Radamisto was Handel's first opera for the newly formed Royal Academy of Music. The two preceding seasons had seen no operatic productions in London, however there were plans to form an opera company, complete with shareholders and yearly subscribers. The Academy was finally founded in 1720, with sixty-two original subscribers, a place on the stock market, a royal subsidy from George I, and annual subscribers for each season. Their financial resources were secure and seemingly limitless. The directors sought to engage to best singers from Italy, and they hired composers in residence a well. Handel was hired as master of the orchestra and given an annual salary. In the spring of 1720, the first opera of the Academy was produced, Giovanni Porta's Numitore. For the first full season, that of 1720-21, works by the resident composers Bononcini, Handel, and Ariosti were staged. Bononcini's opera came first, but was followed by the very successful Radamisto of Handel.

There were two librettists that worked for the Academy, Paolo Rolli, and Nicola Haym. Rolli was the Academy secretary, and lyric poet, and a man of political influence within the company. Haym, a personality more congenial to Handel's tastes, was a scholar, orchestral musician, arranger, and author. Because he was less influential than Rolli within the structure of the organization he only wrote one of the librettos of the early Academy operas, and that was Radamisto. Haym had an ability to bring out the best in Handel. He shows a flair for creating dramatic momentum, of keen characterization of emotions and emotional experience, and a dynamic organization of musical text. He knew how to allow room for an aria, and how to integrate melodic set pieces into the flow of the story. Later, when it became apparent that Handel was the darling of the London audiences, Haym's position as a librettist was strengthened, and he collaborated more often with him.

When Radamisto first premiered, the leading stars of the Italian theater had not yet arrived in England, but as they did, the opera was revised for them. Senesino, a great castrati star, became Radamisto. Durastanti and Cuzzoni were the two prima donnas. The first operas of the academy were different than previous operas of Handel. Unlike Rinaldo and Amadigi, Radamisto contains no magic, mythology, or spectacle. It adheres much more closely to opera seria traditions. This is reflected not only in the plot, but in the scenic construction, which is almost rigidly built around the exit aria convention. Haym, however, constructs his scenes flexibly, imbuing life into stiff formalism. He was an inspiration to Handel, and the music is extremely fine. The important relationships in the opera are familial; daughters, sisters and brothers, wives and husbands, all display varieties of love, fidelity, heroism, deception, and callousness. There is an unfeeling tyrant spurred to cruelty by his illicit passions, who repents in the end in part due to the virtues of his wife and the strengths of his friends. This is a stock character in opera seria, appearing in many operas of Handel, and hundreds of operas in the eighteenth century. The source for Haym's libretto is a libretto by Domenico Lalli, one of the finer, more poetic opera seria authors. His text was first set by Gasparini in 1710, and was known to both Handel and Haym.



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