A tragic-pastoral tale in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the sea nymph Galatea and the shepherd Acis are blissfully in love, but the monstrous Polyphemus burns with lust for Galatea. When his grotesque serenade fails, he resorts to violence; while Mount Etna shakes, he crushes Acis to death with a boulder. By godly intervention his gushing blood becomes a bubbling spring, the source of the River Aci – thereby the tragic lovers are united eternally in the Sicilian sea.
Having already set the story to music in Naples (1708), Handel returned to it with entirely new music for an English masque as an entertainment hosted by the Earl of Carnarvon at his country estate, Cannons, in midsummer 1718. Handel’s first great English masterpiece is a charming journey through pastoral, affectionate, ardent, sentimental, ominous, hilarious, tragic, cathartic and magical elements that was both unprecedented and never replicated by him in his settings of the English language.
This will be a concert performance with some dramatic elements.
