Handel's autograph score survives, with the Sinfonia and first recitatives missing, but is significantly different from the libretto which reflects changes made for the first performances.
(David Ives's concert adaptation conflates different versions of the libretto to fine effect, but I prefer the less trite final line of the original.) Ms. Baldwin feels like a discovery as Sharon, although she has a modest list of Broadway credits.
In fact, the composer conceived them independently, to librettos by different authors, and introduced them in three different theaters, in Milan and Naples.
Each with a libretto by a different author, they were premiered over a seven-year period (1830-1837) in different Italian theaters, with different singers as the royal protagonists: Giuditta Pasta ("Anna Bolena, Maria Malibran Maria Stuardaanda") and Giuseppina Ronzi de Begnis (Elizabeth I in "Roberto Devereux").
Writing a libretto demands techniques different from those for writing spoken drama.
The 1896 libretto also offers a different ending, in which Tosca does not die but instead goes mad.
It contains considerable differences from the final libretto, relatively minor in the first two acts but much more appreciable in the third, where the description of the Roman dawn that opens the third act is much longer, and Cavaradossi's tragic aria, the eventual "E lucevan le stelle", has different words.
Such success for the new work seems to have been fleeting; but during the next few years the libretto was reset by several different composers, including Wolfgang's London mentor Johann Christian Bach.
Such a milieu could easily have produced a melodrama of the gay-martyr type, but "Fellow Travelers," which has a libretto by Greg Pierce, is after something different.
They were followed by an altogether different sort of opera, Der Rosenkavalier (1911), again with a libretto by Hofmannsthal, a bittersweet comedy notable for the superb musical depiction of the central character (the Marschallin).
