Abstract
The years 1738 and 1739 saw a dramatic reversal in Handel's life and career. Wide popularity, admiration, and financial success in the spring of 1738 gave place to unexpected competition and performance clashes with the Italian opera party a year later, spoiling Handel's first oratorio season and exhausting his current account. New documentary evidence culled from a variety of sources allows us to reconsider this period, probe its central episodes, and reveal new ones. Among the topics explored in this essay are a hitherto unknown attempt by female aristocrats to produce Italian operas in 1739, Handel's long-standing interest in musical innovation, a Frenchman's eyewitness account of key Handelian events in 1738, a reconsideration of Saul's and Israel in Egypt's reception in 1739, and the earliest attempt to promote English Oratorio as a British national genre.
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