Partenope

Partenope ("Parthenope", HWV 27) is an opera by George Frideric Handel, first performed at the King's Theatre in London on 24 February 1730. Although following the structure and forms of opera seria, the work is humorous in character and light-textured in music, with a plot involving romantic complications and gender confusion. A success with audiences at the time of its original production and then unperformed for many years, Partenope is now often seen on the world's opera stages.

Background

The opera, which is in three acts, is composed to an Italian libretto adapted by an unknown hand from a libretto originally written in 1699 by Silvio Stampiglia. Stampiglia's libretto had received many previous settings, including one by Caldara which Handel may have seen in Venice around 1710.

It was Handel's first comic (or, rather, unserious) opera since the much earlier Agrippina, breaking away from the more traditional opera seria works for which the composer was known in London. He originally proposed the libretto to the opera company the Royal Academy of Music (1719) in 1726. They however rejected the work because of its frivolous nature, its relatively few extended arias and its long passages of recitative. (The latter objections are not particularly true, however. The opera has relatively few ensemble pieces but is replete with gorgeous arias.) The opera manager Owen Swiney opined that the project was uncommercial; in a letter of 1726 he wrote:

Partenope (Zumaya)

Partenope is an opera in three acts by composer Manuel de Zumaya. Zumaya adapted the libretto himself from a Spanish translation of Silvio Stampiglia’s Italian libretto which was first set for performance in Naples during 1699 with music by Luigi Mancia. All told, Stampiglia's libretto was used by a variety of composers for more than a dozen operas that were produced all over Italy, including versions by Leonardo Vinci and George Frideric Handel. Zumaya's version was commissioned by Viceroy Fernando de Alencastre Noroña y Silva and produced at the viceroyal palace in Mexico City on 1 May 1711. The production is the earliest known full opera produced in North America and the first opera written by an American-born composer. However, Parténope is not the earliest opera to be performed in the New World, as some sources have reported. That distinction belongs to Tomás de Torrejón y Velasco's La púrpura de la rosa, which premiered ten years earlier in Lima, Peru.

Partenope may not have been the first stage work by Zumaya that contained music. He had previously written the play Rodirigo for the birth of Crown Prince Luis in 1708. It is possible that he may have also composed music for this play. Unfortunately, both the score of Zumaya's opera and any music he may have written for the play has now been lost.