Immediately after performing George Frideric Handel’s Ariodante at the Göttingen Händel Festival, I segued into another Handel (pasticcio) opera project, Il Muzio Scevola, with Il Gusto Barocco in Stuttgart. This opera featured a Prologue which had been specially written for the occasion by Th. W. Leininger in 2021 to a text from 1723 (Hamburg). The first act was by Filippo Amadei, with a second act by Giovanni Bononcini and the third act by Handel. The concert began at 17:00 on Sunday 12th September 2021, and it took place in the Mozartsaal of Stuttgart’s Liederhalle. The performance of this extraordinarily long work finished at around 22:20; it ran in the format of Prologue, Act 1, interval, Act 2, interval, Act 3.

The trumpets were involved in the Prologue, which began with a suite of movements reminiscent of Rococo or Classical styles; a later movement in the Prologue included a trumpet aria in a different style. We were also involved in Act 1 with three movements and a trumpet call after the inscription ‘Si ferma per la Tromba’ [‘Stops for the Trumpet’] in one of the recitatives. We were tacet in all of Act 2, and did not play again until the end of Act 3. We worked out that we had until at least 20:30 before we needed to return to the hall. So I returned to the hotel, changed my shirt (it was hot on stage), and we had time to explore some more of Stuttgart and eat an apple strudel before returning to the hall for 20:30. When we returned we were still in plenty of time, and we returned exactly as the Third Act began. We followed a score from off stage, and the horns, flute, trumpets and timpanist [editorial] had been permitted to enter the stage after No.36, where the director, Jörg Halubek, had planned to make a short break for a tuning check.