Handel's lost Hamburg operas

No music that can be definitively traced to Nero has been identified, although Handel scholars have speculated that some of it may have been used in later works, particularlyAgrippina which has a related storyline and some of the same characters. Fragments of music from Florindo and Daphne have been preserved, although without the vocal parts, and some of these elements have been incorporated into an orchestral suite first recorded in 2012. 

In 1703 the eighteen-year-old composerGeorge Frideric Handel took up residence inHamburg, Germany, where he remained until 1706. During this period he composed four operas, only the first of which, Almira, has survived more or less intact. Of the other three, the music for Nero is lost, while only short orchestral excerpts from Florindo and Daphnesurvive.

Handel was born and grew up in the town ofHalle, where he received his early musical education and became an accomplished organist. In Hamburg he obtained employment as a violinist at the Oper am Gänsemarkt, the city's famous opera house. Here, he learned the rudiments of opera composition, mainly under the influences of Reinhard Keiser, the theatre's music director, and Johann Mattheson, its leading vocalist. The Gänsemarkt was largely dedicated to Keiser's compositions; his temporary absence in 1704 gave Handel his chance, and in quick succession he wroteAlmira and Nero. The former was successful, the latter less so and was never performed after its initial run of three performances. Handel's final Hamburg operas, Florindo andDaphne, originally conceived as a giant entity, were not produced at the Gänsemarkt before Handel left Hamburg for Italy in 1706.

Hamburg

The Oper am Gänsemarkt

Early 18th-century engraving of the Hamburg Oper am Gänsemarkt

The Hamburg Opera, otherwise known as the Oper am Gänsemarkt, was the first public opera house to be established outside Italy. The brainchild of the exiled Duke of Schleswig-Gottorf and hisKapellmeister, Johann Theile,^[14] it was designed byGirolamo Sartorio,^[15] and modelled on the Teatro Santi Giovanni e Paolo in Venice.^[14] Its construction was opposed by the clergy and cathedral hierarchy, but enthusiastically supported by the city's municipal authorities.^[11] Built in 1677 on a lavish scale, with a reported capacity of 2,000,^[15] it boasted an exceptionally deep stage and was, according to Handel scholars Winton Dean and John Merrill Knapp, one of the best-equipped theatres of its time.^[14]

Dean and Knapp write that the theatre's history was "enlivened and envenomed by a maelstrom of controversy, pursued in pamphlets, broadsheets, sermons and prefaces to librettos ... and by financial crises which persisted on and off throughout the sixty years of its existence".^[14] A preponderance of biblically inspired works in the earliest years was soon replaced by a range of more secular subjects, often drawn from Roman history and myth, or from recent events such as the 1683 siege of Vienna.^[16] Performances tended to be of considerable length, often extending to six hours.^[14] The 18-year-old Handel entered this hectic environment in the summer of 1703, to take up a place in the theatre's orchestra as aripenio (ensemble) second violin.