Background
Years before, Smart wrote a libretto for an oratorio called Hannah. Like Hannah, Smart most likely wrote the work out of a need to earn money. However, his previous oratorio only lasted a few nights, and Smart hoped that his second could succeed where the other failed. This would be the last work in Smart's final years that was written completely for adults.
An advertisement for Abimelech ran in the "Musical Intelligencer" section, of the Public Advertiser, on 16 March which said:
"YOUNG Abimilech will be exercised on Foote's Theatrical Heath on Wednesday next, when he will run three Trial-heats. He was bred by the celebrated Kit Crazy, who rode flying Pegasus the great Match round the Hop-Garden and who is universally allowed to be a SMART Fellow, and a tolerable Psalmodist. Abimilech is half Brothers to Saul, which beat Sampson on Friday 19th of February, tho' the Odds in the upper half of the Scaffold were Three and a Half to One. Abimilech has been a long while in Training under little Arnold, a Man of sound-Knowledge, who tho' of a diminutive Size, hath such amazing Strength in his Composition, that, when he gets with his Airs, he will seize on any Man alive, and take him by the Ears."
Abimelech was performed once at the Theatre Royal on 18 March 1768 and once, after Smart's death, at Covent Garden on 25 March 1772. There are no surviving scores for Abimelech, but the libretto was sold during its run at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, in 1768 and the run of the revised version of the oratorio at the Covent-Garden in 1772. These works were published anonymously but Charles Burney, Smart's friend, attributes the libretto to Smart and pasticcios from Handel in his General History of Music. The "pasticcios" were musical selections from Handel used by the composer Samuel Arnold.
Read more about this topic: Abimelech (oratorio)
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