A pasticcio is an opera in which arias from older pieces are put together to make up a new piece. This practice, which might seem strange to us today, was entirely common in the eighteenth century.

One took the text of an older opera and inserted, in place of the original arias, pieces that fit best to the current cast of singers and through which the greatest possible popular success could be achieved. In this way, it was possible to hear music by many different composers during one opera performance. In London, George Frideric Handel, too, attempted on a number of occasions to offer such pasticci alongside his original compositions.

Giove in Argo, occupies a very special position that distinguishes it from all of Handel’s other musico-dramatic works.

A number of things make this work appear unusual: It is Handel’s only Italian opera in which only low men’s voices (a tenor, two basses) participate. That is to say, neither castratos nor trouser parts are included. Moreover, it is the opera with the most, and the most extensive, choral movements. There is a special reason for this: Giove in Argo, one of Handel’s last musico-dramatic works, was written at a time in which the interest in Italian opera had declined greatly in London. With the extended and virtuoso choruses, sometimes with marvelous parts for the two horns, Handel presumably also wanted to take advantage of the success of his first English oratorios.

The libretto of Giove in Argo is by the Venetian poet Antonio Maria Lucchini, who wrote it for a setting by Antonio Lotti in Dresden in 1717. Handel would have heard Lotti’s opera during his visit to Dresden in 1719.

What distinguishes Giove in Argo from the other pasticci by Handel is the fact that, besides older pieces, several texts were newly set to music. A further musical attraction is provided by Isis’ two large arias in the second and third acts: these are not by Handel, but were taken, in accordance with the above-described pasticcioLucio Vero by the later Russian court chapel-master Francesco Araja. practice, from the opera

The music of Giove in Argo, of which a complete score has not survived, can be completed – with the help of the surviving libretto – from Handel’s operas from which the individual arias were taken.

On these two SACD's we hear in first recording a reconstruction by the musicologists Steffen Voss and Thomas Synofzik.