Sixty years ago, as I was just beginning my critical semicareer with a few reviews for Opera News, one of my first assignments was to head up to Connecticut for a production of Handel’s Deidamia at the Hartt College of Music. In prospect, the main attractions were two. First, this would be a chance to check out the rear-projection scenic system of Dr. Elemer Nagy, of which I’d heard enthusiastic report as to its adaptability for small opera companies and educational institutions. Second, it would be a rare opportunity to see a fully staged Handel opera, albeit with student performers plus a ringer or two. Deidamia was Handel’s last opera, and not a terribly representative one—a pastoral/satirical tale concerning Ulysses’ recruitment of the young Achilles (disguised as a girl on the island of Skyros under the protection of King Lycomedes—never mind) for the assault on Troy, and erotic complications with the eponymous heroine, daughter of said king. It’s light entertainment of the most accomplished sort, with a bittersweet ending. The performance was well prepared, Dr. Nagy’s designs were charming and atmospheric, and I enjoyed the occasion.

Not a month later, the pièce de résistance in my first package of records to review for High Fidelity was none other than the then-recently discovered Tetide in Sciro of Domenico Scarlatti. Same island, same characters, same story! But with a few variants, and in the far different tone of the true opera seria, of the chamber variety. This was a performance on the Westminster label by the Angelicum forces of Milan, severely cut and with midlevel Italian singers, but certainly dedicated and accomplished enough to give us an idea of the work’s effect. And one year after that, I encountered another, later, opera seria (in form, if not in tone), Paisiello’s Il Re Teodoro in Venezia, as staged by Boris Goldovsky at Tanglewood with a cast that included Sherrill Milnes and Justino Diaz.

Taken as a fourteen-month slice of a young devotee’s experience of pre-Mozartean opera—two “Young Artist” productions and a no-stars recording—there would be nothing very remarkable in any of this today. But at the end of the 1950s, the operas of Handel, along with the opera seria in general, to say nothing of the Neapolitan opera buffa, the French tragédie or comédie lyrique, and anything else we categorize as The Baroque in opera, was very much the province of specialists of scholarly bent—and even they had not experienced much of it in performance, live or recorded. We knew that there had been a Handel performance revival movement in Germany, initiated at Göttingen in 1920 by Oskar Hagen (father of the noted American actress and acting teacher Uta Hagen) that had made some headway, and that in England the Handel Opera Society was finding good critical and popular response for a few of that master’s works.

We had also learned something about Handel’s operas from books like Edward J. Dent’s Opera or Paul Henry Lang’s Music in Western Civilization, or by dipping into Burney; and we knew the some fifteen or twenty arias from his operas and oratorios that had been recorded by great singers and were regularly programmed in the opening groups of vocal recitals; and we had a notion of The Handel Sound from some of his instrumental music and sacred choral pieces. And—ça va sans dire—Messiah. But with respect to the operas, things were pretty much as I describe them in Opera as Opera (see “Ombra mai fu and The Modern Mezzo,” pp. 305 ff.). This extensive body of work by one of history’s most important composers was only beginning to stir from its 200-year coma. You don’t have to rely on my subjective testimony on this. A few glances at credentialed contemporaneous accounts of the situation will settle the matter. And in these accounts you will also find—even among the most enthusiastic champions of the operatic Handel and of The Baroque as a whole—some serious doubt as to the 20th-Century theatrical viability of any of these repertoires. ^(I) At the very least, the champions note, a great deal of work would need to be done in terms of performance practice and audience orientation to discover how to make these operas play.