Handel’s “Arminio” with Max Emanuel Cenčić

First performed at Covent Garden on 12 January 1737, Arminio belongs to a period of strain in Handel’s career. The composer was then facing competition from the Opera of the Nobility, while London’s audience was too small to sustain two Italian opera companies in the long term. The work received only six performances before disappearing, returning to the stage only in the twentieth century. Behind its ancient subject – Arminius’s resistance to the Romans after the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest – the opera unfolds less as a war fresco than as a drama of loyalties, in which political honour becomes inseparable from private fractures. In Karlsruhe, Max Emanuel Cenčić, both director and interpreter of the title role, presents Arminio as a hero caught in the contradictions of power, fidelity and survival.

Handel in the years of crisis

Arminio was born in the heart of the 1736–37 season, between Giustino and Berenice, at a time when Handel was composing quickly and prolifically for a London theatrical system that was beginning to run out of steam. Antonio Salvi’s libretto, previously set by Alessandro Scarlatti, turns the historical episode of Arminius into the material of opera seria: a captured Germanic leader, a threatened wife, a father ready to betray his own people, and a son torn between love and duty. At its first performances, the work was admired by some connoisseurs, but failed to win over the wider public. That brief reception partly explains its long absence from the stage, before the great Handel rediscoveries of the twentieth century.

An opera of captivity and fidelity

Beneath its heroic surface, Arminio is above all an opera of moral pressure. Its characters are trapped in impossible choices: Arminio must defend his people without losing his dignity; Tusnelda confronts the humiliation of defeat; Ramise and Sigismondo see their love caught between opposing camps; while Segeste embodies the temptation to come to terms with the victor. War is present, but often offstage; what occupies the stage are its emotional, familial and political consequences. Handel favours a dark tension here, less immediately dazzling than in his most famous titles, but rich in arias of fury, wounded nobility and inner resistance.

Karlsruhe, a Handel laboratory

The production recorded at the Karlsruhe Handel Festival in 2017 belongs to a place that has become one of the German centres of Handel rediscovery. Max Emanuel Cenčić appears both as the title-role interpreter and as director. His staging embraces theatrical artifice: wigs, eighteenth-century costumes, codified gestures, and the visible hierarchy of bodies and ranks. Yet this world of ceremony does not smooth over the work; on the contrary, it reveals its social brutality. The old form becomes a machine for exposing relations of domination, forced loyalties and the violence of political choice.

At the head of Armonia Atenea, George Petrou brings to this revival the authority of a conductor particularly associated with Handel and eighteenth-century opera seria. Together with Cenčić, he has often helped bring rare works – by Handel, Hasse, Vinci or Porpora – back into circulation, freeing them from the mere status of musicological curiosities. Here, Arminio regains a theatrical presence: not simply as a forgotten title, but as a tense, political and vocally formidable drama.

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Programme

🎼 George Frideric Handel (1685–1759):
Arminio (Dramma per musica in three acts to a libretto by Antonio Salvi)

Conductor: George Petrou
Director: Max Emanuel Cenčić
Sets, costumes and lighting: Helmut Stürmer
Costumes: Corina Gramosteanu
Lighting: Christoph Häcker
Ensemble: Armonia Atenea
Conductor: George Petrou

Cast:

• Max Emanuel Cenčić Arminio
• Lauren Snouffer Tusnelda
• Gaia Petrone Ramise
• Aleksandra Kubas-Kruk Sigismondo
• Juan Sancho Varo
• Owen Willetts Tullio
• Pavel Kudinov Segeste

At the Karlsruhe Handel Festival, 2017.