ORLANDO

Orlando, in praise of madness in the Age of Enlightenment

Premiered on 27 January 1733 at the King's Theatre, Haymarket in London, this composition marks Handel's reaction as an entrepreneur to the bankruptcy in 1728 of the Royal Academy of Music, an institution for which he had worked for the previous ten years. The rewriting of Carlo Sigismondo Capece’s libretto based on Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso (1533), confirmed a trend already begun in previous works, both in the decision to adopt a text that had already been set to music (by Alessandro Scarlatti in 1711) and in the elimination of secondary characters and the inclusion of fantastic settings. This was guaranteed by the choice of the leading character, a crusader knight of Charlemagne, driven mad by love for his lady Angelica and brought back to his senses by an ‘enlightened’ magician with a philosophical name, Zoroaster; a completely invented character who introduces notes of rationalism in vogue at that point in the 18th Century and acts, in his magical guise, as the final deus ex machina.