Handel’s Scipione

Scipione is an opera about a man at the height of his power choosing not to use it.

Scipio Africanus has just won New Carthage. He has the city, he has the army, and he has Berenice, a captive he wants and could, by every right of conquest, simply take. He doesn’t. He gives her back to the man she loves. That decision is what the opera is about: what it actually costs to do the right thing when the wrong thing is entirely within your reach.

Handel wrote it in three weeks. The score was finished on 2nd March 1726; the curtain rose ten days later. He had no choice;his star soprano was late arriving in London and he needed something to fill the gap. You would not know any of that from the music. The score Handel produced under that pressure contains what the novelist Prévost, writing from London in 1733, described as some of the finest work Handel ever wrote, in the same breath as Julius Caesar and Rodelinda.

The march that opens the opera became the Grenadier Guards’ regimental march. It has been played at every state occasion since. Most people have heard it without knowing where it comes from.