L'angue offeso mai riposa (Giulio Cesare in Egitto)

Handel composed Giulio Cesare in Egitto for the Royal Academy of Music in London, where it reached the stage of the King's Theatre in the Haymarket on 20 February 1724. Nicola Haym's libretto reworks an older Venetian text around Caesar's Egyptian campaign, and the cast assembled for it — the castrato Senesino in the title role, Francesca Cuzzoni as Cleopatra — was among the strongest Handel ever had. The score runs to some three hours of arias, each a closed portrait of a character caught between politics, revenge and desire. Handel revived it repeatedly, and it returned to the repertory in the twentieth century.