Partenope

Partenope ("Parthenope", HWV 27) is an opera by George Frideric Handel, first performed at the King's Theatre in London on 24 February 1730. Although following the structure and forms of opera seria, the work is humorous in character and light-textured in music, with a plot involving romantic complications and gender confusion. A success with audiences at the time of its original production and then unperformed for many years, Partenope is now often seen on the world's opera stages.

The opera, which is in three acts, is composed to an Italian libretto adapted by an unknown hand from a libretto originally written in 1699 by Silvio Stampiglia. Stampiglia's libretto had received many previous settings, including one by Caldara which Handel may have seen in Venice around 1710.

It was Handel's first comic (or, rather, unserious) opera since the much earlier Agrippina, breaking away from the more traditional opera seria works for which the composer was known in London. He originally proposed the libretto to the opera company the Royal Academy of Music (1719) in 1726. They however rejected the work because of its frivolous nature, its relatively few extended arias and its long passages of recitative. (The latter objections are not particularly true, however. The opera has relatively few ensemble pieces but is replete with gorgeous arias.) The opera manager Owen Swiney opined that the project was uncommercial; in a letter of 1726 he wrote:

[The libretto] is the very worst book (excepting one) that I ever read in my whole life. Signor Stampiglia [...] endeavours to be both humorous and witty in it: if he succeeded in his attempt on any stage in Italy, 't was merely from a depravity of taste in the audience; for I am very sure it will be received with contempt in England'

The opera was presented during the 1730 season at the King's Theatre when Handel was working in partnership with the director John James Heidegger. The score was completed by Handel just two weeks before the premiere.

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