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Baroque opera librettists seem to have found an impish satisfaction in thoroughly putting the heroes of their stories through the wringer before they meet their more or less glorious end or, with a bit of luck, live to celebrate the opera’s happy ending. The creativity with which they maneuver their own characters into horrifying scenarios knows no bounds. Popular subjects include fighting terrible monsters, marching into seemingly hopeless battles, various forms of murder, intricate entanglements that can only lead to disaster, lifelong imprisonment, the occasional suicide... and, of course, the full Baroque-opera bounty of creative death sentences. Our poor heroes and heroines are alternately thrown to the lions (e.g. Salustia), burnt at the stake (e.g. Croesus), set adrift in the middle of the Mediterranean on a boat with no sails (e.g. Poppea), beheaded (e.g. Tito Manlio) and so on...
These scenes of horror are not only thrilling and sundry from a literary standpoint – their musical compositions are equally so.

Fear and trembling are never, but never presented in a single, monotonous tone color! Our characters often go through an
emotional rollercoaster: from deepest despair to sorrow and anger, from flight to fight, from love and longing to sheer insanity. Truly, a painters box full of affects, inviting composers to go wild with musical expression. “Scenes of Horror” is a baroque cabinet of grotesqueries featuring music by Georg Friedrich Handel, Attilio Ariosti, Antonio Vivaldi and Carl Heinrich Graun. As you may imagine, the Baroque librettists were not the only ones who derived sadistic pleasure from seeing their characters suffer. We also found a devilish delight in sending Laila Salome Fischer through this program’s series of nightmares.