My encounters with Deidamia, Tetide, and Re Teodoro, while interesting and enjoyable to a degree, did not lead me to any strong disagreement with Dent and others as to the playability and singability of such operas for our time. Even the many blandishments of the 1962 recording of Alcina with the likes of Joan Sutherland, Teresa Berganza, and a just-setting-out Mirella Freni, along with a synergistic Carnegie Hall concert performance of the same work, also starring Sutherland, were no more than suggestive of viability, and I didn’t fully appreciate Handel’s stature as a musical dramatist until giving close attention to the 1964 Westminster recording of Rodelinda. That is to say, I began to absorb his genius for characterization and emotional expression bonded with a dramatic situation in music on a more than intermittent basis, and to imagine how certain scenes and arias could be compelling in a superior performance. I still had my reservations as to the establishment of a convincing dramatic continuity (Dent’s chief complaint, and no doubt the main factor in Kerman’s lack of interest) or the likelihood of the singing demands being met at a high enough level (magical, entrancing, thrilling) to keep us engaged in its absence. These were soon eased, at least in a particular case, by the NYCO’s famous (to some musicologists, infamous) 1966 production of Giulio Cesare. ^(I)In the decades since, through audio and video recordings, concert performances, and (still) relatively few staged productions, I’ve had some positive experiences. But they haven’t set the reservations entirely at ease.

In the coming season, the Met will import John McVicar’s production of Agrippina. This opera was premiered in Venice in the season of 1709-10, and is the one that first established Handel as a master operawright. It also happens to be one of the eight Handel operas I have seen live and staged, in a quite well-cast, well-played production by a small company called The Opera Mission a few years back. Then, I underwent what is for me a typical Handel opera progression of attention—thunderstruck for the first twenty-five minutes or so by the composer’s ingenuity in keeping the sequences of aria and recitative fresh and delightful, and then a couple of hours of intermittent engagement while trying to unscramble the plot as we went, figure out whose side I should be on, and hoping that this next number would not be another slow one for an upper-family voice, and would not have a da capo verse.