The great soldier Orlando is lovesick and shows little intention of resuming his former glorious and heroic deeds. When Orlando enters, he is a man clearly torn between his love of fame and his love for Angelica. "Orlando teaches all of us that love is often responsible for our loss of reason," runs a line from Act 3 of the opera. It is a modest moral, and perhaps one not demanding of the dramatic finesse and musical diversity that Handel serves up in Orlando - for the opera's complex of problems is rather more complicated than that. Beneath the fabric of this masterfully woven constellation of characters and values is a score of such independence and vivacity as to give Orlando a special position among Handel's works - indeed among opera literature in general.
