George Frideric (or Frederick) Handel (1685 – 1759) was a German-British Baroque composer well known for his operas, oratorios, anthems, concerti grossi, and organ concertos. Handel received his training in Halle and worked as a composer in Hamburg and Italy before settling in London in 1712, where he spent the bulk of his career and became a naturalised British subject in 1727. He was strongly influenced both by the middle-German polyphonic choral tradition and by composers of the Italian Baroque. In turn, Handel's music forms one of the peaks of the "high baroque" style, bringing Italian opera to its highest development, creating the genres of English oratorio and organ concerto, and introducing a new style into English church music. He is consistently recognized as one of the greatest composers of his age.

After spending some of his early career composing operas and other pieces in Italy, he settled in London, where in 1711 he had brought Italian opera for the first time with his opera Rinaldo. A tremendous success, Rinaldo created a craze in London for Italian opera seria, a form focused overwhelmingly on solo arias for the star virtuoso singers. In 1719, Handel was appointed music director of an organisation called the Royal Academy of Music (unconnected with the present day London conservatoire), a company under royal charter to produce Italian operas in London. Handel was not only to compose operas for the company but hire the star singers, supervise the orchestra and musicians, and adapt operas from Italy for London performance.

The Royal Academy of Music collapsed at the end of the 1728–29 season, partly due to the huge fees paid to the star singers, and the two prima donnas who had appeared in Handel's last few operas, Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni both left London for engagements in continental Europe. Handel went into partnership with John James Heidegger, the theatrical impresario who held the lease on the King's Theatre in the Haymarket where the operas were presented and started a new opera company with a new prima donna, Anna Strada. One of Handel's librettists, Paolo Rolli, wrote in a letter (the original is in Italian) that Handel said that Strada "sings better than the two who have left us, because one of them (Faustina) never pleased him at all and he would like to forget the other (Cuzzoni)."

Lotario ("Lothair", HWV 26) is an opera seria in three acts by George Frideric Handel. The Italian-language libretto was adapted from Antonio Salvi's Adelaide.The opera was first given at the King's Theatre in London on 2 December 1729. The story of the opera is a fictionalisation of some events in the life of Holy Roman Empress Adelaide of Italy. The story of Lotario is, in modern terms, a "prequel" to Handel's previous opera Ottone with many of the same characters at an earlier part of their lives. In fact, the character of Lotario was referred to in Handel's manuscript score as "Ottone" since it is based on the same person, the historical Otto the Great, but the name was changed part way through composition, probably to avoid confusion with Handel's earlier, highly successful, piece.

Paolo Rolli commented in a letter at the time to Giuseppe Riva that "everyone thinks (Lotario) a very bad opera". There were 10 performances, but it was not repeated. Handel reused pieces in later operas. As with all Baroque opera seria, Lotario went unperformed for many years, but with the revival of interest in Baroque music and historically informed musical performance since the 1960s, Lotario, like all Handel operas, receives performances at festivals and opera houses today. Among other performances, Lotario was staged at the London Handel Festival in 1999, by the Handel Festival, Halle in 2004 and by the Stadttheater Bern, Switzerland, in 2019.

Source: Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotario).

Although originally scored for Violini, Altos & Bassi I created this Interpretation of the Aria "Non pensi quell' altera" from "Lotario" (HWV 26 Act 1 No. 2) for String Quartet (2 Violins, Viola & Cello).