Handel - Per te lasciai la luce - Natalie Dessay

George Frideric Handel
Per te lasciai la luce
Extract (Aria #5) from the cantata Delirio amoroso, HWV 99
Text: Benedetto Pamphilj

In this recording:

Natalie Dessay (soprano)
Atsushi Sakaï (Viola da gamba)

Le Concert D`Astrée/Emmanuelle Haïm
Label: EMI Classics
Italian cantata from Handel's "Cantate con strumenti" which he mainly composed in Italy between 1706 and 1710. Cantata "Il Delirio amoroso" was composed in 1707 for Handel's patron Benedetto Pamphilj, who also wrote the libretto texts. The extensive cantata Delirio amoroso is an evocation of hallucinatory madness in which Clori imagines she enters the realm of the dead to conduct her disdaining lover to the Elysian fields.
Pamphilj's text for Delirio amoroso (Love's delirium) is more imaginative than most cantata texts, and inspired Handel to create some expansive and delightful music. The cantata may have been presented with a simple form of staging, as is suggested by the unusual feature of dance movements for the instruments alone. The first and last recitatives are narrations, setting and closing the scene. In between the singer impersonates the lover Chloris mourning the death of her beloved Thyrsis. Apparently he never responded to her love, so in her 'delirium' she imagines that he is being punished in hell for his cruelty. She resolves to enter the underworld herself and bring him back to life - but even in death he continues to reject her. At first she is angry, but then she decides in an act of compassion to move him from the fiery part of Hades to the Elysian Fields.The cantata begins with an orchestral Introduzione in da capo form, the lively opening section with solo oboe being repeated after a short Largo for strings alone. Chloris's first aria, with its extensive part for solo violin, is one of the most elaborate that Handel ever wrote, and he made good use of it in other works. It became the closing aria of Act 1 of his opera Rodrigo, produced in Florence in the autumn of 1707, and a more substantially revised version also appeared in the first version of Radamisto, produced in London in April 1720. The second aria, Per te lasciai, begins as a wistful minuet, but immediately broadens into a dialogue between the voice and a solo cello; in the more dramatic middle section, Chloris' pleas to Thyrsis are answered only by eloquent moments of silence. Yet another solo instrument, a recorder, appears in the next aria, from which Handel later took ideas for "Hush, ye pretty warbling choir" in Acis and Galatea and for his violin sonata in D major. The orchestral Entrée is one of the earliest known examples of Handel's borrowing from other composers: the opening bars come directly from Reinhard Keiser's opera Claudius, produced in Hamburg in 1703, where they also begin an Entrée of Spirits in the Elysian Fields; the rest of the movement comes from an earlier Entrée of Handel's own, in Act 3 of Almira, his first opera for Hamburg.
Original text:

Per te lasciai la luce,
ed or che mi conduce
amor per rivederti,
tu vuoi partir da me.

Deh, ferma i passi incerti,
o pur se vuoi fuggir,
dimmi perché?
Translation:

For you I left the daylight,
and now that love leads me
to see you again, you want to leave me.

Oh, stop your uncertain steps,
Or if you want to go, tell me why. Why?
For you I left the daylight...

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