engleski

Attilio Ariosti as a composer of vocal duets

In the first seasons of the Royal Academy of Music its directors saw G. F. Handel as one among many composers whose style reflected their expectations of what Italian opera in London should be like. At one point Handel’s slightly older Italian contemporaries Giovanni Bononcini and Attilio Ariosti were in equal positions to compete for success in this – for London – novel form of operatic production and patronage. This paper will focus on Attilio Ariosti as the seemingly most moderate party in the rivalry between the three composers to see if the particular working conditions in London affected his output in the realm of the vocal duet. Duets were a less common and somewhat less important part of dramatic vocal genres than arias and could therefore be less dependent on stylistic trends and more suitable for comparison. Another link between the three composers is the court of Sophie Charlotte of Hanover in Berlin, where both Ariosti and Bononcini were active and where Handel allegedly made a visit in his youth, possibly meeting his older colleagues and receiving musical stimuli from them. Not only did the patronage of the Prussian queen leave a strong mark on the two Italian composers (comparable to her impact on Agostino Steffani, Handel’s predecessor in the service of her Hanoverian father and brother): Ariosti and Bononcini also shared illustrious patrons in Vienna. This paper will examine the duets in some of Ariosti’s works written for Berlin, Vienna and London, making comparisons with the duets by both Bononcini and Handel in order to outline how they changed and to determine whether this is related to their different contexts of rivalry and patronage.

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