Aria of Cleopatra (Giulio Cesare)

Handel composed Giulio Cesare in Egitto for the Royal Academy of Music in 1724, to a libretto Nicola Haym adapted from an older text by Giacomo Bussani. The first performances in February brought together Senesino and Francesca Cuzzoni, and Handel revived the opera repeatedly in later seasons — unusual in a repertory that normally disappeared after a single run. Cleopatra is given eight arias and a full trajectory from calculation through defeat to grief, an unusually complete portrait for opera seria. Since the twentieth-century Handel revival it has become the most frequently staged of his forty-odd operas.