Lately we have been favoured by Hanjörg Drauschke of the Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg with a number of critical editions of music by Reinhard Keiser, including the operas Desiderius (1709) and Nebucadnezar (1704), and three volumes of smaller secular works edited in collaboration with Thomas Ihlenfeldt. Now comes an edition of Keiser's opera Almira, produced by two students at Halle, Kota Sato and Mai Koshikakezawa, working under Drauschke's supervision. Although Keiser composed three distinct versions of Almira, none of them survives in anything like a performable state. Yet they amply deserve a modern edition, not only for the inherent musical interest of what does survive but also because they form part of a complex and contested moment in the early history of German opera. The story begins with the Almira of Ruggiero Fedeli (c1655–1722), a 1702 setting for Brunswick of a Venetian libretto dating back to 1691. Keiser had the Italian text translated into German for the Hamburg stage by the novice librettist Friedrich Christian Feustking (1678–1739). In keeping with the new local fashion for macaronic opera, Feustking retained fifteen of Fedeli's Italian aria texts, and it is stated in the Preface to Keiser's libretto that he was also reusing three of Fedeli's settings to oblige the singer of the title role, who had previously sung it in Brunswick.

Keiser's Almira was supposed to be performed at the Theater am Gänsemarkt in 1704, but instead he departed for the Saxon duchy of Weissenfels, where a heavily revised version of the opera was staged in July of that year, while Handel's setting of the original libretto was brought out in Hamburg the following January. In recent German literature this surprising turn of events has regularly been explained as the result of Keiser having received a commission, unexpected and prestigious, to compose an opera for a visit to Weissenfels by the Elector Palatine Johann Wilhelm II, a scenario echoed in the Preface to the present edition. There is, however, no documentary support for such an interpretation, and a good deal of evidence to suggest a very different one. In 1704 the Theater am Gänsemarkt, of which Keiser was then the joint lessee, was going through a series of financial crises; moreover, he, ‘being a man of gaiety and expense, involved himself in debts, which forced him to abscond’, in the words of John Mainwaring in his Memoirs of the Life of the Late George Frederic Handel (London, 1760), his information obtained more or less directly from Handel himself (see page 32). It would have been only natural for Keiser to take refuge at the court of Weissenfels, close to his family home in the village of Teuchern.

Handel's Almira, his first opera, seems to have been a great success, and when Keiser returned to Hamburg in the summer of 1705, he immediately set about discrediting his young rival, seconded by his literary allies, Christian Friedrich Hunold (1680–1721) and Barthold Feind (1678–1721). Initially, though, he made no move to stage his own Almira, merely inserting eight arias, probably all from the Weissenfels version, in his opera La fedeltà coronata (1706), and going on to publish excerpts from the unperformed Hamburg version of 1704 in his Componimenti musicali (Hamburg, 1706), together with portions of his more recent Octavia (1705). Only near the end of 1706, after Handel had left for Italy, did Keiser offer his Almira in a third version, the libretto revised by Feind, combining elements of its two predecessors with much new material. Il genio d'Hosatia, identified by Mattheson on page 187 of Der musicalische Patriot (Hamburg, 1728) as a prologue to Keiser's Almira, seems in fact to have been a freestanding introduction to a fireworks display in June 1706 in honour of visiting royalty.

The main musical source for Keiser's opera is Componimenti musicali, which consists of a score for voice and basso continuo and four supplementary partbooks containing assorted instrumental parts. From the Hamburg Almira, it includes twenty-eight arias and four recitatives for three sopranos, two tenors and two basses. The Ortus edition makes this music available in score for the first time. According to the anonymous Preface to Componimenti musicali, Keiser had planned to publish a printed edition of Almira at the time of the first performance in 1704 but was prevented from completing the opera by his departure for Weissenfels. He must have broken off composing near the end of Act 2: ‘Sanerà la piaga un dì’, the last Almira aria in Componimenti musicali, has several vacant bars in the instrumental parts, most notably bars 26–36 in violin 1, gaps sensibly filled by the editors. Also missing is Edilia's ‘Der Himmel wird straffen’, the one remaining aria in the act (not counting one for the comic character Tabarco, all of whose arias are omitted), along with the music from Act 3. However, Componimenti musicali was prepared for publication not in 1704, but closer to its appearance in mid-1706, judging not only by its inclusion of the Octavia excerpts but by the conspicuous elimination of the two Almira arias that in Handel's libretto had been particularly ridiculed by Hunold in 1705, ‘Almira regiere’ and ‘Vollkommene Hände’. The two arias retained from Fedeli's Almira are present, though, as Drauschke showed in his edition of the Fedeli (Beeskow: Ortus, 2011), Keiser did make some changes without incommoding the singer.

Two additional arias and an unknown duet discovered by Sato in a Sondershausen manuscript are printed in an appendix. Since the texts of one aria and the duet appear only in the 1706 libretto, it can safely be assumed that all three of the new pieces belong to that version. No mention is made of a setting of the Act 3 aria ‘Vedrai s'a tuo dispetto’ uniquely preserved in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (Mus.ms. 30341, fols 29r-29v). Explicitly attributed in an early hand to ‘R. C.’ (Rinardo Cesare), it cannot derive from the 1704 Hamburg version, in which Keiser planned to use Fedeli's setting. This setting must therefore have been composed either for Weissenfels or for Hamburg in 1706. Fortunately, it can be read online through the website of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin.

The Ortus edition is well produced in a handsome and sturdy binding. A thorough Preface with abbreviated English translation is limited only by its failure to take much notice of the relevant literature in English. There is a full critical report and numerous facsimiles from Componimenti musicali, including a long and very interesting poem by Feind in praise of Keiser. Especially considering the slimness of this volume, it is regrettable that it does not provide a facsimile of Keiser's 1704 Hamburg libretto, at least the revealing Preface. The sole copy of the libretto can, however, be viewed on the website of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, which holds the only copy, under the shelfmark Mus. T 3, 30 (search for VD18 90123972).

The music text appears to be reliable. I would only raise a question regarding the editors’ interpretation of Osmano's aria ‘Zürne was hin’ (14–15). In this aria, labelled ‘Violette e tutti li Violini Unisoni’ in Componimenti musicali, the two violin parts are notated in the alto clef as well as the viola. The clefs and the unusually low range for the violins (g–d²) led the editors to conclude that one or more of the violinists would probably have switched to the viola for this aria. A more likely explanation, I think, would be that the alto clef was chosen for the violin parts simply to avoid an unnecessary proliferation of ledger lines.

As a composer – rather than a name in the annals of music history – Keiser is less well known than most of his leading German contemporaries. There are various possible reasons for this neglect: his focus on opera with the inevitable heavy loss of sources and high cost of modern revivals; the mix of languages in the operas, making him neither fish nor fowl to some national tastes; and a misplaced expectation that he will sound like Handel or J. S. Bach and consequent disappointment when he does not. None the less, Keiser was one of the most brilliant and original dramatic composers of his time. He also commands special interest for the enormous influence he exerted on Handel, who over the course of his career borrowed countless melodic ideas from Keiser, no doubt more than we will ever know. Handel's Almira clearly betrays his familiarity with Keiser's unfinished first version, as Hellmuth Christian Wolff demonstrated in Die Barockoper in Hamburg, 1678–1738 (Wolfenbüttel: Möseler, 1957), volume 1, 246–248 and volume 2, 72–83. Hugo Leichtentritt, on page 37 of his dissertation Reinhard Keiser in seinen Opern (Berlin, 1901), judged Keiser's setting far superior to Handel's. Whether or not we agree with this assessment, it is very good at last to have a fine modern edition of this important opera.