Instant time travel? Yes, that’s possible! Listen to Georg Friedrich Händel’s (aka Handel) Agrippina and, with the first notes, you will be instantly transported to Baroque times.
The opera tells the story of Agrippina, Nero’s mother, plotting the downfall of her second husband, the Roman Emperor Claudius. There is a new, great Erato/Warner Classics recording out with the American mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato (*1969 in Prairie Village, Kansas) in the lead as Agrippina (Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr, Amazon.de). She sings under the direction of Maxim Emelyanychev, Chief Conductor of Il Pomo d’Oro. Joining them on this recording is a cast of established and rising stars including Marie-Nicole Lemieux, Franco Fagioli, Luca Pisaroni, Elsa Benoit and Jakub Józef Orliński. The May 20-28, 2019 recording of Handel’s Agrippina took place at Sala Mahler at Centro Culturale Dobbiaco in South Tyrol (Grand Hotel Dobbiaco aka Grand Hotel Toblach, Südtirol).
In a 2019 interview with Fiona Maddocks for The Observer / The Guardian, mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato said about her lead role as Agrippina in a London Royal Opera House production (a cooperation with the Bavarian State Opera in Munich): “Agrippina feels like the most modern drama, helped by the fact of Barrie’s production being timeless. I’ve got plenty of role models in mind – strong, wounded, slightly broken women. Robin Wright in House of Cards. Julia Louis-Dreyfus in Veep. Or, though she wasn’t villainous, Hillary Clinton 20 years ago – the smart, super-intelligent, suffering wife. It’s easy to say Agrippina’s wicked, power-obsessed. But she has no choice, no place in society other than being by the side of her husband. There are definitely times, in the crowd scenes, when I feel like Melania Trump: the cameras are there, darling.”
Joyce DiDonato. Photography copyright by Simon Pauly / Warner Classics.
Still according to Fiona Maddocks, Joyce DiDonato said about Agrippina: “It’s the densest, most elaborate, largest Italian text that must exist in opera. Agrippina has so much information to impart, so many things to resolve. And she’s three steps ahead of all the useless men around her. It’s constant information, manipulation, plotting and resolving. The story unfolds like rolling news today. And I keep saying, this is genius. How did Handel know the human psyche so profoundly? He’s the composer who’s taught me most. I’d put Agrippina up there with Richard III.”
Joyce DiDonato also said in this 2019 interview: “Early on, it was clear my voice was suited to lighter repertoire – Handel, Mozart, Rossini – and gradually and carefully I’ve broadened that out, always returning to Handel. That feels like home base.
David Vickers writes in the Erato Agrippina booklet (Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr, Amazon.de) that, in the summer of 1703, the 18-year-old Handel left his native Halle for Hamburg, where he started his career at the Gänsemarkt opera house, gradually rising from the ranks from back-desk violinist until his first opera, Almira, which premiered there in 1705. In 1706 Händel traveled to Italy. After some time in Rome and other cities, he arrived in Venice in 1709 where, according to his first biographer, John Mainwaring (London, 1760), he was encouraged to compose an opera: Agrippina.
The plot is drawn from the histories of Tacitus and Suetonis, and the drama is set in Rome, c. 50 AD. The ambitious Julia Agrippina, fourth wife of the Emperor Claudius and sister of Caligula, schemes to put her son Nero (from a previous marriage to the consul Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus) on the throne.
David Vickers describes Agrippina as a comedy of antiheroic characters with an unquenchable thirst for political and sexual power, whose amoral, corrupt and decadent intrigues are shown as intrinsic parts of everday life among ancient Rome’s rulings class. Much more info to find in the great Erato 3-CD-box!
Händel / Handel: Agrippina. Order the great Erato (Warner Classics) 3-CD-Box with a 238-page booklet containing a good introduction and synopsis by David Vickers (an important source for this article) as well as the libretto in English, French and German: Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr, Amazon.de.
For a better reading, quotations and partial quotations from the CD booklet by David Vickers + The Observer / The Guardian are not put between quotation marks.
Article added on September 21, 2020 at 09:42 German time. Simon Pauly photo added at 21:27.
