Seattle Opera Weblog: Alcina’s Literary Origin

What differentiates Ariosto’s poem, among the many many chivalric epics widespread within the center ages and Renaissance, is its beautiful verse, the ample number of its story, and the tender, smart, assured, very important voice of its narrator. Orlando furioso is funnier and sexier than any comparable work. Its characters and episodes have been so widespread, Ariosto’s poem engendered spin-offs in each conceivable artwork kind: portray, sculpture, illustration, madrigal, opera, extra poetry, puppet exhibits, and, extra just lately, video video games. Handel composed three dazzling operas based mostly on Orlando furioso, Alcina not the least amongst them.

What’s Orlando furioso about? A complete lot of passionate love tales, set in opposition to the background of wars between Christians and Muslims earlier than the Crusades. The poem’s title character, Orlando, is the strongest knight in Christendom; he goes mad (“furioso”) when the beautiful Angelica, princess of China, spurns him for Medoro, a candy, wounded Saracen boy from Africa. Orlando’s power and insanity are so excessive, he leaves a path of devastation throughout Europe and Africa till one other paladin, the English knight Astolfo, recovers Orlando’s misplaced wits: Astolfo finds them on the far aspect of the moon, the place all the pieces misplaced on earth may be discovered.

Portray of George Frideric Handel (1685–1759) by Balthasar Denner. Identified principally for his often-performed Messiah, Handel was a prolific composer of operas.

In the meantime, the long-awaited union of Ruggiero (who’s North African) and Bradamante (who’s French), foretold by Merlin originally of the poem, will get delayed and delayed and delayed. First Bradamante should rescue Ruggiero from his over-protective foster-father, the wizard Atlante. Afterward, Ruggiero rescues Angelica, who’s going to be sacrificed to a sea monster, and will get briefly distracted by her charms. Additional problems and horny misunderstandings are brought on by Ruggiero’s sister, who likes to go about disguised as a male knight, and Bradamante’s twin brother Ricciardo, who masquerades as a woman.

Nevertheless it’s Alcina who represents the best risk to the union of Ruggiero and Bradamante. Ariosto helped himself freely to conditions and characters from Greek fable, and Alcina clearly derives from Circe. It’s possible you’ll bear in mind Circe from The Odyssey; she’s the seductive witch who turns Odysseus’s males into swine and retains the hero as her lover on her beautiful pleasure-palace island for a yr. Just a few many years after Orlando furioso was written, the Italian poet Torquato Tasso paid Ariosto the praise of deriving from Alcina one other such character: Armida. In Tasso’s epic poem, Gerusalemme liberata (“Jerusalem Liberated”), the sorceress Armida seduces the heroic Rinaldo away from the Crusader military besieging Jerusalem. Armida’s love-life, like that of Alcina’s, has impressed dozens of operas. Rinaldo’s buddies discover him, enervated and emasculated with love, within the witch’s hidden pleasure-gardens. They remind him of masculine virtues similar to power, braveness, self-control, and retaining your phrase, so he flees Armida and returns to the battle. However by that time she has fallen in love with him, which she wasn’t imagined to do. Within the operas, after all, her damaged coronary heart provides her heaps to sing about.

Armida Discovers the Sleeping Rinaldo by Nicolas Poussin (1629). In homage to Ludovico Ariosto, poet Torquato Tasso (1544–1595) revealed Gerusalemme liberata (“Jerusalem Liberated”). Tasso’s poem options Armida, a seductive sorceress just like Alcina. On this portray by Nicolas Poussin, Cupid restrains Armida from stabbing her enemy.

Irrespective of how tangled their plots change into, Baroque operas at all times finish fortunately, with justice and order restored. So Alcina and Armida are at all times defeated in the long run. However the particular genius of Handel, as an opera composer, was his skill to remodel such an astonishing vary of human emotion into music, from tender sensuality to wistful nostalgia to impatient petulance to fiery decision. Even when Ariosto’s characters are making poor selections, Handel makes us really feel what they really feel. Thus, compassion overrides judgment; Alcina may be tragic, Ruggiero may be heroic, and the daring and courageous Bradamante is usually a livid, vengeful monster. Not like her epic counterpart—the villainous Morgan le Fay—Handel’s Morgana is a shiny, likeable younger girl who learns quite a bit in regards to the pleasure and ache of affection over the course of this opera.

Curiously, the gender-play of this manufacturing brings Handel again nearer to Ariosto. In Ariosto, the magician who helps Bradamante free Ruggiero from Alcina is Melissa, a benevolent sorceress. When Handel’s opera premiered, in London in 1735, this character grew to become Melisso, sung by a bass, principally as a result of Handel needed to write down an element for his cook dinner, Gustavus Waltz, who was additionally a beautiful singer. Restoring this character to her authentic gender restores the rigorously balanced gender politics of Ariosto’s story: Alcina isn’t defeated by a (male) wizard; as an alternative, one other girl brings her down. “Are you witch or a foul witch?”