At around the time of Alcina’s premiere, in the mid-1730s, London became the largest city in Europe, surpassing even Constantinople, as its population surged past 650,000 (it had passed Paris some thirty years earlier, at the turn of the century). Industrialisation, on the back of nascent imperialism in support of the British slave trade, helped fuel that growth, and also helped shape and fund the burgeoning forms of cultural expression that flourished in the rapidly expanding capital. At the same time, cultural expressions helped to define that national and imperial identity, rationalising its structures and practices. 

Opera was one such form of expression: the conventional narrative for serious Italian opera since the 1690s centred on a young prince wrestling with the dilemmas of love before eventually accepting that his royal duty took precedence; this presented an obvious lesson for contemporaneous rulers and as obvious a justification of the status quo for their subjects. In the clearest example we have of an allegorical reading of Handel’s operas, Alcina was interpreted in just such a way, in a letter to The Universal Spectator of July 1735: 

“The Opera […] contains an agreeable Allegory; Rogero is carry’d thro’ the Air on a Hypo-griffin, by which is figur’d to us the Violence of youthful Passions. […] Astolfo’s […] advice to Rogero […] proves that neither the Counsel of Friends, nor the Example of others suffering by the Corses we are ourselves pursuing, can stop the giddy head-strong Youth from the Chase of imaginary or fleeting Pleasures, which infallibly lead them to cruel Reflections and to too late Repentence. The Character of Alcina’s Beauty, and Inconstancy proves the short Duration of all sublunary Enjoyments, which are lost as soon as attain’d.” 

Surprisingly for modern listeners, who find Alcina herself an emotionally compelling character, to this particular eighteenth-century audience member she was nothing more than a convenient allegory for the temptations of the flesh. However, this reading offers a window into opera’s aesthetic politics. If we understand this juxtaposition of the sensuality of the sorceress with the ultimate moral virtue of the knight as an opposition not just of female vice to male virtue, but also of Eastern heathen to Western Christian (as Ruggiero became at the end of the epic poem on which the opera is based), the story aligns with an orientalist vein in European culture that steadily grew in importance as European imperialism took hold. Orientalism’s aim, as Edward Said has explained, was to justify the repression of the oriental (or colonial) ‘other’ through depictions of them that reinforced tropes of sensuality, decadence, illogicality, and violence. Many of the stories for earlier opera were drawn from two epic poems oriented round the crusades (a focus of orientalist anxiety, then as now): Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1516/1532) and Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (1575/1581). Ariosto was the source for Alcina, alongside Handel’s two preceding operatic works, Orlando (1733) for the King’s Theatre and Ariodante (1735) for Covent Garden, while Tasso was the source for his first London opera, Rinaldo (1711). Alcina was thus not the only representative of the temptations and dangers of the exotic on the eighteenth-century stage, and she finds later, still more famous echoes in Aida, Lakmé, and Butterfly, as well as in Dalila and Carmen. 
 

OPERATIC RIVALRIES

But there are other, equally revealing, ways of understanding the choice of Alcina – ones that relate to the very local politics of London’s operatic environment and to Handel’s difficult fortunes at this time. London’s operagoers were notoriously fickle, and, aware both of their collective wealth and of their distance from Italy, the centre of musical fashion, they demanded constant novelty and the best that money could buy. The Italian opera company, the Royal Academy of Music, had thus consistently sought to recruit fashionable artists, sending Handel (and others) to persuade singers such as Senesino, Cuzzoni, and Faustina to come to London in the 1720s. Similarly, they sought to keep abreast of current musical style in compositional terms: Giovanni Battista Bononcini, not Handel, was the principal composer of the early 1720s, and pasticci derived from successful Italian productions were not uncommon. 

But fashion could prove problematic: in Bononcini’s Astianatte in 1727 the rivalry between Cuzzoni and Faustina had spiralled out of control, contributing to the demise of the operatic Academy in 1728. Similarly, by the early 1730s, the relationship between Handel and Senesino – never good, it seems – had broken down, such that Senesino left Handel’s operatic venture. Handel himself had contributed to this state of affairs. Following the 1732 public productions of his 1718/20 ‘masque’, Esther, including Handel’s own version expanded into an ‘oratorio’ (unstaged, and with additional choral movements), the composer recognised that London audience interest in this ‘new’ genre offered him an exciting opportunity: in 1733 he attempted to increase ticket prices for that season’s new oratorio, Deborah, and was met with general resentment. This no doubt contributed to the decision by a group of opera lovers and artists, led by Senesino, to set up a new company against him. One Londoner (Charles Delafaye) reported a view that sounded like an operatic narrative to the Earl of Essex in May 1733:

“Here is like to be a Schism in y^e Musical World.  Handel is become so arbitrary a Prince, that the Town murmurs, Senesino not being able to submit any longer to his Tyranny threatens to revolt and in conjunction with Cuzzona to set up a separate Congregation at Lincolns Inn fields.” 

Evidently, his rivals hoped to crush Handel for his apparent upstart presumption. As it turned out, the ‘Opera of the Nobility’, as the breakaway company is now known, lasted only four seasons. But the impact on Handel was also significant. Handel’s friend and librettist, Charles Jennens, summed up the problem in December 1733: ‘How two Operas will subsist after Christmas, I can’t tell; but at present we are at some difficulty for the support of One; & Mr. Handel has been forc’d to drop his Opera three nights for want of company.’

As the two companies vied with each other for audiences, the Opera of the Nobility hit on what seemed a sure-fire strategy. One artist Handel and the Royal Academy directors had not managed to cajole to London, despite trying since 1726, was the most celebrated castrato of the day, Farinelli, who was apparently concerned about the impact that damp (and, as we would now understand it, polluted) London air might have on his health. In 1733, the Opera of the Nobility hired Farinelli’s teacher, Nicolà Porpora, as their principal composer. This, along with an extraordinary financial offer of 1400 or 1500 guineas per annum (around 230.000 €) plus a benefit performance, and a network of aristocratic supporters, was enough to lure Farinelli to join their company the following year. Just as Porpora’s first opera for the Opera of the Nobility, Arianna in Nasso (December 1733) had been matched by Handel with Arianna in Creta (January 1734) – to a libretto Porpora had himself set in 1727 – so Farinelli’s London premiere, a new version of Johann Adolph Hasse’s celebrated Artaserse (Venice, 1730), in which Farinelli reprised the role of Arbace that he had created in Hasse’s original production, was met by Handel with a revival of Leonardo Vinci’s Artaserse (Rome, 1730), with Vinci’s original Arbace, Giovanni Carestini, revisiting that role in London.

Alcina can also be seen within this framework, for it is a resetting of L’isola di Alcina, a libretto set in 1728 by Farinelli’s brother, Riccardo Broschi, which (of course) starred Farinelli himself. The version of the libretto presented in London is unusual in its retention of the majority of the original aria texts (twenty-four of the original thirty-four, with nineteen of them in the same place and for the same character as the original libretto); the arias removed were mostly for the lower-ranked singers. Might Handel have hoped Farinelli would notice the choice, either in annoyance or seeing it as some kind of homage? 
 

SPECTACLE!

There were other reasons for choosing this story, one heavy in magic and scenic spectacle, however. At the end of the 1733-34 operatic season, Handel’s lease on the prestigious King’s Theatre in the Haymarket came to an end, and he was forced out by the rival company. Handel came to an arrangement to shift to the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden, a new theatre belonging to manager and celebrated pantomime artist, John Rich, that had (ironically) been built in part thanks to the success of The Beggar’s Opera, a ‘ballad opera’ which had satirised Italian opera so successfully it damaged the Academy’s fortunes in 1728. The theatre was certainly in a less prestigious location than the King’s, but it offered some advantages: most notably, having been completed in 1732, it had the latest technologies in staging and scenery; and Rich had employed a dance company for the season, Marie Sallé’s Parisian troupe. Covent Garden’s resources meant that Handel and his librettist could devise operas featuring elaborate spectacle. In Alcina this manifested itself in, for example, the sudden and magnificent appearance of Alcina’s palace in act one scene two; the equally sudden transformation of the scene from a beautiful chamber to a horrid wasteland (as Ruggiero puts on a magic ring of revelation) at the beginning of act two; and the appearance of Alcina’s palace ‘surrounded by trees, statues, obelisks, trophies and cages with wild beasts pacing about in them’ in the middle of act three.

For Rich himself, it made sense to add opera to his list of attractions: since 1717, spectacle accompanied by the music of the talented German composer, Johann Ernst Galliard, had been integral to his successful pantomimes. Thomas Davies’ later summation of these distinctive pieces gives a striking sense of congruence with the mix of music and spectacle in Alcina:

“Rich created a species of dramatic composition unknown to this, and I believe, to any other country, which he called a pantomime: it consisted of two parts, one serious, and the other comic. By the help of gay scenes, fine habits, grand dances, appropriate music, and other decorations, he exhibited a story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, or some other fabulous writer. Between the pauses or acts of this serious representation, he interwove a comic fable, consisting chiefly of the courtship of Harlequin and Columbine, with a variety of surprising adventures and tricks, which were produced by the magic wand of Harlequin; such as the sudden transformation of palaces and temples to huts and cottages; of men and women into wheelbarrows and joint-stools; of trees turned to houses, colonnades to beds of tulips; and mechanic shops into serpents and ostriches.” 

So Rich was very well equipped with everything that an eighteenth-century opera composer might need. Perhaps more surprisingly, he was also very supportive of opera, as this dedication to one of his pantomimes from 1727 attests:

“Though my Inclination to Musick frequently leads me to visit the Italian Opera; yet I confess […] there are many essential Requisites still wanting, to establish that Entertainment on a lasting Foundation, and adapt it to the Taste of an English Audience. For, not to mention the trite Objection of the Performances being in Italian, and the general ill Choice of the Subjects for those Compositions, it is evident, that the vast Expence of procuring Foreign Voices, does necessarily exclude those various Embellishments of Machinery, Painting, Dances, as well as Poetry it self, which have been always esteemed (except till very lately in England) Auxiliaries absolutely necessary to the Success of Musick; and, without which, it cannot be long supported, unless by very great Subscriptions, of which we naturally grow tired in a few Years. It seems, therefore, the only Way by which Musick can be establish’d in England, is to give it those Assistances from other Arts which it yet wants, and by that Means to adapt it still more to the Publick Taste; to moderate, as much as possible, the Expence of it, and thereby to make it a general Diversion, which hitherto it has not been.”

As this dedication suggests, the musical drama Rich and his audiences remembered most fondly was the English semi-opera made famous by Henry Purcell in the late seventeenth-century. This form of English opera had embraced and adapted the operatic fashions of contemporaneous Italy and France, combining spectacular scenic and musical effects with mythological and often comic stories of gods and monsters, but the lack of singers able to sustain a full-length opera at that time in England meant that the drama was mostly still spoken. With more imported singers available in the early eighteenth century, Handel was able to turn these supernatural and magical stories into all-sung dramas in his earliest London operas, Rinaldo (1711), Teseo (1713), and Amadigi (1715). By the 1710s, the fashion-conscious aristocracy’s preference for all things foreign meant that Italian opera seria of the 1690s, with its focus on heroic and nominally ‘historical’ plots, had largely ousted the supernatural and the comic from London’s operatic stage. But lower-class English audiences, who weren’t able to make the pilgrimage to Venice, Rome, or Naples, evidently still favoured the mix of speech, song, farce and spectacle, as the success of Rich’s pantomimes attests.

Rich the populist aspired in 1727 to reintegrate scenic and other decorations into opera, while saving money on expensive singers’ fees so a wider audience could afford to attend. Just a few years after he wrote the dedication above, he had the opportunity to put some of his ideas into effect. At least one of Handel’s supporters saw the connection between Rich and Handel. Attending a rehearsal of Alcina at the composer’s house in 1735, Mary Pendarves delightedly compared Handel to a ‘necromancer in the midst of his enchantments’, surely alluding to his association with the ‘Harlequin necromancer’ himself, as Rich was known after his most popular pantomime, The Necromancer (1723). 
 

CASTING FOR COVENT GARDEN

If Covent Garden was ideal for Alcina conceptually, Handel faced challenges in casting, for he had lost some of his best singers to the Opera of the Nobility. But he cleverly played both to the tastes of Rich’s audience and to the strengths of each artist, providing opportunities to the best young English singers, while entrusting the leading roles to talented Italians. Cecilia Young, a singer for the English opera and Handel’s Dalinda in Ariodante, was given the most prominent role of the English singers as Morgana, Alcina’s sister: of her four arias, the virtuosic ‘Tornami a vagheggiar’, added at the end of the first act, demonstrates her ambition and ability. John Beard, a promising young tenor who was later to become a mainstay of Handel’s oratorios, played Oronte, would-be lover to Morgana, with three rather light arias. Bass Gustavus Waltz, also emerging from the English operas, took the role of counsellor, Melisso. The part of the boy Oberto was a late addition, created especially for the talented treble, William Savage, who had debuted in a revival of Handel’s oratorio Athalia just two weeks earlier in the season; he was given three new arias expressing clear-cut, simple emotions. As important was the addition of three choruses (with new texts), representing Alcina’s followers in the first act and her longsuffering victims thereafter; they, like the ballets for Marie Sallé’s troupe, gave the opera a slight flavour of a Parisian tragédie en musique.

Of the Italians, the contralto Maria Caterina Negri, a singer who specialised in male parts, took the cross-dressing role of Bradamante, with three appropriately ‘manly’ arias. The two leading roles were particularly ingenious castings. The castrato Giovanni Carestini came to England in 1733 to replace Senesino. His singing, described as being in ‘the most perfect style’ by the composer Hasse, is encapsulated in the elegantly simple ‘Verdi prati’, but he was given eight arias and a trio in total – more than any other singer. In looks, he was said by historian Charles Burney to be ‘tall, beautiful, and majestic’ and ‘a very animated and intelligent actor’.  The role of Ruggiero – a man who has captivated the enchantress Alcina – must have seemed made for Carestini.  In Broschi’s version it had, of course, been sung by Farinelli.

Alcina herself was the most significant challenge. Handel had met Anna Maria Strada del Pò when he travelled to Italy seeking fresh talent in 1729 (he had also hoped to engage Farinelli then). After her London debut that year, she remained Handel’s prima donna until 1737. Burney said that she ‘came hither a coarse and awkward singer with improvable talents, and he at last polished her into reputation and favour’, but that seems an exaggeration: she sang substantial roles in Naples in 1725 alongside Farinelli and other leading singers of the day. Handel must have appreciated her vocal prowess, because Strada lacked the good looks that at the time often made up for weak singing: Burney said ‘she had so little of a Venus in her appearance, that she was usually called the Pig’. Choosing Strada to represent a woman needing to use magic to bewitch men into loving her may have amused audiences.

By the time she played Alcina, Strada was evidently a singer of considerable dramatic as well as musical talent, for the role plumbs the depths of emotion as well as the heights of passion, and is the focus of the opera. Even though magic was a key attraction, Handel shows us Alcina’s genuine attachment to Ruggiero in the first act, with a delicate lover’s aria in ‘Di cor mio’ and a plangent complaint in ‘Si son quella’. The end of the second act most clearly humanises her: when Alcina discovers Ruggiero has deceived her and intends to escape, she responds initially not with anger, but with anguish and shock in ‘Ah! mio cor’.  As Burney noted in the 1780s, Handel could easily have chosen a different response: ‘Perhaps a modern composer, from the rage into which the enchantress is thrown in the drama […] would have given the lady less tenderness, and more passion; however that may be, the first strain of this air, upon a continued moving bass, is truly pathetic’. The act reaches its culmination with the accompanied recitative ‘Ah! Ruggiero crudel’: Alcina attempts to summon demons only to find that they, like Ruggiero, have deserted her; as she vents her anger at them in the aria ‘Ombre pallide’, she reinforces her desperation. It was this scene that particularly struck Mary Pendarves when she attended the opera’s rehearsal: even before praising the ‘necromancer’ Handel, she noted ‘Strada has a whole scene of charming recitative – there are a thousand beauties’. For recitative to ‘charm’ an Englishwoman demonstrates how much care Handel lavished on this role.

Of course, not all Londoners saw opera’s musical magic as ‘charming’. A year previously, the satire Harmony in an Uproar: A Letter to F-d-k H-d-l had asked the composer: ‘Have you not this very Season imported from Italy an Arch-Fiend, one Care---no, that will play the Devil with us before he quits us, and leagu’d yourself to a notorious Witch, one Str-da, that never lets us be quiet Night nor Day[?]’.  This teasing reflection on the impressive vocal abilities of Carestini and Strada is a reminder that opera, like all cultural forms, trod a fine line between delighting and provoking its audiences, and perhaps particularly in an industrial, imperial London, suspicious of all ‘foreign’ imports. There was surely nowhere better for the sorceress Alcina to test her charms.