Some singers credit managerial help for their rise to the top. Amanda Forsythe, in contrast, has actual bloodsuckers to thank.

As the acclaimed soprano tells the Straight, in a phone call from her New York City home, she can pinpoint the exact moment when she opted for a career in music—and it did not happen while basking in the spotlight’s acclaim. Instead, it came when she was tired, wet, muddy, and pursuing a degree in marine biology.

“I was doing a field lab with a group of students, and we were wearing hip waders, wading through a stream collecting leeches,” she recalls. “And I just thought, ‘This is not the glamorous life that I had imagined for myself. I think I will work on music a little bit more.’

“I was much happier putting on a fancy dress than doing the leech thing,” she adds.

That impromptu decision has paid off for the 40-year-old singer, who is especially well-known for interpreting baroque music—like the arias by George Frederick Handel, Nicola Porpora, and Giovanni Bononcini that she’ll tackle in an Early Music Vancouver concert next week. She’s singing with the Vancouver Baroque Orchestra in Handel and His Rivals: Opera Arias From 18th-Century London, which harks back to a time when the chamber-music audience was not the decorous crowd we expect today.

“All of these pieces were written for a particular singer, Francesca Cuzzoni,” Forsythe notes. “I don’t know how much you know about Handel’s singers, but he obviously favoured using the same ones over and over again, and two of his most famous sopranos were Cuzzoni and Faustina [Bordoni]. And they had a rivalry of their own, much as Handel had his ongoing rivalry with Porpora and Bononcini and other composers in London at that time. Cuzzoni and Faustina had rival factions; people would come to the opera and scream and holler and boo people off the stage, so it was very tabloid!”

A case in point being a 1733 performance of Porpora’s opera Arianna in Nasso, from which the aria “Miseri sventurati” has been extracted. “These two rival divas, Cuzzoni and Faustina, were both appearing in it, and there was a full-on riot during the performance, with the women attacking each other on-stage,” Forsythe says. “The performance was cancelled—as was the entire opera season, which I can’t really imagine happening nowadays. So whatever Arianna is about, it must be terribly exciting!”

Not exciting enough, however, that its composer’s fame lasted as long as his own lifetime. Both Porpora and Bononcini “died in obscurity,” Forsythe notes. “I always find it really sad, actually, that these people who were hugely popular in their day died poor and completely forgotten.”

Asked why Handel’s music has endured while his rivals’ has not, Forsythe has a ready answer.

“It’s just better,” she says assuredly. “I would like to hear the rest of Arianna, because this aria certainly is intriguing, and that’s the only piece I know from it. The Bononcini I’m finding sort of plain, so I’m trying to go a little bit crazy on the da capo section to liven it up. But with Handel, I just love his melodies. He tugs at my heartstrings.”

Early Music Vancouver presents a sold-out performance of Handel and His Rivals: Opera Arias From 18th-Century London at Christ Church Cathedral on Friday (September 16).