Mi palpita il cor

Over the years we’ve heard a great deal from Händel on the stages of the Staunton Music Festival. Tonight we have a chance to hear something youthful and relatively obscure: one of the 50 secular chamber cantatas which he composed for Sunday conversazione at the Roman villa of the Marchese Francesco Ruspoli. These years in Italy (1706-10) were decisive in Händel’s growth as an artist, for they laid the foundation of later triumphs on the London opera scene.
Händel had crossed north over the Alps only a few months earlier when he wrote “Mi palpita il cor” (My Heart Throbs) on one of his first trips to the English capital. The brief work divides into five alternating movements of aria and recitative. The theme of the libretto is a perennial favorite—love scorned—though it is somewhat atypical in telling the story from a man’s perspective. As one would expect, the larger passages of text pass quickly as accompanied recitative, set against contrasting, lyrical meditations in the da capo arias. The first aria, a graceful siciliano in E minor for flute and voice, dwells on the notion of tyrannous love. Händel enjoys several wonderful exchanges between the two solo lines, and the vocal line in particular strikes a nice balance between stepwise runs and angular, expressive leaps. In the concluding Allegro we enter the brighter realm of G major as the protagonist gives vent to (misguided) hopes of requited love. The central minor-mode section reverts to mentioning “pains” and “torments,” and if the da capo structure carries us to a sunny close in the major it is only to underscore the fragile mental state of our hero—hopes cast aloft on clouds, castles built on sand . . . .

(c) Jason Stell