This glittering cast was no doubt at least in part responsible for the instant success of Giulio Cesare, one observer, the courtier Friedrich Ernst von Fabrice, noting on 10 March that Senesino and Cuzzoni “shine beyond criticism”, while also recording that “the house was just as full at the seventh performance as at the first”. During the same month it was also reported that “the passion for the opera here is getting beyond all belief”, news that had obviously also spread to France, where the Mercure de France informed its readers that even the Italians considered the opera a masterpiece.

Such favourable reactions were due in no small part to the Roman-born Nicola Haym, the librettist of Giulio Cesare. Haym had arrived in London in 1701, subsequently playing a major role in the establishment of Italianate opera in the English capital. A composer and cellist himself, Haym was appointed in 1722 Secretary of the Royal Academy, subsequently acting as stage manger (the equivalent of today’s director) for all its productions. By this time he already had an association with Handel that stretched back to Teseo (1713), the first of their ten, possibly eleven collaborations. In keeping with many earlier eighteenth- century opera librettos in general and those of Haym in particular, the book prepared for Handel was not an original work, but an adaptation of an earlier libretto of the same name written in 1676 by Francesco Bassano for the Venetian composer Antonio Sartorio. Bassano’s libretto quickly became popular, inspiring to some degree at least half a dozen new operas before being taken up by Haym, who based his version largely on Bassano’s original and a version given in Milan in 1685.

By common consent, Haym’s libretto for Giulio Cesare, which may also have had some input from Handel, is one of the most successful he produced for the composer. By eliminating from Bassano many of the extraneous characters and cutting scenes that play little or no part in the development of the central action, Haym produced a tautly compelling dramatic entity in which the twin themes of Cleopatra’s love for Caesar, and the vengeance of Cornelia and Sesto for the murder of Pompey become the central argument. Additionally the opera is particularly notable for contrasting dramatic effects that range from battle scenes (including rare examples in Baroque opera of on-stage deaths) to imagery of voluptuous sensuality.

In the character of Cleopatra, librettist and composer had, of course, a gift: not only a woman whose legendary beauty and air of Eastern mystery have fascinated men throughout the ages, but the paradigmatic femme fatale. It is to the credit of both Haym and Handel that their Cleopatra overcomes such remote imagery to emerge as a thoroughly sympathetic flesh and blood figure who throughout the course of the opera matures from coquettishly frivolous girl to a woman capable of passionate, intense emotions. It is this development that stands at the heart of the opera, its progress revealing Cleopatra not only as one of Handel’s most rounded and fully developed operatic heroines, but also one of the great operatic creations.