Semele (Handel) - Background

Background

In the early 1740s, oratorios at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, were George Frideric Handel’s chief concert activity in London. Several of them — Israel in Egypt (written 1738), Messiah (1741) and Samson (1743), for instance — bore some semblance to Greek tragedy, and this led Handel to venture into the world of classical drama.

He took up William Congreve's libretto for the 1707 John Eccles opera Semele, writing the music in a month, from 3 June to 4 July 1743. The work naturally took shape as an opera, but Handel eyed a place for it on the Theatre Royal's oratorio-centered Lenten concert series the following February (1744), knowing that this would secure the work's first performance and enable him to get paid. So he fashioned Semele for presentation "in the manner of an oratorio" — a wolf in sheep's clothing.

His ploy did not delight the organizers of the series, resulting in few performances, and it created a spurious and long-lasting identity for Semele as a concert piece, one championed and "claimed" even today by choral groups. That the work is more an opera than an oratorio is implicit in playwright Congreve's libretto, amplified by Alexander Pope, and in the score. As the late Lord Harewood put it:

" ... the music of Semele is so full of variety, the recitative so expressive, the orchestration so inventive, the characterization so apt, the general level of invention so high, the action so full of credible situation and incident — in a word, the piece as a whole is so suited to the operatic stage — that one can only suppose its neglect to have been due to an act of abnegation on the part of opera companies."