Tolomeo, Re d'Egitto: Dramma per musica in tre atti, HWV 25, (review)

Tolomeo, re d'Egitto is an almost tautological title: most Egyptian kings who descended from the heirs of Alexander the Great were called Ptolomy. The elusive hero of George Frideric Handel's opera, Ptolomy IX Soter (not to be confused with his famous namesake from the time of Julius Caesar), ruled between 116 and 81 B.C., but with interruptions caused by his jealous mother Cleopatra III and his younger brother Ptolomy X Alexander I. The opera's libretto weaves an invented story around these historical personalities and adds some fictitious characters. It reinterprets history to aid the moral edification of a contemporary courtly society, depicting people as forlorn souls who wander in the park and express their woes in poetry and music.

First performed on 30 April 1728, when support for Italian opera was dwindling in London, Tolomeo was the last opera Handel created for the Royal Academy of Music. Nicola Francesco Haym derived the libretto from a dramma per musica by Carlo Sigismondo Capece (or Capeci), Tolomeo ed Alessandro, ovvero La corona disprezzata, first performed with music by Domenico Scarlatti in Rome in 1711 for Maria Casimira, ex-queen of Poland (as I first documented in "Händel und seine italienischen Operntexte," Händel-Jahrbuch 21/22 [1975-76]: 101-59). The opera paid homage to the sons of Maria Casimira by paralleling Ptolomy's kingdom with that of the Sobieski dynasty of Poland; members of the Arcadian Academy wrote celebratory poems in honor of the poet, performers, and patrons of the Roman opera (see my essay "Scarlattiana at Yale," in Händel e gli Scarlatti a Roma: Atti del convegno internazionale di studi (Roma, 12-14 giugno 1985), ed. Nino Pirrotta and Agostino Ziino [Florence: Olschki, 1987], 115-17). I have analyzed in detail the dramaturgy and poetic character of Capece's original libretto, and its adaptation by Haym and Handel, in the chapter "Tolomeo: Handel's Opera and the Rules of Tragedy" of my monograph Dramma per musica: Italian Opera Seria of the Eighteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997, pp. 201-19; originally published as "Händel-Oper und Regeldrama," in Zur Dramaturgie der Barockoper: Bericht über die Symposien der Internationalen Händel-Akademie Karlsruhe, 1992 und 1993, ed. Hans Joachim Marx, Veröffentlichungen der Internationalen Händel-Akademie Karlsruhe, 5 [Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 1994], 33-54). Oddly, the introduction to the new edition by Michael Pacholke does not mention any of these contributions to the scholarship on Handel's Tolomeo.

The other opera by Capece and Scarlatti composed for Maria Casimira in 1711, L'Orlando, ovvero La gelosa pazzia, was the source libretto for Handel's opera Orlando (1733). Haym owned both of the 1711 librettos and might have envisaged adapting Orlando as well, but he died in 1729. Capece had conceived both operas as pastorals or pastoral-heroic works in the taste of Roman Arcadian circles of the time. Haym expanded upon this aesthetic in his libretto for Tolomeo by increasing the number of arias in which a suffering lover either addresses or compares himself to Nature. The drama invokes a...