Handel's Orlando was created during a time of London's worst cabal and operatic intrigue. The golden age in which Handel hurried from success to success was drawing to a close, as Orlando was Handel's last premiere at the King's Theater on January 27, 1733. For his next opera projects, the successful composer had to be content with the much simpler and far less prestigious setting of the Covent Garden Opera House. The moody audience immediately showed their affection for the newly founded Opera of Nobility and its star castrato Farinelli. However, Handel was determined to fight for the audience's favor and wanted to win it back with new, innovative ideas.
The hero Orlando goes mad because of an unrequited love for Angelica, Queen of Catai. Angelica loves Medoro, who left the shepherdess Dorinda because of her. But the master of the event is a friend of Orlando's, the magician Zoroastro. With his help freed from his love madness, Orlando returns disappointed of love to fight and fame.
Orlando represents the end of an era, but at the same time represents an interesting new beginning in Handel's oeuvre, as the composer turned dramatically and musically away from established artistic traditions, for example by reducing the da-capo arias or breaking up their strict form. Handel must have in Ludovico Ariosto's imaginative verse epic Orlando furiososaw a key to popular success through the old Roland saga from 1516, as he used it again in the next two years with Ariodante and Alcina .
Orlando - belonging to the genre of magic opera popular at the time - still has all the external characteristics of the opera seria, but the genre is ironically broken with a little wink.
This is also the case in the famous Orlando mad scene, which points far into the future and once again shows Handel as a great psychologist
