Ariodante (HWV 33)

In 1734, George Frideric Handel found himself at the centre of an intrigue involving the English aristocracy. A clique of aristocrats led by the Prince of Wales withdrew their support from Handel’s London opera company and founded a rival venture: the Opera of the Nobility. They engaged the celebrated castrato Farinelli and also lured away a considerable number of Handel’s singers. For a time, rumours circulated that Handel would withdraw from London altogether. But he fought back, staging what was arguably his most lavish operatic production to date at the newly built Covent Garden Theatre in 1735: Ariodante. With a plot of betrayed love and courtly intrigue drawn from Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, along with ballet scenes, stage machinery and sumptuous sets, Handel sought to regain the upper hand with audiences.

While Handel brings the medieval Scottish setting of the story of the knight Ariodante, the beautiful Ginevra and the scheming Polinesso into his own Baroque era, George Petrou takes the time machine one step further in his production. He sets Ariodante in late Victorian England, an era of strict moral codes and repressed passions. By weaving the psychological darkness of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897) into the structure of Handel’s magnificent music, the production explores the explosive tension between Victorian puritanism and primal desire. The immaculate façade of Victorian high society crumbles when a sinister villain resorts to psychological violence and supernatural manipulation to destroy innocence and seize power. In a society that grants men the right to unrestrained desire while condemning women to silence and submission, the Baroque struggle between honour and deception becomes a disturbing descent into paranoia, obsession and nightmarish delusion.

“A rising star among countertenors, dazzling with great agility and breathtaking coloratura” - this is how Kirsten Liese praised Nicolò Balducci in the specialist magazine Orpheus. Balducci played Odysseus in last year’s Festival opera, Deidamia, and now returns to the Festival as Ariodante. Erika Baikoff has already enjoyed success as Ginevra at Theater an der Wien, the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées and the Teatro Real in Madrid - and now she’ll be taking to the stage in Göttingen!