HANDEL AND FIVE PRIMA DONNAS

Abstract

W HENs HANDEL arrived in London for the first time in the autumn of 17 o, he had already won favorable renown as a composer on the continent of Europe. His operas, Almira and Nero had pleased music-lovers in Hamburg, and his compositions of various kinds were praised in Venice, Florence, Rome, and Naples. In Venice, then the center of the Italian operatic world, his opera, Agrippina, had had a truly brilliant reception and enjoyed an uninterrupted run of twenty-seven performances-a rare, if not an unprecedented, record. Italian opera was all the rage in fashionable London, and Aaron Hill, the manager of the Queen's Theatre in the Haymarket, was prompt in commissioning the newly arrived young Saxon to compose for his stage an opera with an Italian libretto. The result was Rinaldo, libretto by Giacomo Rossi, which was performed before an enthusiastic public fifteen times between February 24 and June 2, I7 1. Handel went to Germany for the whole summer, but returned to London in the fall and entered on his long and prolific career as a composer and producer, at first of operas and eventually of oratorios. The first two of Handel's prima donnas that concern us here are Margherita Durastanti and Anastasia Robinson, both of whom were in the cast of his Amadigi (I715). Though neither of these two singers could qualify as a great artist, certain unusual features of their careers render them worthy of brief commemoration. Durastanti was well known on the Continent. Handel had heard her in Dresden, and she had taken part in his Agrippina in Venice, so that her appearance in Rinaldo was of his own choosing. Very likely she was no better than a reliable routine singer, but for twenty years she seems to have been a welcome and familiar figure on the London operatic stage. She was accorded a unique social distinction, which is described in the Evening Post of March 7, 172I, as follows: Last Thursday, His Majesty [George I] was pleased to stand godfather, and the Princess and Lady Bruce godmothers to a daughter of Mrs. Durastanti, chief 214