Cibber

Before long, Handel’s English-language oratorios even featured home-grown English singer-soloists, too, fulfilling contemporary actor-playwright and Poet Laureate Colley Cibber’s aspiration to ‘reconcile Musick to the English Tongue’.

Loosely based on Colley Cibber’s pared-down 1699 adaptation, the production clips along at a rollicking pace thanks to an able cast with no weak links.

So much for Buckingham,” was preferred until 1877, and even Laurence Olivier’s 1955 film kept some of Cibber’s alterations.

Alongside Handel, the film looks at his devout, depressive librettist Charles Jennens, and at actress and favorite singer Susannah Cibber, the subject of the aforementioned scandal, whose parts Handel taught her note by note.

And then there was Susannah Cibber, a prominent stage actress and friend of Handel’s who in the 1730s had been tarnished by a scandal that would have been supermarket tabloid fodder even today.