Listeners glancing at the graphics before listening to the music here may be surprised that the music seems distinctly un-Handelian. That's because most of it is not by
Handel. It seems a half-baked practice today, but 18th century operagoers were unfazed by so-called pasticcio operas, which took earlier materials, often by other composers, and perhaps added new material to make the whole thing fit together.
Handel did this nine times, and even
Mozart was involved in a few pasticcio (pastiche) operas.
Caio Fabricio, HWV A9, dates from 1733, when
Handel was under business and time pressures due to the new rival Opera of the Nobility established by his former star castrato,
Senesino. To put something attractive on the stage quickly, he turned to an opera,
Cajo Fabricio, by
Johann Adolf Hasse, adding arias in the latest Neapolitan style by a variety of composers, deleting some of
Hasse's, and replacing
Hasse's lengthy recitatives with short ones of his own. It's debatable whether the revisions made the work dramatically any more sound, but English audiences were said to dislike long Italian recitatives, and anyhow, the story (it is a military tale about a Greek general, Pirro, from whose efforts comes the concept of the Pyrrhic victory) is not really the point. The attractions lie in the arias, which are strikingly different from
Handel, fetching and melodic rather than muscular and polyphonically sinewy. This was the new stylistic breeze coming from Naples (and Venice), and apparently Londoners enjoyed the chance to hear the latest stuff. Indeed, this may be the main attraction for contemporary audiences as well; not only does the opera as a whole receive its world premiere here, but many of the composers involved are rarely heard. One of those is
Giuseppe Sellito, and his aria, "E grande e bella quella mercede," offers another attraction, the chance to hear the rising mezzo of the day,
Helen Charlston. Most of the singers catch the flavor of the new idiom, although the Italian of
Miriam Allen sounds a bit swallowed-up in the inappropriate church acoustic. Nobody is pretending this represents a major part of
Handel's output, but for
Handel lovers, it offers a way to hear a good-sized slice of the London operatic scene as
Handel's audiences would have heard it, and it's no surprise to have seen the recording land on best-seller lists in the summer of 2022. ~ James Manheim
