ABSTRACT
George Frideric Handel's L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato was first performed at Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre on 27 February 1740. In terms of Handel's professional biography, the 1730s now seem to us to be a period of confusion; to people at the time, Handel's experiments with English oratorio-style works in his theatre programmes must also have been confusing. In a study of the dramaturgy of Handel's operas, the theatre historian Robert D. Hume concluded that: In Handel's operas the central objective is always the expression of emotion, not the telling of a story. Overall, the documents that record the development of L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato indicate that, while Harris was right in spotting the potential of Milton's poems for musical setting. It took Handel's experience and musical judgement to re-shape the text into a form that was suitable for concert performance in a London theatre.
