ABSTRACT
Handel's career as a theatrical dance composer encompassed the period from his Hamburg opera Almira in 1704 to his first season at London's Covent Garden Theatre in 1734–5. For these later operas, he collaborated with Marie Salle, an innovative performer who had experimented with developing the expressive potential of dance. In London, grotesque dancing had its roots in the antic masque dances and in commedia dell'arte entertainments; in the latter, each character became associated with his own particular gestures and movement style. Handel's 'Entree de' Mori' from Act II of Ariodante is another character dance in serious mode. The perpetual iambic pattern and frequently disjunct melody creates an intense atmosphere; Isaac Vossius, a late 17th-century theorist, identified the iambic metre with bitterness and anger; Quantz associated dotted rhythms with 'the serious and the pathetic'. Handel's most striking use of character dances occurs in the dream sequence which originally concluded Act II of Ariodante.
