Giulio Cesare in Egitto premiered at the King's Theatre in London on 20 February 1724. At the time, Händel was the most respected composer on English soil as well as director of the Royal Academy of Music, which had been successfully promoting Italian opera in London since 1719. Julius Caesar, a musical drama in three acts to a libretto by Nicholas Francis Haym, was met with great triumph followed by thirteen performances with the theatre completely sold out. The opera is based on the historical episode of Caesar's campaign in Egypt in pursuit of his enemy Pompey after the Battle of Pharsalus. In Egypt, Caesar will meet the cunning and deceitful King Ptolemy and the perturbing Cleopatra, who will try to seduce him to her own advantage, only to fall in love with him for real. The opera was a perfect sampler of Baroque marvels: a first-rate vocal cast, which included the famous castrato Senesino in the title role and the soprano Francesca Cuzzoni in that of Cleopatra, a sumptuous and spectacular staging, and refined and beautifully crafted music. In the continuous scansion of recitatives and arias, typical of 18th-century opera, Giulio Cesare contains some of the composer's most popular pages such as the accompanied recitative “Alma del gran Pompeo”, sung by the protagonist before the urn of his murdered enemy Pompey.

Giulio Cesare in Egitto

Maggio Musicale Fiorentino Theatre

Pagliacci, an opera in two acts with a prologue, by Ruggero Leoncavallo, follows in the fortunate wake of Cavalleria rusticana, which had paved the way for the strand of verismo theatre. The libretto, prepared by the composer himself, is based on a crime story, a crime of passion that really happened in Montalto Uffugo, the village in Calabria where the composer lived as a young man. Performed at the Teatro Dal Verme in Milan on 21 May 1892, under the baton of Toscanini, the opera achieved international fame in a very short time. The popular setting, where violent feelings are rendered by a convulsive vocalism, is the backdrop to the drama of jealousy of Canio, the head of an itinerant company. Thanks to the subtle narrative device of the theatre within the theatre, of real life consumed in the comedy performed on stage, Leoncavallo enhances the dramatic charge of the subject. The demon of jealousy that devours the protagonist, an unhappy man in reality and in fiction, cannot but lead him to the final catastrophe, with the heinous murder of his adulterous wife Nedda and her unfortunate lover.

Janetka Hoşco

Events

Past events

14 - 25 Jun, 2026

Giulio Cesare in Egitto · Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino

Feb 22 - Mar 3, 2026

Pagliacci / Cavalleria rusticana · Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino

Future and recently performed repertoire

Maddalena/Giovanna in Rigoletto by Verdi

Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino

Nireno in Giulio Cesare in Egitto by Handel

Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino

Lola in Cavalleria rusticana by Mascagni

Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino

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