History
Oxford was then a center of nationalist and Jacobite sentiment and Athalia was composed in the midst of a controversy about Handel's advocacy of Italian opera and may have been a pragmatic reaction to this: Handel bowed to English musical taste by writing an oratorio, a genre with which he had had two previous successes.
Handel may have chosen Jean Racine's Athalie as the basis for his libretto because of Jacobite allusions in its plot. Athalia, as presented in the Bible, was a tyrannical usurper who was finally overthrown, whereupon a hidden prince took his rightful throne – a theme obviously capable of a Jacobite interpretation. Handel uses rhetorical planning and symbols to reinstate many ideas of Racine's that are lost in Samuel Humphreys' libretto.
The work was completed on 7 June 1733, and first performed on 10 July 1733 at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford. The Bee (14 July 1733) reported that the performance was "performed with the utmost Applause, and is esteemed equal to the most celebrated of that Gentleman's Performances: there were 3700 Persons present".
Read more about this topic: Athalia (Handel)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“A country grows in history not only because of the heroism of its troops on the field of battle, it grows also when it turns to justice and to right for the conservation of its interests.”
—Aristide Briand (1862–1932)
“History, as an entirety, could only exist in the eyes of an observer outside it and outside the world. History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“History ... is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
But what experience and history teach is this—that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)