This symposium was convened by Michele Calella of the Institut für Analyse, Theorie und Geschichte der Musik, at the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien. Calella, an acknowledged expert in eighteenth-century opera, obtained the collaboration of the Theater an der Wien and its Intendant, Roland Geyer, for an operatic-academic event highlighting the premiere of a new production of Handel's Partenope by Pierre Audi on 22 February 2009. The performance, with Christophe Rousset and Les Talens Lyriques, featured Christine Schäfer in the title role, Patricia Bardon as Rosmira and David Daniels as Arsace. The Theater an der Wien, the original venue for Leonore and Fidelio, aims to renew the operatic canon by focusing on eighteenth-century opera, modern ballet and cross-genre productions. In 2008/2009 it has offered Handel's Ariodante, a staged performance of Messiah, a Fidelio ballet, Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice, Mozart's Mitridate Re di Ponto and Don Giovanni, plus Rossini, Strauss, Debussy and Stravinsky. Concert performances have included works by Haydn (L'isola disabitata), Gluck (Ezio), Domenico Scarlatti (Tolomeo ed Alessandro) and Luci mie traditrici by Salvatore Sciarrino (born 1947), on a libretto by the seventeenth-century poet Giacinto Andrea Cicognini.

The well-attended symposium benefited from the experience of the excellent performance directed by Rousset: participants got a fresh impression of Handel's opera, members of the audience took the opportunity to raise questions about the work, and critical eyebrows were raised about the production (‘Honestly, the opera I saw was not the one I used to know’). The symposium was not exclusively a Handel event. Partenope was originally a Neapolitan opera, premiered at the Teatro San Bartolomeo in 1699 with music by Luigi Mancia; the libretto by Silvio Stampiglia (1664–1725) belongs to a series of drammi per musica that he wrote on subjects relating to ancient Italic history. In this instance he embroiders the legend of the foundation of Naples by a Greek princess (or nymph) called Parthenope. The libretto was often set in Italy; its productions during the first half of the eighteenth century reached so many cities that Robert S. Freeman could metaphorically narrate ‘The Travels of Partenope’ in the collection Studies in Music History: Essays for Oliver Strunk, edited by Harry S. Powers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968, 356–385) – hence the symposium's title.

Silke Leopold (Universität Heidelberg) had the first and biggest bite at the cherry of sexual identity offered by Stampiglia's libretto (‘Rosmira's Nöte, ossia: Eine Frau ist ein Mann ist eine Frau’). She placed the male disguise of Rosmira, abandoned fiancée of Arsace and fictitious suitor of Partenope, in a long series of literary highlights from Boiardo and Ariosto to Blake Edwards (Victor/Victoria, 1982), asking about the borderlines between feminine and masculine behavioural codes on stage and in society. Handel set similar roles in Siroe (with Emira), Alcina (with Bradamante) and, notably, Stampiglia's Serse based on Minato (with Amastre); these were as traditional as was the female disguise of Achille in Deidamia. What Leopold is reconstructing in this and other contributions she has made to this topic is an early modern view of gender defined by performativity rather than sexuality: men had to conform to certain feminine styles of public behaviour in order to fit in; Handel's music is not ‘genderized’ but reflects different behavioural potentials accessible to both women and men.

Suzanne Aspden (University of Oxford) and David Vickers (University of Huddersfield) represented the younger generation of UK-based Handel scholars in an as yet unfamiliar Austrian environment. Vickers (‘Evaluating Handel's Performing Versions of Partenope’) gave a carefully calibrated report on the sources of the various versions and their pros and cons, helping us to understand Handel's approach to plot and dramaturgy. Aspden (‘The Politics of “Queen Operas”’) widened the range of evidence from opera to spoken drama and oratorio in her search for political-cultural attitudes to women as agents. She showed that Winton Dean's assessment of Partenope as a ‘feminist’ opera needs rethinking, but that there are tendencies in Handel's work of the early 1730s that would satisfy a bourgeois admiration for powerful women, just when the earlier fantastic and romantic stereotypes of sorceresses and forsaken girls were on the way out.

Inevitably, the one contemporary document addressing such matters in Handel's own orbit has sometimes been interpreted out of context: Owen Swiney's letter to the Royal Academy of 18 August 1726 (published in Elizabeth Gibson, The Royal Academy of Music, 1719-1728: The Institution and Its Directors (New York: Garland, 1989)), in which the ex-impresario, having been told by Senesino that the Academy might put on a Partenope, condemns the libretto as being in very bad taste and attempts to dissuade his correspondents from taking it on. The symposium discussion led to the consensus that we have no evidence that the Royal Academy ‘rejected’ the libretto, as is often asserted, that it had been proposed by Handel, or that Swiney's advice was taken seriously in London. Rather, the letter suggests that Faustina Bordoni might have been interested in having the opera put on in London, following on from her success as Rosmira in Leonardo Vinci's Venetian setting from the carnival season of 1725. If that is relevant, then the most plausible explanation for why the production had to wait until 1730 should lie with negotiations over Faustina's appearances in London. Swiney's contempt for the libretto presumably stemmed from the last scene, in which Rosmira – disguised as a man – challenges Arsace to a duel, but he insists that the contestants must fight stripped to the waist, at which point she has to declare her true identity. It is amazing how much this little sexist (or ironic) lazzo of Stampiglia's has influenced interpretations of the opera well into the twentieth century. We do need a fresh consideration of the libretto's qualities, but one that considers the prejudices of Handel's time, not only expresses ours.

The symposium certainly demonstrated how much Handel's 1730 version differed from those then current on the continent. Paologiovanni Maione (Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II) and Francesco Cotticelli (Università degli Studi di Cagliari) presented – in a dialogue performance – the circumstances of origin of the Neapolitan Partenope of 1699. Angela Romagnoli (Università di Pavia-Cremona) spoke on the setting by Caldara performed in Venice in 1708 and its context (‘Caldara und die venezianische Partenope’). Caldara's libretto was the direct textual source for Handel's, but there were several other productions of Caldara's opera, not all of them securely attributable. The paper also focused on Caldara's patron, Duke Ferdinando Carlo Gonzaga, and his political downfall in the War of the Spanish Succession. I (Reinhard Strohm, University of Oxford) concentrated on those settings and productions of the libretto that usually carried the title Rosmira or Rosmira fedele (‘Die Reisen von Rosmira’). Their common ancestor was Domenico Sarri's Partenope (Naples, 1722), in which Faustina Bordoni excelled as Rosmira, but it took her until the next setting for Venice by Vinci – La Rosmira fedele – in 1725 to make the name of her character the new title, again used by Vivaldi (in 1738) and in various German pasticcio revivals. My questions concerned the identity of the opera itself – a work or a series of productions? – and the identification of singers with their roles and their uses of the musical and verbal text.

Michael Zywietz (Universität Bremen) emphasized the importance of the Braunschweig revivals of Handel's operas in the 1730s (‘Die deutsche Rezeption von Händels Partenope im 18. Jahrhundert’); he also revealed that the Handel documents surrounding the pasticcio Hermann von Balcke, performed in Elbing (Elbląg) in 1737, are forgeries by the Nazi-influenced musicologist Joseph Maria Müller-Blattau.

Partenope was not Handel's and not even Stampiglia's monopoly. Andrea Sommer-Mathis (Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna) introduced and interpreted Pietro Metastasio's festa teatrale of the same title of 1767, an arguably minor work, but one that fascinatingly relates to the reformist atmosphere of the Habsburg court (‘Eine Partenope für den kaiserlichen Hof: Hasse und Metastasio’). The paper by Arnold Jacobshagen (Hochschule für Musik, Cologne) on ‘Händel auf der modernen Bühne’ offered not the perhaps expected discussion of Regietheater practices, but a historical survey of Handel opera performances of the last forty to fifty years, embedded in critical interpretations of their component ideologies and aesthetic ideals. This sort of reflection might also, in other contexts, serve as a useful replacement for the more usual debates about how (not) to stage Handel.

In fact, that sort of debate threatened to follow right on the heels of this paper, in a panel discussion conducted by Bernhard Trebuch (Österreichischer Rundfunk, Vienna) on ‘(Kon-)Texte für das heutige Publikum? Zur Aktualität der “Barockoper”’. Thanks to the efforts of the panellists – Christophe Rousset, Herbert Lachmayer, Silke Leopold and Arnold Jacobshagen – and their relevant, witty and worthwhile thoughts, potential connections between ideology, historical research and aesthetic experiment appeared on the horizon.