Atalanta: Overture – All Classical Research

Handel composed, produced and premiered his opera Atalanta in 1736, during a short opera season he launched to celebrate the wedding of Frederick, the Prince of Wales. The Prince wasn’t a big fan of Handel at the time and refused to attend the premiere.¹
- Prince Frederick and other nobility had opposed Handel’s monopoly on Italian opera in London, possibly because Handel ran his opera company without any leadership from aristocratic patrons, unacceptable in a time when musicians were considered little more than servants.
- The prince and the anti-Handel faction had gone so far as to establish a new opera company, the “Opera of the Nobility,” which poached many of Handel’s singers and offered a rival opera season.
Appropriately for the occasion of the 1736 royal wedding, Atalanta is also about a wedding between royalty.²
Story: Meleager, King of Etolia, woos Atalanta, the Princess of Arcadia. Atalanta initially refuses Meleager’s advances, preferring to become a huntress, but eventually the two reconcile. Their marriage is celebrated as a match ordered by Jupiter and in answer to the “fervent prayers of the British people” (clearly the mythical setting was such a thinly-veiled tribute to the Prince’s actual royal wedding that nobody cared that much about maintaining the fantasy)³

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