico-linguistic predictive play. Since Baroque composers employed relatively fixed formulae in setting words to music, and many listeners of the time read wordbooks during the performance, it would be easy for such a reader-listener to fit the words before them to the ritornello as they heard it. The second part of the paper explores how vocal practice might impact the performance of ritornelli in light of this dynamic. If the ritornello derives from a vocal phrase in which word-stress deflects emphasis from a strong count of the bar, should the instrumentalists reflect this rhythmic disjunction in their playing? And if they do not, even in some iterations of the ritornello, how does this affect the predictive play for the reader-listener?

As a whole, the paper offers new perspectives on the complex interconnections between vocal and instrumental music, print and delivery, and surprise and expectation in early-eighteenth-century entertainment. By conceiving of the ritornello as a ‘teaser’, it sheds fresh light on audience psychology, and suggests new directions for historically informed instrumental performance.

Paolo Rolli’s 1721 Muzio Scevola production at the Haymarket in London with music by Filippo Amadei, Giovanni Bononcini and George Frideric Handel pulls Bononcini and Handel together in one of their first public matches in Britain. However, while Handel’s music and its sources have been thoroughly investigated in recent decades, not enough attention has been paid to Bononcini’s contribution or to the contextualization of the whole opera in the European framework. For Bononcini – then at the pinnacle of his celebrity – the London production was not his first encounter with the story of Caio Muzio Cordo, the fearless Roman nobleman who burnt his hand (becoming Scevola, ‘left-handed’) to save Rome: Bononcini’s long-standing familiarity with the subject, and his desire eventually to rework and penetrate it, affected his approach to the London opera.
The first Muzio Scevola that Bononcini set to music was Silvio Stampiglia’s remake of Nicolò Minato’s Venetian libretto for the 1695 carnival season in Rome. This opera was radically revised and richly re-elaborated by Bononcini for the Viennese stage in 1710. In the meantime it had been staged in Florence (1696), Naples (1698), Turin (1700) and Genoa (c. 1700), and the Roman setting had undergone several changes (supervised in one case, at least, by Bononcini) regarding dramaturgy, distribution of vocal parts, aria texts and instrumentation.
In the present paper I provide an overview of Bononcini’s Muzio Scevola operas and propose a comparison between the Stampiglia-Bononcini versions (1695–1710) and the London version of 1721. In doing so I consider selected passages of the plot, aria settings and instrumentation patterns, with particular attention to the London, Turin and Vienna productions, where several texts were modified and fascinating new musical settings were employed.

It has often been postulated in the past that the works of Nicola Fiorenza should become the subject of detailed research. This article is the first to examine comprehensively the concertos of this outstanding Neapolitan violinist and cellist, and to present a thematic catalogue of his concertos. It also verifies the existing lists of Fiorenza’s works, and examines the issues of  authorship and genre classification of his works. It confirms that he was the author of 20 concertos, eleven of which were composed during the years 1726-1728, while a few may be dated to a later period. His works are presented against the background of the concerto genre developed during the first half of the eighteenth-century. Fiorenza is the author of the oldest Neapolitan cello and violin concertos. He continues the tradition of his Neapolitan predecessors in using the four-movement form of the concerto with fugues, but is one of the first to introduce the dominance of homophonic texture and ritornello forms. The great majority of his concertos survive as single parts, but in a few of cases sources suggest the use of scoring for doubled parts. When compared to concertos by Northern Italian composers, Fiorenza’s works do not foreground the virtuoso element to the same extent. The composer places greater emphasis on the work’s expressive aspect, elegance of sound and harmony, original tonal plan and beauty of cantilena. In one case he even uses a paraphrase of the famous Farinelli’s aria Sposa, non mi conosci. The audiences for these concertos were Neapolitan aristocrats; some of the concertos may have formed part of the repertory of the Real Cappella, others may have been performed by pupils of the Conservatorio Santa Maria di Loreto during religious ceremonies.