Ezio (opera)

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This article is about the opera. For other uses, see Ezio (disambiguation).

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Ezio (Aetius) is an opera by George Frideric Handel. It was his last opera based on a libretto by Pietro Metastasio. Metastatio's story was partly inspired by Jean Racine's play Britannicus.^[1] The same libretto was also set by Nicola Porpora for an opera of the same name, first performed four years earlier.

The opera received its first performance at the King's Theatre, London on 15 January 1732. It received a total of only 5 performances before falling from the repertoire, in what turned out to be Handel's greatest operatic failure. It did not receive another performance in London until 1977, by the Handel Opera Society at Sadler's Wells Theatre. Winton Dean has stated that the failure of the opera related to the artistic incompatibility between the more "classical" nature of the libretto and the more "romantic" nature of the music.^[2]

Handel's Ezio is considered one of the purest examples of opera seria with its absence of vocal ensembles.

1 Roles
2 Synopsis
3 Selected recordings
4 E-book
5 Notes
6 References
7 External Links

[edit] Roles

Role	Voice type	Premiere Cast, January 15, 1732 (Conductor: - )
Ezio, Roman general	alto castrato	Senesino
Fulvia, his lover	soprano	Anna Maria Strada
Valentiniano, Roman emperor	alto	Anna Bagnolesi
Onoria, his sister	alto	Francesca Bertolli
Massimo, Fulvia's father	tenor	Giovanni Battista Pinacci
Varo, Prefect of the Praetorian Guard	bass	Antonio Montagnana

[edit] Synopsis

The protagonist is the fifth-century AD Roman general Flavius Aetius (Ezio in Italian), returned from his victory over Attila.

[edit] Selected recordings

VOX 1995: Manhattan Chamber Orchestra, D'Anna Fortunato, Julianne Baird, Jennifer Lane, Nathaniel Watson, Frederick Urrey, Raymond Pellerin, Johannes Somary

[edit] E-book

Score of Ezio (ed. Friedrich Chrysander, Leipzig 1880)

[edit] Notes

^ Strohm, Reinhard, "Handel, Metastasio, Racine: The Case of Ezio" (November 1977). The Musical Times, 118 (1617): pp. 901-903.
^ Dean, Winton, "Music in London: Ezio (January 1978). The Musical Times, 119 (1619): pp. 59-64.

[edit] References

Dean, Winton (2006), Handel's Operas, 1726-1741, Boydell Press, ISBN 1843832682 The second of the two volume definitive reference on the operas of Handel