Apollo & Dafne : Wich / Cappella Coloniensis, Donath, Runge

Georg Friedrich Handel (1685-1759)
Apollo e Dafne, HWV 122
Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno, HWV 46a: Overture

Helen Donath, soprano
Peter-Christoph Runge, baritone
Cappella Coloniensis / Gunther Wich, conductor

Recorded 1978

Handel’s sinuously seductive cantata, written under the auspices of his two patrons of this era, Gian Gastone de’ Medici (1671-1737), the last Medici Grand Duke of Tuscany; and Georg Ludwig, Elector of Brunswick-Luneburg (1660-1727) who in 1714 became King George I of Great Britain, has some historical ironies. The figure of Apollo has long been seen as an epigone of noble patrons, however inappositely. Gian Gastone’s sister Anna Maria Luisa de’ Medici (1667-1743), who particularly cherished Handel, had urged her brother to marry Anna Maria Franziska of Saxe-Lauenburg (1672-1741), described as “appallingly and hugely fat” with “massive, ungainly limbs.” Gian Gastone was gay and hugely obese himself, but he acceded to his family’s demands, and this was the Apollonian love couple under whose auspices Handel first began composing the highly romantic “Apollo e Dafne.” A one-act opera in everything but name, the spare and graceful, fleet orchestration has a lilting and plaintive melodiousness that sometimes recalls an earlier setting of the same tale from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Francesco Cavalli’s Gli amori d’Apollo e di Dafne (The Loves of Apollo and Daphne; 1640).
Georg Ludwig, Elector of Brunswick-Luneburg’s own love affairs, which include marital infidelities on both sides and even murder, are lurid enough for an entire TV miniseries. It is a particular tribute to Handel that despite the swollen, immobile royals who supported him, and the looming prefiguration of his own later stolid self, he managed to create such a delightfully pliant and yielding masterpiece as Apollo e Dafne. ( Phoenix Edition )