J. S. BACH Jonathan Berkahn - Victoria University - Victoria ...

that would perpetuate his oratorios in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was yet to
be born, but a growing middle-class public, suspicious of the theatre (and with no
interest in—or comprehension—of its Italian libretti) were ‘happy to find a format in
which musical virtuosity could be enjoyed within an aura of respectable piety.’ 8
Jonathan Keates has pointed to the moral effect of the Lisbon earthquake in 1755,
encouraging a public mood (and hence public entertainments) of a graver, more
serious nature. 9 More recently there has been considerable exploration of the political
and national context to his oratorios, some of them (the Occasional Oratorio, Judas
Maccabaeus, Joshua, Alexander Balus) written against the background of the 1745
Jacobite rebellion, and all of them presupposing an identification between
contemporary Britain and Old Testament Israel that was a commonplace of eighteenth-
century thought. 10 As Ruth Smith has made abundantly clear, Handel’s libretti
addressed questions of legitimacy, patriotism, rebellion, and liberty that were very
much live issues, and his oratorios were a confluence of the most potent cultural
currents of the day: ‘The depiction of history was the noblest form of painting; epic
was the highest form of literature; the Old Testament was the greatest repository of the
sublime; religious music was music at its best; . . . Oratorio, which combined all these,
8 A. Hicks. ‘Handel, George Frideric, 22: Oratorio forms , Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online,
http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/40060pg22 (accessed August 2,
2008).
9 J. Keates, Handel: the man and his music (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1986), p.313.
10 See William Weber, ‘Handel’s London: Political, social and intellectual contexts’, The Cambridge
companion to Handel, ed. D. Burrows (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp.45-54;
‘Intellectual bases of the Handelian tradition, 1759-1800’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical
Association 108 (1981), 100-114; The rise of musical classics in eighteenth-century England: A
study in canon, ritual, and ideology, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp.103-42; and Thomas
McGeary’s response to arguments from this last: ‘Music, meaning, and politics: The 1784 Handel
commemoration reconsidered’, Göttinger Händel-Beiträge 9 (2002), 205-17. Ruth Smith has done
much particularly detailed and valuable work in this area: ‘Intellectual contexts of Handel’s English
oratorios’, Music in eighteenth-century England: essays in memory of Charles Cudworth, ed. C.
Hogwood and R. Luckett(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 115-33; ‘The
achievements of Charles Jennens (1700-1773)’, Music & Letters 70/2 (May, 1989), 161-90;
‘Handel’s Israelite librettos and English politics, 1732-52’, Händel und die europäische
Kirchenmusik seiner Zeit, Göttinger Händel-Beiträge 5 (1993), 195-215; Handel’s oratorios and
eighteenth-century thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); ‘Handel’s English
librettists’, The Cambridge companion to Handel, ed. D. Burrows (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997), pp.92-110; ‘The meaning of Morell’s libretto of “Judas Maccabaeus”,
Music & letters 79/1 (February 1998), 50-71; ‘Comprehending “Theodora”’, Eighteenth-century
music 2/1 (March 2005), 57-90.
114