Tuesday, February 06, 2018

Arrival of the Queen of Sheba

These gentlemen do a bang-up job of rendering a joyous and splendid  version of a quintessentially joyous and campy piece of music--the best, for sprightly, but not rushed, tempo, and perfectly articulated parts, that I could find on YouTube.  I could find nothing in history, or on the Internet, however, to indicate how the original Queen of Sheba was supposed to "arrive," or what she looked like in so doing, at the beginning of the third and last act of Handel's oratorio Solomon.  As I remember from my youthful (King James') Bible studies, the Queen of Sheba described herself as "dark, but comely," as, I think we can all agree, this mannequin-lady is.  And, my notion is, that, as a queen arriving (in what is basically a static baroque opera), she needs to have feathers (nodding plumes) on her head, and be wearing a hoop skirt (and supplemental draperies), and, in general, be moving like a tall ship under full sail, gliding over rolling billows--which I'm sure this handsome Negress could well portray.

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