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Knights at the Opera, Part 12 - Sixteenth-Century Epic Poetry

© Iris Bass

More than 100 operas owe their plots to Lodovico Ariosto's 1516 soap-opera-like episodic saga, Orlando Furioso. It took twenty-seven years for this poet to complete the work, which he created in honor of his benefactor, a descendent of the Lombard-related duchy of Este. Ariosto interwove some seven centuries of history (and an international cast of characters) with myth and fantasy (including such legendary characters as Merlin). His subplots go as far back as Charlemagne's Crusade-like journey east, and right up through what would have been contemporary Crusaders and Saracens of the early 1500s. Although Ariosto used Orlando Furioso as a platform for his own strong views about war and religion, he was also playful, teasing his reades by abruptly dropping discussion of one set of characters when they were tied to the tracks, so to speak (or gone mad, or been sentenced to death...), to take up another unrelated subplot for a while; or allowing an occasional slapstick quality to add a little humor to violent or emotionally turbulent proceedings.

Because of the episodic nature of the work, it was easy for librettists to dip into only a small section (or connect interrupted sections) to create full-length operas concerned with only a few characters or incidents. Many of these operas are about the knight Orlando (Charlemagne's nephew), or else spin off such characters as Rinaldo (Orlando's cousin), Alcina (an evil sorceress), Ariodante (the Duke of Albany), or Ruggiero (son of the African king of Reggio).

Handel's 1735 Alcina seizes upon the eponymous seductress's habit of magically transforming knights who came a-courting, into her own private menagerie. Bradamante, fiancée of the still-human but otherwise bewitched knight Ruggiero, disguises herself as a man and sets out in search of her lover. Coincidentally, her boat becomes shipwrecked upon Alcina's very island, where not only does Alcina's daffy sister, Morgana, fall in love with Bradamante, not knowing she is really a woman; but her own spellbound fiancé mistakenly believes she (in male disguise) is a rival to his romance with the enchantress. These dilemmas are eventually resolved, Alcina stripped of her powers, and all the transformed knights returned to human form.

Gary Schmigdall wrote in his book Literature as Opera, "The worlds of Ariosto and of the opera seria were dazzlingly illusionistic, so it is no wonder that, for instance, the Ginevra-Ariodante episode was set to music no fewer than twelve times between 1708 and 1753." Handel's Ariodante, dating like Alcina from 1735, is probably the only one of those twelve regularly performed in our own time. The plot: Ariodante is engaged to Ginevra, daughter of the king of Scotland. The jealous Polinesso, who is the Duke of Albany, circulates false evidence that Ginevra is not chaste -- a crime punishable by execution.Ariodante disappears but comes back just when Polinesso confesses that he made it all up, and so Ariodante may marry Ginevra after all.

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