After the great success of Rinaldo, his first opera performed in London, in 1731 Handel took up the score again for a revival with one of the greatest stars of the London vocal panorama of those years, the alto Castrato Francesco Bernardi called Senesino. In addition to the novel Italian music, the fantastic plot, which exploited all the possibilities of baroque theatre, also met with enthusiasm from the audience: love, anger and passion amid sensational scene changes, fire-breathing monsters, flying dragons and an exotic magical island.