Rodrigo
Dramma per musica in three Acts, HWV 5
Libretto after Francesco Silvani
First performance at Teatro di Via del Cocomero, Florence, 30 October 1707

For a long time, a large portion of Handel’s early opera Rodrigo was thought to have been lost. It was back in 1707 in Rome that George Frideric Handel wrote Rodrigo, but it was not until 1974 that the printed libretto turned up again, and nine years later the third act was found in the Earl of Shaftesbury’s Handel collection. On August 29, 1984, finally, the work was revived during the Innsbruck Festival of Early Music, and in 2019 it’s on the programme at the Göttingen International Handel Festival. The opera narrates a freely adapted version of the end to the regency of the Last Visigoth King Roderich. In the libretto by Francesco Silvani, however, the reason behind it is less the lust for power on the part of his opponents than the thirst for vengeance of his spurned mistress.

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Live recording: 17 May 2019, Deutsches Theater Göttingen (Germany)