Mio bel tesoro (Alcina)

Alcina opened Handel's season at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, on 16 April 1735 and ran for eighteen performances. The anonymous libretto derives from Ariosto's Orlando furioso: a sorceress who turns her discarded lovers into rocks, beasts and trees, and who loses her powers at the moment she begins to love in earnest. Handel wrote it with dancers in mind, adding ballet sequences for Marie Sallé's troupe. What holds the opera together is the slow collapse of enchantment into ordinary human feeling, traced through arias that grow plainer as the magic fails around their singer.