Never performed before in Venice, Georg Friedrich Händel’s Il trionfo del tempo e del disinganno finally lands on the stage of the Teatro Malibran, as part of the 2022-2023 Opera and Ballet Season. The opera is staged in a new staging entrusted for the musical part to a repertoire specialist such as Andrea Marcon and with direction, sets, costumes, light design and choreography by the Japanese artist Saburo Teshigawara. Five performances are scheduled: on 25, 28, 30 May, 1 and 3 June 2023, with the support of the Agency for Cultural Affairs, Government of Japan through the Japan Arts Council. Composed for the first time in 1707 – Handel was just twenty-two years old – on a libretto by Cardinal Benedetto Pamphilj, then revised twice many years later, in 1737 and 1757, the German composer’s first oratorio work takes the form of a precise allegory with four protagonists, Beauty, Pleasure, Time and Disillusionment, a sort of austerity manifesto that bears the echo of the Counter-Reformation. Beauty (soprano) lives under the spell of Pleasure (soprano) until Time (tenor) and Disillusionment (alto) convince her to take a new path of repentance and devoted austerity. Composed of two parts, it includes some of Handel’s most beautiful arias (in particular the bewitching «Lascia la spina»), virtuosic passages for the organ (intended for Handel himself) and for the first violin (part written expressly for Arcangelo Corelli, director of the first execution). Il trionfo del tempo e del disinganno remained for Handel a sort of storehouse from which he drew for other works on no fewer than thirty occasions.
