Siroe, Re di Persia HWV 24

George Frideric Handel's "Siroe, Re di Persia", HWV 24, was premiered on February 17, 1728 at the King's Theatre in London's Haymarket. With Francesca Cuzzoni, Faustina Bordoni and Francesco Bernardi, known as Senesino, the composer had top-class vocal soloists famous throughout Europe at his disposal for no fewer than 17 consecutive performances. However, Handel's opera was not an outstanding success due to the strong competition from the "Beggar's Opera" presented in London at the same time.

The libretto for "Siroe" goes back to Pietro Metastasio and was very well-known and popular at the time, so that various settings of the subject matter, among others by Leonardo Vinci, Nicola Porpora and Johann Adolph Hasse, have been handed down. The historical background against which the plot of the opera unfolds is the forced handover of the reign of the Persian king Chosrau II (Cosroe) to his son Siroe, the later Kavadh II, in the 7th century AD. With its abundance of love affairs, intrigues and misunderstandings, the libretto offers a proverbially magnificent "stage" for Handel's singing stars, to whom he entrusted rousing arias and ensemble pieces.

Taking into account numerous manuscript and printed sources, this scholarly-critical edition offers a reconstruction of an abridged version by Handel in the first appendix, in addition to the premiere version. Apparently, Handel made preparations here for a revival of the work which, however, never materialized. This version is interesting both from a documentary and dramaturgical point of view, because it was Handel himself who significantly shortened his opera – incidentally the one from his oeuvre with the longest share of recitatives. The second appendix contains an abridged version of the aria "D'ogni amator la fede", an early version of the famous aria "Sgombra dall'anima", as well as an ornamented version of the aria "Non vi piacque, ingiusti dei". These ornaments in the vocal part, which rarely survive in Handel's operatic oeuvre, are contemporary and provide valuable evidence of the apparently highly differentiated performance of the opera arias by Handel's singers.