page_title: Ezio (Handel)
section_title: Context and analysis
hierarchical_section_title: Ezio (Handel) / Context and analysis
caption_attribution_description: English: A reproduction as a postcard of the Italian Opera House (King's Theatre), built by John Vanbrugh, at the Haymarket before it was destroyed by a fire on 17 June 1789. The original print was earlier published in Charles John Smith's Historical and Literary Antiquities,[1] Messrs Bernard Quaritch, Ltd.[2] The book and print was republished as: Smith, Charles John (1875) Historical and Literary Curiosities, London: Chatto and Windus, Piccadilly, pp.&#160;Plate 97 Retrieved on 10 February 2011. The original print measures 18 cm x 21.3 cm and is under the H. R. Beard Collection F94-14. TM 376. Victoria and Albert Museum, London Deutsch: William Capon (1757-1827): Italian Opera House (King's Theatre). (Architekt: de:John Vanbrugh). Bleistift und Wasserfarben. Originalgröße: 18 cm x 21,3 cm H. R. Beard Collection F94-14. TM 376. Victoria and Albert Museum, London
context_page_description: Ezio is an opera seria by George Frideric Handel to a libretto by Metastasio. Metastasio's libretto was partly inspired by Jean Racine's play Britannicus. The same libretto had already been set by many other composers, first of all Nicola Porpora who managed to preempt the official Rome premiere of Pietro Auletta's setting for 26 December 1728 with his own version for Venice on 20 November, a month earlier. The libretto continued to be set and reset for another 50 years, including two versions of Ezio by Gluck. Handel's Ezio is considered one of the purest examples of opera seria with its absence of vocal ensembles.
  The story of the opera is a fictionalisation of events in the life of the fifth-century AD Roman general Flavius Aetius, returned from his victory over Attila.
context_section_description: The German-born Handel, after spending some of his early career composing operas and other pieces in Italy, settled in London, where in 1711 he had brought Italian opera for the first time with his opera Rinaldo. A tremendous success, Rinaldo created a craze in London for Italian opera seria, a form focused overwhelmingly on solo arias for the star virtuoso singers. In 1719, Handel was appointed music director of an organisation called the Royal Academy of Music (unconnected with the present day London conservatoire), a company under royal charter to produce Italian operas in London. Handel was not only to compose operas for the company but hire the star singers, supervise the orchestra and musicians, and adapt operas from Italy for London performance.
  The Royal Academy of Music collapsed at the end of the 1728 - 29 season, partly due to the huge fees paid to the star singers. A bitter rivalry had developed between the supporters of the two prima donnas who had appeared in Handel's last few operas, Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni, culminating in June 1727 with a brawl in the audience while the two prima donnas onstage stopped singing, traded insults and pulled each other's hair, to enormous public scandal satirized in the popular The Beggar's Opera of 1728 and bringing Italian opera of the kind Handel composed into a certain amount of ridicule and disrepute. At the end of the 1729 season, both ladies left London for engagements in continental Europe. Handel went into partnership with John James Heidegger, the theatrical impresario who held the lease on the King's Theatre in the Haymarket where the operas were presented and started a new opera company with a new prima donna, Anna Strada.
  For the opera season of 1732, opening with Ezio,  Handel added to his ensemble of singers the tenor Giovanni Battista Pinacci, his wife alto Anna Bagnolesi, and the renowned bass Antonio Montagnana, the latter beginning a long association with Handel and creating many roles in Handel's works.
  Ezio is the last of three operas Handel composed to texts by the most famous librettist of the day, Metastasio, the other two being Siroe and Poro.  Many of the long passages of recitative in the Metastasio original were cut in Handel's version, London audiences preferring to move more swiftly from one aria to the next. Unlike most of Handel's operas, there are no duets or other ensembles in the piece at all, only recitatives and arias. Ezio was performed just five times in Handel's lifetime, one contemporary noting of it that it was "a New Opera, Clothes & all ye Scenes New - but did not draw much Company" (at that time scenery and costumes were often drawn from stock, entirely new costumes and scenes were an added attraction.) Nevertheless, King George II attended every performance but one.
  To music historian David Vickers, Ezio is "one of Handel's finest serious operas."
  The opera is scored for two recorders, two flutes, two oboes, two bassoons, trumpet, two horns, strings and continuo (cello, lute, harpsichord).
caption: The King's Theatre, London, where Ezio had its first performance
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