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Gänsemarkt shareholders, he and Mattheson were reconciled. After a celebratory meal, they went to the rehearsal of Handel’s first opera, Almira , better friends than ever. Cynics must make what they can of the fact that Mattheson took one of the leading roles.
    Almira received its première on 8 January 1705.It was an instant success, with some twenty performances, but it is impossible to be more than lukewarm about Handel’s unique surviving essay in Hamburg opera. Keiser and Mattheson both did this kind of thing better, but to pick through the forty-two German and fifteen Italian arias for flashes of Handelian brilliance is an absorbing task. The libretto, whose full title is Der in Krohnen erlangte Glücks-Wechsel, oder Almira, Königin von Castilien , is an adaptation by Friedrich Christian Feustking of a Venetian text by Giulio Pancieri based on the familiar seventeenth-century dramatic situation of the queen who secretly loves a commoner (Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi , Corneille’s Dom Sanche de Navarre and Dryden’s Secret Love contain similar storylines). The whole thing belongs very much to its Venetian Baroque operatic world, with a loosely-strung plot full of intrigue interlaced with comedy and ballet. Besides the three female and three male leads, the story introduces a buffo servant Tabarco, a Papagenolike figure first seen setting out the card tables for an evening’s gaming at the Castilian court. The princes and princesses, by now neatly entangled, sit down to a fraught set of ombre (the game immortalized in Pope’s Rape of the Lock ) followed by a ball during which the horrified Queen Almira sees her secretary Fernando happily dancing with the Princess Edilia. After a multitude of plot twists all comes right in the end, however, and to save the Queen from betraying her class by marrying a mere person, Fernando is discovered to be the long-lost son of the Count of Segovia. Tabarco enters on horseback and Almira says that she will be delighted to share the throne with her quondam secretary.
    Handel was evidently powerless to do much towards modifying the rambling drama that Feustking had given some years earlier to Reinhard Keiser. The older composer’s Almira setting was premièred not in Hamburg but at Weissenfels, in honour of a visit to Duke Johann Adolf by the Elector Palatine. Keiser had his own reasons for clearing out of Hamburg with his opera still unperformed. ‘Being a man of gaiety and expense,’ says Mainwaring, ‘he involved himself in debts, which forced him to abscond.’ After Feustking had enlarged the text for these princely celebrations, Keiser appears to have passed the original libretto to Handel. Was his second setting of Almira , composed in 1706, stimulated by a friendly rivalry with his young protégé?
    Handel’s version is exactly the sort of apprentice work we might expect.Imaginative daubs of instrumental colour are scattered here and there (some lessons well learned from Keiser in this respect) and the writing for strings in arias such as Almira’s ‘Move i passi’ is particularly inspired. Some of the dramatic climaxes, especially those involving the eponymous heroine, show the composer responding keenly to moments of pathos and vulnerability among his characters, two-dimensional as most of them are. Otherwise the vocal writing seems mannered and ungrateful to the singers. Moments of florid grandeur in the word setting, a strong French idiom and a generally uncritical subservience to the Hamburg style are elements bundled together rather than assimilated. The total effect, even if we suppose that Handel would have become as adept a practitioner of this kind of opera as Mattheson and Keiser, is like looking at the ambitious façade to a provincial corn exchange.
    Hamburg’s enthusiasm for its new composer was greeted with a second collaboration between Handel and Feustking, hurried into