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Opera

Why we should revel in the empty virtuosity of Handel's pasticcios

Gesamtkunstwerk be damned. Long live the Baroque jukebox. Alexandra Coghlan on two Handel pasticcios, Giove in Argo and Catone in Utica, at the London Handel Festival

28 March 2015

9:00 AM

28 March 2015

9:00 AM

Giove in Argo; Catone in Utica

London Handel Festival

Before the jukebox musical, back when Mamma Mia!, Jersey Boys and Viva Forever! were still dollar-shaped glints in an as-yet-unborn producer’s eye, there was the pasticcio opera. Literally a musical ‘pastry’ or ‘pie’, these brought together arias from different operas, often by different composers, in a single work, designed as a way of feeding an 18th-century public whose appetite for opera was greater than composers’ ability to sate it with new music.

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