When George Frederic Handel wrote his opera Xerxes, he little knew that it would owe its fame not to the stage but to churches all over the world where organists swell out the peaceful first-act aria under the name of the Handel Largo. The Saxon composer wrote Xerxes as a comic opera, when he was depressed by Bankruptcy woes in London. To commemorate the 250th anniversary of Handel's birth, Xerxes was revived last week by the State Opera in Berlin and by the music department at the University of Chicago.
Berlin was only...
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