Music historians spend much time and effort trying to recapture the original experience of artworks that survive for us only as notes on paper. And among their hardest tasks is to explore what state of mind our ancestors would be in, in order to create an opera such as Handel’s Partenope, which has just returned to ENO in a lauded production by Christopher Alden.
Partenope is a comedy, but not as we know comedy today. Its humour wouldn’t work on TV: it’s too wry, too glancing and too convoluted. But it evidently had them rolling in the aisles during the early 18th century; and the task of latter-day directors is to give new voice to those old jokes, unlocking them for modern ears.
