page_title: Amadigi di Gaula
section_title: Composition history
hierarchical_section_title: Amadigi di Gaula / Composition history
context_page_description: Amadigi di Gaula is a "magic" opera in three acts, with music by George Frideric Handel. It was the fifth Italian opera that Handel wrote for London and was composed during his stay at Burlington House in 1715. It is based on Amadis de Grèce, a French tragédie-lyrique by André Cardinal Destouches and Antoine Houdar de la Motte. Charles Burney maintained near the end of the eighteenth century, Amadigi contained "...more invention, variety and good composition, than in any one of the musical dramas of Handel which I have yet carefully and critically examined".
  The opera received its first performance in London at the King's Theatre in the Haymarket on 25 May 1715. Handel made prominent use of wind instruments, so the score is unusually colorful, and at points resembles the Water Music, which he composed only a few years later. Exceptional care was lavished on the production. Amadigi employs no voices lower than alto and it ends in a minor key. The opera was a success and received a known minimum of 17 further performances in London through 1717.
context_section_description: The identity of the librettist is not known for certain. Previous consensus had been that John Jacob Heidegger, who signed the dedication to Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington was the author, but more recent research has indicated that the librettist was more likely to be Giacomo Rossi, with Nicola Francesco Haym as a more probable candidate. This libretto is an adaptation of a medieval Spanish knight-errantry epic Amadis de Gaula in which the King of Gaul, educated in Scotland, falls in love with and eventually marries Oriana, daughter of the King of England.
  David Kimbell compared in detail the treatments of the story by Handel and Destouches.
  What interested Handel was the emotions and the sufferings of the four characters. not the descriptive effects of his later "magic" operas. The sole preoccupation of each of the protagonists is to make the others fall in or out of love with them.
  In act 2 Amadigi addresses the Fountain of True Love in a long cavatina of the utmost sensuous beauty. This scene was famous originally for its spectacular effects. The "coup de theatre" then was the use of a real fountain spraying real water. The scene employed a large number of stage engineers and plumbers, among other things, such that the following newspaper announcement appeared on the day of the premiere: "whereas there is a great many Scenes and Machines to be mov’d in this Opera, which cannot be done if persons should stand upon the
  Stage (where they could not be without Danger), it is therefore hop’d no Body, even the Subscribers, will take ill that they must be deny’d Entrance on the Stage".
  According to Winton Dean the quality of the score, especially the first two acts, is remarkably high, but it shows less careful organization than most of the later operas. He also states that the tonal design seems off balance. The conception of an opera as a coherent structural organism was slow to capture Handel's imagination.
  The original manuscript of Amadigi has disappeared, along with ballet sections in the music. Only one edition of the libretto is known, dating from 1715. Two published editions of the opera exist, the Händelgesellschaft edition of 1874, and the first critical edition, by J. Merrill Knapp, which Bärenreiter published in 1971. Dean has examined the history of various manuscripts which contain alternative selections for the score.
  The opera is scored for two recorders, two oboes, bassoon, trumpet, strings, and basso continuo (cello, lute, harpsichord).
  The singer Elisabetta Pilotti-Schiavonetti in the role of Melissa, who specialised in playing sorceresses, and for whom Handel had written the similar parts of the witch-like Armida in Rinaldo and Medea in Teseo is distinguished in Handel's music between her vengeful character and that of the other leading female part, the sweet Princess Oriana.
caption: Burlington House in the 1690s
exif: {}