Siroe

Siroe

The hmHeritage series offers a new lease on life to the major productions that have established the reputation of the harmonia mundi catalogue: operas, oratorios, extensive cycles, and large-scale projects of every kind are presented in full to ensure this precious legacy remains available. Handel's opera Siroe, re di Persia was premiered at London's Haymarket Theatre in 1728. Not entirely by coincidence, in the year following George II's accession to the throne, it forms with Riccardo Primo, re d'Inghilterra and Tolomeo a kind of triptych on royal subjects. But this was also the first time Handel had set a libretto by a young beginner, Pietro Antonio Trapassi, who would come to symbolize eighteenth-century Italian opera, and, under the name of Metastasio, wrote more than 27 librettos which inspired around 850 works by 260 composers.