ully as he tells this faithless woman to go ahead and laugh for now, but his death will rest on her shoulders for ever. It is his ultimate revenge - to haunt her for eternity.
This is one of the trickiest arias in the operatic canon to pull off: essentially, it's a 10-minute monologue consisting of three sentences. Ariodante's discovery of Ginevra's infidelity takes only seconds, but what is suggested is the days and years that it takes to process such news, and how one's response can change over that time. How much does he relish the thought of destroying her life with guilt? If he truly loved her, doesn't it also cause him pain? The same phrase can be uttered with icy resignation, and then through tears.
When I debuted this role for Geneva Opera, there were no elaborate painted baroque sets to sustain the audiences attention, no armour to hide behind, no real set, just the same three sentences over and over. And yet, I never sang it the same way twice. Each night the solo bassoon that Handel weaved into the texture of the orchestra spoke differently. Each utterance of "per tua colpa ora men vò" (by your fault, I go to my death) held a different, often surprising emotion, and my capacity to sing it varied: one moment in complete defiance ("I never loved you anyway"), and the next feeling so weak I could barely stand ("did you never love me?").
Handel wrote oratorios as the market demanded, and yet often they were far more dramatic than his operas. What was happening? The Italian opera melodrama was supposed to be dead. Handel wrote the Messiah at this time, but also Semele, which was declared a scandal for its bawdy subject matter and apparent lack of morals.
Inspired to conquer London, he turned to an English libretto by Thomas Broughton after The Trachiniae of Sophocles and The Metamorphoses of Ovid, and premiered his oratorio/musical drama Hercules at the King's theatre in London in January 1745. I wonder at how he could have written the character of Dejanira, the wife of Hercules, driven to madness by her unrelenting (and sadly, unjustified) jealousy.
It's not the outlandish plot that intrigues me, but the way in which Handel presents this woman who begins the opera already slightly unhinged by her grief, and sculpts her downfall into one of the greatest scenes of madness ever written, yet never once resorting to caricature.
On the first day of rehearsal I was shaking at the prospect of meeting Maestro William Christie for the first time, but he told our cast, "Don't you worry about anything - just give me everything you've got: soft and loud, black and white, whisper and yell, and we'll be just fine." He held my hand daily as I searched for her vulnerability, her madness. In the immense, exhausting final mad scene, "Where shall I fly", I ran into great difficulty trying to make it work, and at each dead end, I would return again to the score to search for an answer. It was always right there waiting for me: the repeated "See! See! See!" announcing the horror of her visions, the relentless melismas as she attempts to flee the furies, the jagged lines, and the hollow calls for the black shades of night to hide her.
It was a lasting lesson for me that Handel is ultimately about theatre. So whether he wrote to put food on the table or because he was channelling something divine, it doesn't matter: he moves me, and for that I thank him.
• Joyce DiDonato will be singing in Les Talens Lyriques at the Barbican Hall, London, tonight. Box office: 020 7638 8891. Her CD of Handel's opera arias, Furore, is released on Virgin Classics.