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Audience. The Music to be disposed after the Manner of the Coronation Service.’ 5
Although he wrote two oratorios the following year, Deborah and Athaliah,
which were, like Esther, well received, at this stage oratorio was merely an occasional
diversion from what was still primarily a season of Italian opera. But when in 1737 a
pastiche of assorted church music and oratorio movements presented as ‘An Oratorio’
reportedly earned him over £1000, while his latest opera Serse (over which he had
taken particular care) closed after only five performances, he must have seen which
way the wind was blowing. In 1738 Handel returned to oratorio once more, and by
1741 he had definitively abandoned opera. Some intriguing reasons have been
suggested for this turn in his career. David Hunter points to a stroke that Handel
suffered in 1737 and his poor health thereafter as being instrumental to his decision in
favour of oratorio, with its shorter performance season. 6 Henry Burnett has argued that
Maurice Greene’s monopolization of virtually all the significant positions in the
Anglican musical hierarchy thwarted Handel’s own ambitions as a composer in this
field, which had then to find another expression. 7 Certainly he did use many of his
earlier oratorios as a way of re-presenting much of the church music he had already
written to a wider audience. In the main, however, it was surely commercial
considerations that led him in this direction, and it can hardly be denied that his
oratorios captured—and held—the ear of his audiences in a way that his operas did
not.
There are a number of reasons why this was so. The amateur choral tradition
5 From the Daily Journal (London, 19 April 1732); quoted in C. Burney, A general history of music
from the earliest ages to the present period, 4 vols. (London, 1776-1789), vol. IV, p.361; facsimile
in H. E. Smither. ‘Oratorio’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online,
http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/20397 (accessed August 2, 2008).
See also D. Burrows, Handel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp.165-71, 199, 205-6.
6 ‘Miraculous recovery? Handel’s illness, the narrative tradition of heroic strength, and the oratorio
turn’, Eighteenth-century music 3/2 (September 2006), 253-267. As Hunter points out, this of
course contradicts the received view of Handel’s legendary physical resilience.
7 ‘Greene and Handel: The choral music-problems concerning mutual influence and indebtedness’,
The American Organist 20/6 (June 1986), 66-74. This could at least partly explain Handel’s curious
animus toward Greene.
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