‘Is it real Handel, then?’, a lady asked her friend as they took their seats behind me in the Sheldonian Theatre. The prospect of what was billed as ‘a new staging of arias and duets’ by Handel clearly caused some confusion. This is understandable: with a few notable exceptions (Armonico Consort’s recent production, Too Hot to Handel, for example) pasticcios simply aren’t a part of the contemporary operatic repertory. In the eighteenth century, however, the practice of ‘cooking up’ a new opera from bits of others (un pasticcio is a pie in Italian) was commonplace.

As a labour-saving device, the pasticcio was invaluable. If there was a gap that needed filling in the season – at the beginning, before the new operas were finished, or at the end, once the audience had begun to tire of them – the practice meant that a work could be put together quickly and easily. Composers liked them because they were paid as much for pasticcios they’d arranged as for new works they’d written themselves. Singers liked them, because they allowed them to trundle out their favourite ‘suitcase arias’ – arie di bagagli, showy pieces they’d learned for previous performances – and impress audiences without the hassle of learning and practising new music.

One of the most obvious reasons for the current operatic theatre-scene’s lack of interest in performing pasticcios – and for the lady’s suspicion that what she was about to watch was somehow not the real deal – is our continuing fascination with authors. Despite Barthes’s proclamation of ‘The Death of the Author’ in 1967 – part of a wave of twentieth-century criticism that moved critical and interpretative focus away from the creators of artworks and towards their audiences and their material, social, commercial and political contexts – great creative imaginations retain the primacy they have held since the Romantic period. Works of art that are not the product of an individual, brilliant mind – works, like pasticcios, that are collaborative – are by extension expected to prove fragmented, uneven, unsatisfactory in some unspecified sense.

To take an example from the theatrical culture of the previous century to Handel’s, recent editions of two plays on the edge of the Shakespeare canon – both widely regarded as joint efforts with other writers – illustrate the negative associations of collaboration well. In the introduction to his Arden edition of Titus Andronicus, an early tragedy whose sexualised violence, cannibalism, and terrible puns have led many to suggest collaboration, Jonathan Bate dismisses the idea: ‘I believe that the play was wholly by Shakespeare and furthermore […] it was one of the dramatist’s most inventive plays’. While Doreen Delvecchio and Antony Hammond, in their New Cambridge edition of Pericles, profess that they ‘as editors don’t really care who wrote Pericles’, they do suggest that the play is ‘the product of a single creative imagination’, and ‘a masterpiece’. In both instances, in order for the editors to argue that their play is good, they have to reject the possibility of collaboration; we should look for more than one writer at work, they suggest, only when the product is second-rate.

Only one pasticcio that Handel had a hand in putting together has received any modern attention. With Muzio Scevola (1721) – a three-act opera which was put together by Filippo Amadei, Giovanni Bononcini, and Handel contributing an act each – this seems to have been because the contribution of the individual brilliant mind can be neatly removed from the rest of the piece. The first and only modern stage revival (at Essen in Germany, in 1928) presented Handel’s act only. What appears to be the sole modern recording (Rudolph Palmer and the Brewer Baroque Chamber Orchestra, 1993) was also, except for the six Bononcini movements that open the disc, just of Handel’s music.

The ‘problem’ with an evening’s entertainment such as Handel Furioso is related, but different. What was most praised in Handel’s musical-dramatic achievement during the period of the operas’ ‘rediscovery’ was his ability to create compelling, vivid, and psychologically realistic characters, whose development across the course of the narrative we could see enacted in their music. The dusty historical settings and noble characters of the librettos were brought to life by Handel’s knack for pinpointing the characters’ emotions at particular points in the story – emotions we all share – and representing them perfectly: as Donald Grout writes, ‘the power of capturing the most subtle nuances of feeling [is] so astounding, that one is tempted to believe there is no emotion of which humanity is capable that has not found musical expression somewhere in Handel’s operas’.

In Handel Furioso, ideas by Julian Perkins and Max Hoehn, who wrote the recitatives for the production, share the spotlight with Handel’s own (meaning the work is no longer a product of an individual brilliant mind, and invoking all the negative associations of collaboration), while the composer’s original arias are re-contextualised in a new plot, with new characters. This must mean, surely, that all of that emotional intelligence and subtlety of musical characterisation for which Handel is most valued more or less goes out the window. In Handel Furioso, the music is often made to represent situations and emotions quite different to the ones it did in its original context. A perfect example came in ‘Dove sei’, from Rodelinda: in Handel’s opera, this enraptured, bittersweet aria is sung by the usurped and exiled king Bertarido – the hero of the opera – who yearns to be reunited with his wife. ‘Where are you, my dear beloved?’, he asks simply, and the music is simple too: simple but perfectly judged, masterfully constructed. As Winton Dean writes, it is ‘an education in the art of melodic architecture’.When we hear it in Handel Furioso, the context is not melancholy but erotic. The boy who sings it (there are only two characters, a boy and a girl, who meet, fall in love, marry, separate, and then reunite before death) is blindfolded by the girl halfway through the aria’s B section; the reprise of the A section becomes a charged, decidedly kinky search for the girl, and concludes with a kiss. The aching, tender longing of Handel’s music comes to represent a different kind of desire entirely. This is perhaps most striking in the repeated cries of ‘vieni!’ (‘come back’): where in Rodelinda the rests between each vocal entry had suggested a character choking up with tears, they now seemed frankly, startlingly sexual.

The moment was magic, and as it turned out, so was the whole evening. As eighteenth-century critics recognised, a carelessly constructed pasticcio could be terrible, but one that was sensitively put together could be as entertaining – and moving – as any other night at the opera. The effect created when the arias were poorly chosen for their new dramatic context was entertainingly described by a reviewer of Antonio Andrei’s pasticcio, Silla (1784) as ‘a feast, where the viands were entirely of sugar’: monotonous, cloying, dull. Yet the spirit of unpretentious good humour that characterises the best examples of the genre is evident in a sentence from a letter of 1740 by Horace Walpole: ‘Our operas begin tomorrow with a pasticcio, full of most of my favourite songs’. Handel Furioso was full of most of my favourite songs, re-contextualised in ways that created a funny and moving story: it showed new facets of Handel’s music, different ways of hearing it which were at once dramatically apt in their new setting, and testimony to the masterful construction and emotive power of the music.

A few things didn’t work, most notably the chatty prose texts of the newly written recitatives jarring somewhat with their formalised musical language. The staging, too, contrasted poorly with the grandeur of the Sheldonian – a space in which Handel himself performed, with much pomp, as part of the 1733 revival of the ‘Act’, the university’s degree ceremony – the flimsy hanging moon not quite aligned with the surtitles being projected onto it. But it would have been almost impossible for these minor problems to distract me from the consistently fine singing of Robyn Allegra Parton (Girl) and Anna Starushkevych (Boy), the latter’s voice particularly well suited to the music Handel wrote for the alto castrato Senesino (like ‘Dove sei’, for example). Quantz’s account of Senesino’s voice – ‘a powerful, clear, equal, and sweet contralto voice, with a perfect intonation and excellent shake’ – could have been meant for her. The playing of the small period instrument band was just as good. The strings were dead in tune, with crisp articulation – at their best in the ‘interwoven hum-drum’ of the accompaniment to ‘Cara sposa’, from Rinaldo – and the wind expressive in their solos. Julian Perkins, directing from the harpsichord, played stylishly throughout, and had an admirable stab at keeping the band and singer together in the rushing scales of ‘Naufragando’ from La Resurrezione. The lady behind me, sceptical at the start, put it best as she pulled on her coat at the end of the show: ‘Well, that was a treat!’