The term ‘oratorio’ seems altogether too limiting to apply to the type of work he had developed during the course of the 1740s. Though Semele and Hercules are not oratorios, they represent a crucial stage in this process, for without them Belshazzar and Judas Maccabaeus are inconceivable, just as none of these works is imaginable without the experience of Messiah, a piece that appears like a sublime exercise in the reduction of Handel’s genius to its essential components. Nor does any of the oratorios aim merely at formulaic repetition of another. Like the plays of Shakespeare or the operas of Verdi, each, despite external pressures from the entertainment world, creates its own individual dimensions. Though, like the English playwright and the Italian composer, Handel had occasional recourse to quickfire solutions and half-hearted fudging, the particular quality of his absorption in a given work gave it a unique character. Thus when we speak vaguely of ‘Handel oratorio’ we mean something whose connexion with the form as then accepted in Italy and Germany is only a general one.
