When his Triumph of Time and Good Counsel had its first performance, Händel was only four years out of his birthplace, the provincial Prussian city of Halle. But acclaim for his dizzying facility as an organist had preceded him, and most of the audience at the Collegio Clementino would have been there more to hear him improvise on that instrument than to listen to a two-hour-long musico-dramatic debate written by a pillar of the Catholic Church establishment, Cardinal Benedetto Pamphili.

They got what they came for: Pamphili made room in his pious music-drama for his protege to perform a three-movement organ concerto, in the guise of a “lovely youth” with “wingèd hands” who pops up unexpectedly among the personnel of the Palace of Pleasure described in the libretto.

Did they also appreciate what else they heard that night: the earliest surviving music-drama of one of the greatest composers in that form who ever lived, the first of fifty-odd composed over the next 50 years or so?

There’s reason to believe they did. Despite the steady hostility of an older rival for Pamphili’s patronage, The Triumph of Time was revived annually for at least two years after its premiere: a very rare testimony to the power of the work in a time when even the greatest composers were accustomed to having their music treated like disposable ephemera.

Pamphili spared no effort or expense to ensure the piece got an attentive hearing. He engaged the finest singers in the city, and provided his private orchestra to accompany it, led by the great violin virtuoso Archangelo Corelli, himself among the most eminent living Italian composers. In more than equal exchange for the Cardinal’s support, Händel turned Pamphili’s rather frigid and conventional verse drama into dazzling entertainment, without betraying its roots as a Christian morality play.

The “Story” is simple. Beauty (she could just as easily have been called “the Soul”) has been feeling a little troubled lately. Is there perhaps more to life than an endless pursuit of fun? Her handmaid Pleasure says no, but the figure of Time enters with a different message: Repent your frivolous ways before it’s too late, he thunders. He’s backed up by his more discreet ally Good Counsel, who prefers to work by persuasion rather than threats.

And so, in Pamphili’s libretto, it goes: He says, she says, he says, she says, with the outcome never in doubt: This is 1707, after all, and we’re in the hands of an author who is also a Roman Catholic cardinal.

What turns all the moralizing back-and-forth into real drama is Handel’s endless string of musical surprises: Within a structure of conventional da capo arias, he slips in jigs, lullabies, and calls to battle, seductions, laments, glees, and prayers, each with a distinctive instrumental accompaniment and each daring its performer to cut loose and show us just how dazzling he or she can improvise on the written notes of the songs.

By the time Pleasure is decisively defeated (and departs in a whirlwind of angry coloratura), we have been treated to such a feast of brilliant singing and playing that Beauty’s final peaceful prayer makes a deliciously restful conclusion.

It makes no sense to talk about the greatest this or that in the career of a composer as stupefyingly prolific and consistent as Handel. But The Triumph of Time is still something special: the first emergence into the limelight of an artist clearly marked for greatness, and manifesting the rare kind of energy that makes you want to watch him every step of the way.

Despite that fact, The Triumph of Time was virtually unknown to music-lovers for over two centuries. Even after the great rediscovery of Händel’s dramatic output began in the mid-20th century, it remained obscure, a footnote even in scholarly studies of the composer’s vast output. (The most eminent Händel expert of the day, Winton Dean, barely mentions its name in his three huge and exhaustive volumes on the operas and oratorios.)

Fortunately, the early-music movement led to a re-examination of even the most arcane corners of the Händel repertory, and The Triumph of Time was soon recognized, along with its sister work from Roman days The Resurrection, as a seminal work, presaging much of what the composer achieved, perhaps with more temperance and polish, in the next five decades.

When fantasizing about the creation of this early masterwork, it’s also interesting to consider what might have happened if Carlo Cesarini, Händel’s bitter rival for Cardinal Pamfili’s patronage hadn’t ultimately prevailed. Perhaps there never would have been an “English Handel”, and the young genius, coddled and cossetted, might have elected to stay in Rome.

We’ll never know; but when Cesarini won the battle, there was someone ready to take advantage of the situation: Vincenzo Grimani, a power behind the papal throne, became Handel’s patron, and took him along when he was appointed to the role of papal regent in Naples. But Grimani died in 1710, and Handel was once again on the lookout for a permanent post. As it happened, Georg Ludwig, Duke of Hannover was looking for a house composer at the time, and when Georg was invited to change his name to George and become King of England, guess who went along for the ride? – Roger Downey