Handel's Israelite Oratorio Libretti: Sacred Drama and Biblical Exegesis. By DEBORAH W. ROOKE.

Abstract

Handel (1685–1759) relied upon a number of librettists for his Israelite oratorios (composed for the most part during the period 1732–52). In addition to anonymous writers (responsible for Joshua, Solomon, and Susanna), Handel had five known librettists: Samuel Humphreys (Esther, Deborah, Athalia); Charles Jennens (Saul, Belshazzar); Newburgh Hamilton (Samson); James Miller (Joseph and his Brethren); and Thomas Morell (Judas Macchabaeus, Alexander Balus, Jephtha). They provided Handel with a biblically based plot in English which the composer set to music in the style of Italian ‘serious opera’. The focus of this book by Deborah Rooke, Research Fellow in Bible and Music at the Oxford Centre for Christianity and Culture, Regent’s Park College, is to engage in a detailed comparison between the libretti and the biblical source texts and to relate these ‘sacred dramas’ to their eighteenth-century context. Although these Israelite oratorios have fallen into neglect, they were popular in the eighteenth century, and part of their appeal was that Britain was seen as ‘the Israel of its day, preserving the true faith by God’s help against a bevy of infidels’ (p. xxii), such infidels being Catholic nations! So Judas Macchabaeus ‘was completed in the wake of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745–46 as a compliment to the younger son of George II, William Duke of Cumberland, who … had overseen the final quelling of the rebellion’ (p. 145). The libretto of Thomas Morell draws on 1 and 2 Maccabees but at certain points departs from it, thereby revealing his ‘redactional’ interest. One such example is that whereas in 1 Maccabees there is no explicit divine commissioning for Judas, in the libretto his brother Simon does sense such a commission for Judas: ‘Judas shall set the captive free, / And lead us on to Victory’ (p. 155).