Almira, Queen of Castile

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Work data
Title: Almira
Original title: The change of luck achieved in Krohnen, or: Almira, Queen of Castile
Title page of the libretto, Hamburg 1704

Title page of the libretto, Hamburg 1704

Shape: early German baroque opera
Original language: German Italian
Music: georg Friedrich Handel
Libretto : Friedrich Christian Feustking
Literary source: Giulio Pancieri , L'Almira (1691)
Premiere: January 8, 1705
Place of premiere: Theater am Gänsemarkt , Hamburg
Playing time: 3 ½ hours
Place and time of the action: Castile ( Valladolid ), in the Middle Ages, possibly in 1109
people

The change of luck achieved in Krohnen, or: Almira, Queen of Castilien ( HWV 1) is Georg Friedrich Handel's first opera.

Emergence

"Opern-Theatrum" on Gänsemarkt (detail from Paul Heinecken's view of the city, 1726)

In 1678 the first public opera house was founded in Hamburg , which was to last until 1738. This theater , which was located on Gänsemarkt , had to struggle with considerable difficulties even before its opening, which went down in history as the first Hamburg theater dispute. The conflict over whether opera was per se immoral and harmful was fought out in the pulpits and in pamphlets of the city before the Spiritual Ministry and the Hamburg Senate were convinced by reports from theological faculties outside the city to allow this. But by the end of the century the opera house was in full bloom. To take this dispute with the Pietists off the ground, the works listed there were initially of a biblical or at least religious nature. But it did not take long before secular, mythical and historical subjects popular elsewhere also found their way into the world. The Republic of Venice certainly served as a model for Hamburg : like this, Hamburg was also a rich trade republic with a prosperous cultural landscape. Here, as there, the bourgeois public tastes largely determined how the operas should be. In Hamburg, for example, German-language librettos were initially set to music. But it soon became customary to write the most important arias in Italian or, if the original was an Italian opera, to leave them in the original language.

Bourgeois opera companies like the houses in Hamburg or Venice had to get along largely without public subsidies and were financed by their audience. Hence their story is also a story of their bankruptcies. While the opera houses in Venice and other Italian cities were able to establish themselves firmly, the Hamburg house remained financially problematic, so that it was always dependent on grants from aristocratic and diplomatic circles and still had to close in 1738. In 1765 the empty and dilapidated house was demolished and the German National Theater was built on its place .

The Gänsemarkt Opera, located between the Gänsemarkt and the Inner Alster, was a large, if not magnificent, half-timbered building with a deep stage and technically complex. With two thousand seats, its size exceeded all contemporary theater rooms. Anyone who could pay the entrance fee had access. This meant that the composition of the audience was very mixed. In addition to hamburgers from various social classes, there were also wealthy foreigners living in the city and visitors. The resulting different interests led to problems in choosing the repertoire. Some of the librettists, in particular, had demonstratively high standards and did not leave their competitors good. What prevailed in Hamburg, even if not shared by all librettists, was a preference for crude, satirical or patriotic libretti (even in Low German ). Heroic subjects were interwoven with burlesque figures and scenes and at the turn of the century ballet scenes, which were becoming more and more popular, also found their way. The result was a peculiar, typically Hamburg-style Galimathia , which can now also be found partly in the libretto of Almira by Friedrich Christian Feustking . The opponents of such overloaded libretti, the poets Christian Friedrich Hunold (called "Menantes") and Barthold Feind , whose works are more serious and theatrically more credible texts, could not prevent others from continuing to write this mishmash. But they distanced themselves: like Feind, who called the Hamburg “mauvait goût des Parterre”.

Since the Hamburg opera company was founded, Reinhard Keizer was without a doubt the most talented composer in the house. He was Kapellmeister there from 1697 and one of the two directors from 1703 to 1707. The young Handel was known to him, as he was involved in the opera orchestra as the “second ripien violinist” and harpsichordist and had certainly already made himself noticeable with one or the other composition. He had come to Hamburg in the summer of 1703 and knew the repertoire from inside the orchestra pit, and he had also studied and copied some of the Hamburg scores. Keizer was to exert a lifelong influence on Handel, whose melodies accompanied him every year and can be found in many of his compositions. The singer, composer, impresario , music theorist and writer Johann Mattheson later commented on Handel's arrival, somewhat self-absorbed:

"How a certain world-famous man came for the first time here in Hamburg / he knew almost nothing / but regular joints / to make / and the imitations were so new to him / as a foreign language / were just as angry for him. I am best aware / how he brought his very first opera / scenes - white to me / and wanted to hear my thoughts about it every evening / what effort it cost him / to hide the pedant. "

- Johann Mattheson : Critica Musica , Hamburg 1722

Handel's first opera - announced as Sing-Spiel - was premiered on January 8, 1705 under the direction of Keizer, so it will have been composed in the months before. The opera has three acts and is not a Singspiel as we understand it today, as it does not contain any spoken dialogue. The opportunity for the composition arose for Handel by chance: Keizer had already set the material to music in 1703/04 based on a German text by theology student Friedrich Christian Feustking based on a Venetian model from 1691 and wanted to perform his opera in Hamburg in 1704. However, that year he had to flee from his creditors to Weißenfels , where composition commissions were waiting for him, but he could no longer exercise the directorate of the Hamburg Opera. His remaining partner, the dramaturge Drüsicke, handed the libretto over to Handel for setting to music, while Keiser's opera was never performed. Keizer was back in town for the premiere of Handel's Almira , however, and was able to conduct the premiere of the opera of his competitor and friend.

libretto

The Italian-language libretto L'Almira was written by Giulio Pancieri for a setting by Giuseppe Boniventi in Venice in 1691. This libretto also formed the basis for Ruggiero Fedeli and his Brunswick Almira from 1703. When Reinhard Keizer arrived in Weißenfels in the spring of 1704, he, who had just set Almira von Feustking to music in Hamburg, was again waiting for the same subject with the libretto of a librettist who is now unknown to us. This opera premiered in July 1704 and probably contained music from the earlier Hamburg version as well as chants by Fedeli. The libretto was a free German translation of the Braunschweig text. The German translation used by Handel also comes from Feustking and is possibly identical to Keiser's version that was never mentioned (but was partly printed in the Componimenti musicali in 1706 ). The 15 Italian texts included in Handel's score can also be found in the other two sources, while the recitatives and most of the arias were sung in German. In order to bring the libretto closer to the taste of the Hamburg audience, Feustking made a few changes, for example by integrating the ballet into the plot and thus being able to bring more spectacle to the stage. He also introduced the character of Bellante and a dungeon scene that was perhaps a little too long. Above all, the addition of the figure of Bellante leads to a few unnecessary entanglements in the end, as does the idea of ​​sometimes making Consalvo's role laughable, not always laudable, even if it is typical for Hamburg. But otherwise Tabarco's aria Alter Schadt der Folheit would not have existed (No. 31), which Handel later reused in a modified form as Haste thee, Nymph in L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato .

Cast of the premiere

Almira was a resounding success. The opera had about twenty performances by February 25 and was then replaced by Handel's next opera, Nero , the music of which is lost. In 1732 (the premiere was on February 7th) the work was revised in an arrangement by Georg Philipp Telemann - possibly for only two performances - in the Gänsemarktoper.

The Edilia of the premiere, Barbara Oldenburg, daughter of a respected Hamburg council musician “from a good, respected patrician family”, later married Reinhard Keizer. The music was well received, but Feustking's libretto seems to have met with criticism, as can be deduced from the tone of a pamphlet that he published in response to this criticism. In this pamphlet, Handel's name appears in public for the first time:

“To rebuke the Almiram, who has obtained approval for both the poetry and the artistic music of Mr. Hendels honéter Gemüther, and is honored with it until this hour, is a sign of a malicieusen unreasonable or unreasonable Malice. It is the fault of Mr. Kaysers, your faithful vassal, that it is given with a free translation, and not with the literal content, as he changed the intrigue and wanted to introduce new tricks and tricks at every act. Whether I am now one more person, and Raymondo in a royal. bring quality, even the whole work had to be completed within 3 weeks, the indignation of this otherwise great virtuoso was so great that he did not even turn it off with a polite compliment. Ingratum si dixeris, omnia dixeris! Tell him such things when he makes you the reverence, once again. "

- Friedrich Christian Feustking : Hostilius barred because of Almira. Hamburg 1705.

As a result of the literary dispute with Feustking, Feind reworked the libretto, which was then performed again in 1706 with the title The Serene Secretarius or Almira, Queen of Castile, again with music by Keizer. So this was Keiser's third Almira in two years.

It is remarkable that Almira was the only opera of Handel to be performed in the 19th century: several times between 1878 and 1905 in Hamburg (premiered on January 14, 1878 in the Hamburg Stadt-Theater ) and Leipzig , but in a heavily edited and abridged form by Johann Nepomuk Fuchs , as the second part of an evening consisting of three pieces: Handel's music was framed by Keiser's Venus and Adonis and Gluck's Le Cadi dupé . The first modern performance of Almira took place on February 23, 1985 in the Städtische Oper in Leipzig (musical direction: Horst Gurgel) and the first performance of the piece in historical performance practice on May 7, 1994 in Bremen with the Fiori musicali under the direction of Thomas Albert instead of.

action

Historical and literary background

It is difficult to assign the content of the opera to historical events because the plot is fictitious. Some of the role names used allow at least some conclusions to be drawn about historical people and events. One can assume that behind Almira Elvira Alfónsez (1100–1135), the daughter of King Alfonso VI. of León-Castile (1040–1109) and the Moorish princess Zaida, who called herself "Elisabeth (Isabel)" after her conversion to Christianity. Elvira married Count Roger in 1117, who became King of Sicily in 1130 . This more recent Spanish story is transmitted in the Corpus Pelagianum , also known as Liber chronicorum , a six-part work written under the supervision of Pelagius, who was Bishop of Oviedo from 1101 to 1130 . This chronicle was completed towards the end of the 12th century. Further evidence to support this assumption is provided by other roles in this libretto: For example, the foundling Floraldo / Fernando, loved by Almira, was lost as a child on a sea voyage to Sicily. Almira's guardian Consalvo is the prince of that Segovia that Alfonso VI. Recaptured from the Moors in 1085 . Finally Alfons VI. the development of the place of the action, Valladolid , which was largely depopulated in the Moorish times, paid special attention after its reconquest and ensured the repopulation of the city through Count Pedro Ansúrez . Lastly, the name Raymondo can also be found in the family history of those from León-Castile: Raymond of Burgundy was the first husband of Urraca , who after the death of her brother Alfonso VI. was Queen of León-Castile until 1126.

first act

On her twentieth birthday, the princess Almira is released from guardianship, crowned queen and ascends the throne of her father Alfonso, who died young. She rewards Consalvo, who was in charge of state affairs when she was a minor, for his loyal service: from now on he will be her chief adviser. His son Osman is given the command of the army; Fernando, a foundling whom Almira secretly loves, becomes the queen's secretary. The opening of the will surprised Almira: her father decreed that she should choose a husband from the Consalvos family. The pain overwhelms her, because all hope of a connection with Fernando seems lost: Chi più mi piace io voglio (No. 8). Osman, who overheard the opening of the will, separates from his fiancée, Princess Edilia. He needs a clear path to compete with his father for the queen's hand. Fernando, who also secretly loves Almira, but, as he believes, hopelessly as a foundling, lives in the bold hope of being destined to be king. In order to give Almira a hint, he wants to carve into a tree: I LOVE THAT I CANNOT CALL. But he only gets this far: I LOVE DI ... then he is surprised by Almira. She reads and adds incorrectly: I LOVE EDILIA. In frenzied jealousy, she sends him off: Geloso tormento (No. 15). Edilia complains to Consalvo about Osman's infidelity. Consalvo is startled: He too wants to use the will to win the throne with Almira's hand at the same time. He assures Edilia that he will force his son to redeem the engagement. The court has fun with games and dancing. Edilia tries to make the faithless Osman jealous and throws herself at Fernando; Osman, on the other hand, wants revenge by courting Princess Bellante. Almira, who again misunderstands everything, loses her temper and sends Fernando out of the hall: Ingrato, Spietato, tosto rendi a me quel core (No. 28).

Second act

Osman enters Fernando's room; he does not allow himself to be turned away by the servant Tabarco and, as a service of friendship, demands that Fernando be his advocate for Almira. Almira also expects Fernando to make the decision for her as to whether she should obey the will. He wants to be diplomatic and thus enrages the secretly eavesdropping Osman. Consalvo wants to force the marriage of Osman and Edilia with the help of the queen, but Almira misunderstands again because she believes that Fernando is meant: No, no, non voglio (No. 35). Disguised as an envoy, the Moorish King Raymondo appears with political intent: Mi dà speranza al core (No. 38). Almira believes that she can no longer hide her love: Move i passi alle ruine (No. 41). When Osman comes back to challenge Fernando to fight, she steps in, unrecognized, and snatches their swords from both of them. Intermezzo: Tabarco, who is entrusted with the court mail, sniffs the delicate secrets of the noblemen: "The court is pure love, that's why almost all the leaves are full of it." Almira holds the weapons: the sight of Fernando's sword gets caught she in ecstasy - one day he shall heal the wound that burns in her heart. Raymondo, whose disguise she saw through, becomes more and more evident in his courtship for Almira. Advised by Consalvo, she wants to diplomatically disguise her rejection. The threads get tangled again: Edilia, seeing Osman's sword in front of the queen's room, believes she has been betrayed; Osman, on the other hand, thinks Edilia is the veiled lady in Fernando's room.

Third act

Magnificent elevators are presented in honor of the Moorish guests: Europe and Africa, presented by Fernando and Osman, praise their advantages. When Almira decided against Africa, for “Europe's beauty”, Raymondo understood the finely coded rejection. At the end Tabarco proclaims: But keep the true rule over the world by folly; she rules human activity. Consalvo believes Edilia was with Fernando and yet has to marry Osman off to Edilia to get there. So he lets Fernando be thrown into dungeon and accuses him of seducing Edilia, the fiancée of his son Osman. That hits a sore spot in Almira: She bursts with jealousy and wants to fight for her lover all the more : Vedrai, s'a tuo dispetto (No. 62). Tabarco brings her a message from Fernando from the dungeon, a ruby ​​heart with the inscription ALMIREN'S PROPERTY. In order to fathom what is inexplicable to her, she has Fernando pretend to deliver the death sentence. The rejected by Almira Osman tries to win Edilia back. Their refusal encourages Raymondo to anchor in their port. He succeeds, and the scorned Osman takes comfort in the delightful Princess Bellante.

Tabarco delivered the news of his death. Almira, who is secretly listening, learns that all of Fernando's love belongs only to her. Moved, she removes the bonds from him. The riddle is solved: Consalvo, quoted in the throne room, recognizes the gem as the bride's gift for his wife, who was also called Almira. When her son Floraldo was born, it was hung around his neck. Mother and son had perished on a sea voyage, now it turns out that Floraldo has been rescued: He is Fernando, the foundling. Almira is now able to carry out the father's will - nothing stands in the way of her connection with Fernando. The other couples have also met: Raymondo and Edilia, Osman and Bellante. And Consalvo? He is happy about the change of happiness achieved in "Kronen" with his children.

music

The music for the opera consists of an overture in French style and 74 partly short musical numbers. At the beginning there is the coronation scene of Almira, which culminates in a choir accompanied by kettledrum and three trumpets. Afterwards the Spanish ladies and gentlemen dance a chaconne and a sarabande . The third act also contains a longer dance scene in which the three personified parts of the world (Europe, Africa, Asia) and finally folly dance in masquerades. According to the stage directions in the score, Europe, dressed in Roman costume, is first dragged across the stage in a carriage, with a choir of Hautbois in front of him . Africa is carried by twelve moors to the sound of kettledrums and trumpets, while Asia, armed and accompanied by cimbalons, drums and cross pipes, appears in a chariot drawn by lions. The dance of the Asians, a sixteen-measure and only two-part sarabande , was to become one of Handel's best-known melodies up to the present day. While Handel had only reworked and significantly expanded it to the aria Lascia la spina in his Roman oratorio II trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno (1707), it conquered the music world as Lascia ch'io pianga in his first London opera Rinaldo six years later.

Handel composed for the circumstances and in accordance with the norms that he found in Hamburg. Since there was no castrato in the ensemble of the Gänsemarkt Theater, Almira is the only surviving opera that does not contain such a part. The large number of the sometimes very short arias also corresponds to this. He succeeds best when they have strong affects, such as Geloso tormento (No. 15) or Faithless Man / Boil Your Veins (No. 64/65) or loveliness, such as Sanerà la piaga un dì (No. 44) or Speak to express me a sweet word (No. 33). The more mature Handel shimmers through here. However, some of the numbers are still a bit awkward and you can hear that the young Handel had been more concerned with instrumental music than Italian singing up until then. He did not experience this until a few years later during his apprenticeship in Italy. Here he acquired the melodic-vocal intensity and the sovereign handling of the Italian language that characterize his later operas.

Almira's autograph is lost. The only surviving copy of the score was used by Georg Philipp Telemann for his re-performance of the work in 1732 and was so heavily edited that several passages have only survived in fragments. The discovery of a collection of arias from the early 18th century in the library of the Mariengymnasium Jever in 2004 partially closed these gaps: Almira's final aria in the first act Ingrato, spietato, tosto rendi a me quel core (No. 28) is now also available again like the missing nine bars of the bass part of Bellante's aria Ich burnenne (No. 71). Since his stay in Italy, Handel had an excellent reference library in which he kept all of his compositions. This is the main reason for the excellent state of transmission of these works. In contrast to that, our current equipment with works from the Hamburg and especially the Halle period is poor. What was composed for the Hamburg Opera was probably the property of the Opera House and remained there in the archive. There the scores were probably worse off than in Handel's private archive. The other Hamburg operas ( Nero , Florindo and Daphne ) are almost completely lost.

orchestra

In contrast to the sparse orchestra in Venice, the Hamburg Opera Orchestra was able to draw on the full. Perhaps this was the inspiration for the lush opera orchestra of the French court. Reinhard Keizer in particular, who was Handel's first opera model, made frequent use of it and used extravagant instrumentation. Handel's score is more conventional here and except for the aria Osman's Sprich vor mich ein sweet word (No. 33) with two recorders and a solo viola, Handel uses a “normal” orchestral line-up: two recorders , two oboes , bassoon , three trumpets , timpani , strings , Basso continuo (violoncello, lute, harpsichord).

Discography

  • CPO 999275-2 (1994): Ann Monoyios (Almira), Linda Gerrard (Bellante), David Thomas (Consalvo), Patricia Rozario (Edilia), James MacDougall (Fernando), Douglas Nasrawi (Osman), Olaf Haye (Raymondo), Christian Elsner (Tabarco)
Fiori musicali; Dir. Andrew Lawrence-King (224 min)

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f Greta Moens-Haenen: Handel. Almira. CPO 999 275-2, Osnabrück 1996, p. 15 ff.
  2. ^ Johann Mattheson: Critica Musica d. i. Thoroughly correct examination and assessment ... First piece. Hamburg 1722, p. 243.
  3. ↑ a b c Christopher Hogwood: Georg Friedrich Handel. A biography. Translated from the English by Bettina Obrecht. (= Insel-Taschenbuch 2655) Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main / Leipzig 2000, ISBN 3-458-34355-5 , p. 44 ff.
  4. ↑ a b Silke Leopold: Handel. The operas. Bärenreiter-Verlag, Kassel 2009, ISBN 978-3-7618-1991-3 , p. 231 f.
  5. ^ Friedrich Chrysander : GF Handel. First volume, Breitkopf & Härtel , Leipzig 1858, p. 135.
  6. ^ Friedrich Christian Feustking: Hostilius blocked off because of Almira. Hamburg 1705. (Quoted in: Friedrich Chrysander: GF Handel. First volume. Breitkopf & Härtel, Leipzig 1858, p. 109 f.)
  7. ^ Friedrich Chrysander: GF Handel. First volume, Breitkopf & Härtel, Leipzig 1858, pp. 105 ff.
  8. ^ Winton Dean, John Merrill Knapp: Handel's Operas 1704–1726. The Boydell Press, Woodbridge 2009, ISBN 978-1-84383-525-7 , p. 52.
  9. ^ Winton Dean, John Merrill Knapp: Handel's Operas 1704–1726. The Boydell Press, Woodbridge 2009, ISBN 978-1-84383-525-7 , p. 65.

Web links

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