- Handel composed his Italian opera Serse (Xerxes) between December of 1737 and February of 1738. It premiered on April 15, 1738.1
- In the year he wrote Serse, Handel was so respected that a marble statue of him was commissioned, to be sculpted by Louis Roubiliac and placed in the Vauxhall pleasure gardens. At the time, life-size marble statues of living personages were made for royalty or nobility, never musicians, so this was an unprecedented honor.2
- Story: based on an Italian libretto prepared for an opera by Bononcini in 1694, Serse is a fictionalized story of the Persian king Xerxes I (r. 485-65 BCE) during his war against Greece (c. 470 BCE).3
- The plot has less to do with the war and more to do with complicated romance at Xerxes’ royal court.
- This aria appears at the beginning of the opera, sung by Xerxes (a mezzo soprano role, originally sung by a castrato, today sometimes also sung by a bass)4
- Xerxes is singing lovingly to a tree that is providing shade. The contrast between the solemn, passionate music and the object of the king’s affections (a tree) is intentionally humorous: in the next scene, another character makes fun of Xerxes for singing this love song to a tree.
Ombra mai fù
Never was madedi Vegetabile,
A vegetable [or plant]care ed amabile
more dear and lovingsoave più.
From the text of “Ombra mai fù”(trans. Robert Glaubitz)
or gentle.
Sources
- Anthony Hicks, “Handel [Händel, Hendel], George Frideric,” Grove Music Online (2001), accessed October 17, 2019, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000040060.
- “Georg Frederick Handel,” Collections: Victoria & Albert Museum, accessed October 17, 2019, http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O34256/georg-frederick-handel-statue-roubiliac-louis-francois/.
- Anthony Hicks, “Serse,” Grove Music Online (2002), accessed October 17, 2019, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-5000904536.
- Ibid.
Cut IDs
21012