Oh, I guess some of the websites haven't been updated... Sandrine Piau is not appearing, and that's been known for about a month.  But I can recommend her replacement, Karina Gauvin.  The whole cast is very good.

BTW Reiner, it wasn't the daughter who did the slapping, it was the dead guy himself.  So he really deserved it.     The daughters in this work don't get up to anything worse than a bit of illicit pre-marital shagging.

Herr Faninal is more concerned with the social status of his daughter's fiancee in Der Rosenkavalier than with her emotional well being.

As you say, there are multiple versions - you can see the extent of them on the index page of the Chrysander edition of the score
(http://www.digitale-sammlungen.de/~db/0001/bsb00016912/images/index.html?seite=10) - marked "A" and "B" in Atto Terzo

Handel was rewriting the opera on the hoof even during rehearsals, because the Italian tenor who turned-up to sing Bajazet (in fact he was - like many tenors - something of a baritone) came brandishing a much better libretto on the subject,  which Handel pillaged as much as available time allowed him.   The long list of cuts and reworkings accounts for the extensive appendices given in the printed Chrysander score.

You're right about Bajazet expiring off-stage - there's a stage direction in his final aria "va mancando le ritirarsi dentro la scena, sostenuto sempre da Asteria e Andronico"  (p 132 of the Chrysander score url'd above).  Of course, a censorship convention of the time strongly disapproved of stage deaths,  and performers were obliged to peg-out more decorously off-stage, for fear of giving offence.  It's a moot point whether this convention ought to be honoured in contemporary performances?   The entire end of TAMERLANO has a very strained and awkward feel to it,  which is primarily why I picked it - from many other candidates - to spoof in my msg above

The plaintive final chorus you mentioned is here:
http://www.digitale-sammlungen.de/~db/0001/bsb00016912/images/index.html?id=00016912&fip=217.10.38.39&no=5&seite=152
and very fine it is, too.

Ulysses kills Penelope's suitors on stage at the end of the Fourth Act of Il Ritorno d'Ulisse .  Those who remembrer David Freeman's ENO production will recall that this turned into something of a general massacre.

By way of a facetious aside, I had to restrain myself from titling another show as "Bastien & Bastienne, OR You Always Herd The One You Love".  But it lost something in the translation

Yeah, she only sings them 

She may ask for baptism, but whether she gets it is another thing.  She still dies in the gutter (the scene of their struggle is a lonely road at night),  and her body is left there.   (My baritone - pic above - walked back to the corpse as she sang the final words, and covered her face with his jacket.  Cross uppermost. Those blazons weren't on modern fencing-gear by accident, y'know )

"I'm sorry, Sir, you've 'ad your baptism fair-and-square... now move along, please, there's a lot more people behind you demanding refunds, you're not the only one, Sir" 

"Now, Madam - why wasn't there a real horse in it?  Well, you see, the regulations about Performing Animals state that... I'm sorry, but even if the Duke loaned his own charger for the original production, that doesn't mean..."

 

La Cieca, Gioconda's blind mother.