Israel in Egypt
An Oratorio by G.F. Handel

Israel in Egypt : A unique masterpiece

by Ruth Smith

Tonight’s oratorio, with texts from the Old Testament of the Bible, celebrates God’s release of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt and their miraculous passage through the Red Sea to the Promised Land. ‘Exodus’ recounts the Israelites’ suffering, the plagues which God visits on the enslaving Egyptians, and the Israelites’ departure from Egypt under the leadership of Moses. ‘Moses’ Song’ praises God for saving the Israelites.

Israel in Egypt is unique in Handel’s output. It is an oratorio unlike any of his other works. It is hugely ambitious, a cathedral in music, refulgent with some of his most adventurous harmony, most vivid word-painting, most distinctive orchestration, and most demanding self-challenges. Why and how did this masterpiece come about?

Handel in 1739
Handel first introduced oratorio in English to his London public in 1732, very successfully, and during the following years he mounted seasons of both Italian opera and English oratorio, to attract the enthusiasts for the two (very different) forms of music drama. But in summer 1738 it became apparent that too few subscriptions were being promised to secure the costly Italian stars that fashionable London expected for his operas, so Handel planned a season of English works. He opened with his new oratorio Saul, and then revived the moral odes Alexander’s Feast and Il trionfo del Tempo e della Verità. Normally he presented two new works in each season. The second was to be Israel in Egypt.

But, not for the first time, Handel was contested by the monied patrons of Italian opera. In direct competition to his performances, the young Earl of Middlesex put on an opera showcasing his Italian mistress. By the end of March Handel’s bank account, containing £2300 in 1732, was empty. When he eventually gave the first two performances of Israel in Egypt, on 4 and 11 April – which, being Wednesdays in Lent, should have been unchallenged by opera – the competition hobbled him by changing their latest advertisement description from ‘opera’ to ‘serenata’ and performing it on his second night. With help from supporters, Israel managed one further performance. But Handel was already inserting Italian arias in it. In his lifetime it was one of his major box-office flops. No wonder if Handel’s audience, accustomed to his Italian opera arias, and coming to the theatre for a sociable evening’s entertainment, was mystified and alienated by Israel. All its words are direct quotation from the Old Testament of the Bible; it is narrative not dramatic, but not an orderly sequential narrative; it has no character roles; and more than threequarters of the music is choruses, predominantly in ‘church style’. Nothing like it had been heard in London before, and Handel never wrote anything like it again. What was he doing?

Writing Israel in Egypt
Princess Amelia wrote to her sister Princess Anne about Handel’s Funeral Anthem for their mother, Queen Caroline (1737): ‘it’s the finest cruel touching thing that ever was heard’. Handel thought highly of it too, and wanted to widen its audience. He hoped to include it as the central part of his benefit concert (‘Oratorio’) in 1738, but the King would not allow that. Then he envisaged it forming David’s elegy for Saul and Jonathan in Saul, but he changed his mind. At last, only lightly re-texted, it became Part 1 of Israel in Egypt, ‘The Lamentation of the Israelites for the Death of Joseph’.

Four days after finishing Saul, on 1 October 1738, Handel began to compose a setting of ‘Moses’ Song’, Exodus 15.1-21, which celebrates the salvation of the Israelites from Egyptian pursuit at the Red Sea, of which he amended only one verse, and which became Part 3 of Israel in Egypt. The text of what became Part 2 comprises extracts from Exodus and three psalms about the plagues visited on the Egyptians during their enslavement of the Israelites and the Israelites’ subsequent redemption. It is a more elaborate text-compilation than Handel normally undertook himself, and is probably by Charles Jennens, author of the libretto of Saul and, yet to come, Messiah. By the time Handel began to set it, four days after finishing Moses’ Song, he was sure of the ordering of the work, for he headed it as Part 2, calling it ‘Exodus’.

For over two hundred years after Handel’s death, Israel in Egypt was usually performed without the retexted Funeral Anthem, its original cause. It is in this traditional form as a two-part work that we hear the oratorio tonight, depicting the enslavement of the Israelites, the plagues inflicted on their oppressors, their escape from Egypt, the drowning of their pursuers in the Red Sea, and their hymn of gratitude: in all which the ‘hero’ is God.

A work for its times
Handel may have felt that the extraordinariness of his music for Israel would have been acceptable to his audience, because to them its basic story would have been in several ways immediately relevant.

All four of Handel’s performances of Israel in 1739 and 1740 were in the weeks immediately before Easter. His (overwhelmingly Christian) audience would have recognised the aptness of this timing. The Exodus story is for Christians a ‘type’ or foreshadowing of their redemption by Christ. In the New Testament Book of Revelation (15.3), those who have defeated evil sing the Song of Moses, the final part of Israel. It is also part of the Anglican Easter liturgy. The Book of Common Prayer prescribes for Easter Sunday a reading of Psalm 118, which quotes Exodus 15.2, ‘The Lord is my strength and my song, and is become my salvation’, and, for Easter Monday, Exodus 15 itself, the Song of Moses. In this respect Israel is the forerunner of Messiah: both works make the traditional connections between Old Testament texts and salvation by Christ, both draw on biblical text that is also part of the liturgy, both defy contemporary Enlightenment sceptics by insisting on the truth of miracles, and both are written for Passiontide, which is when Handel always performed them.

Handel aspired to be the nation’s prime composer, and Israel claims the ground of high national art. Handel’s contemporaries considered epic to be the noblest of genres. More than any other of Handel’s oratorios, Israel is an epic. As in epic, the nation – here, the chorus – is the main (human) character, and the subject-matter is a nation forging its destiny, overcoming its losses, settling in its land, and assuming an identity as a distinct community, all under the protection and guidance of its especial deity. And, trumping revered ancient Classical epic, Israel reflected the faith of its audience.

Handel may have not been interested in a more specific relevance of Israel to national salvation, but at least one member of his audience was. On 18 April 1739 the London Daily Post carried a letter about the previous evening’s performance of Israel enlisting it as topical war propaganda, invoking the traditional parallel of ancient Israel and Protestant England (God’s chosen people then and now), and the topical parallel of Israel’s heathen enemies with the contemporary Catholic enemies of Britain. In spring 1739 all England except the government wanted war with Spain. The media were full of images and accounts of English sailors ‘enslaved’ by Spanish costa guardas who had captured them in maritime trading reprisals: compare the oratorio’s account of the Israelites enslaved by the Egyptians. The demand was for a naval war, based on Britain’s supposed control of the sea: the engulfing of the Egyptian land forces in the Red Sea was an encouraging image. A year later, the war being now an unpleasant reality, the letter was reprinted to coincide with the oratorio’s revival. To modern ears, the bass duet ‘The lord is a man of war’ may sound inaptly perky and overlong, but for Handel’s audience it was a precursor of ‘Rule, Britannia’: ‘the chosen captains’ of Pharaoh would have been heard as hostile Spanish mariners and the music’s mood as being entirely appropriate (and the captains receive their solemn elegy immediately after).

Another supportive newspaper article alerts us to this oratorio’s particular concord with the contemporary rediscovery of the marvels of Old Testament verse. ‘I would recommend to every one,’ says the writer to the intending audience, ‘to take the Book of the Drama with them: For tho’ the Harmony be so unspeakably great of itself, it is in an unmeasurable Proportion more so, when seen to what Words it is adapted.’ It was a commonplace that the Old Testament’s vivid and sublime (and divinely inspired) words were perfectly suited to Handel’s vivid and sublime music, especially his anthem style – and Israel offers the listener a series of tremendous anthems. What better text for Handel to set than the Ur-sublime anthem, the Song of Moses.

The Song of Moses was particularly valuable to Anglican clergy and Anglican musicians. It provided the most venerable, most unassailable precedent not just for sung worship, but for choral, antiphonal, instrumentally accompanied cathedral music. Such music was still on the defensive from Puritan censure as being too complex, too ornate, insufficiently Protestant. A month before Handel began setting the Song of Moses, the Rev. Thomas Payne pointed out in his Three Choirs Festival sermon that Moses, having brought God’s people out of bondage, led them ‘in that noble Song of Praise which he composed upon the joyful occasion; and which they sang alternately in two Choirs, assisted with Musical instruments, to the God of their Salvation.’ God, says Payne, clearly approved such worship, the patent forerunner of the Anglican cathedral service. And Israel is a pinnacle of instrumentally enlivened double-choir composition.

The music of miracles
Handel is unlikely to have written Israel in Egypt in support of cathedral music’s defenders, but it would have appeared to his audience as one colossal, continuous, magnificently diverse anthem. Of Handel’s identified musical sources most are devotional, including an Easter chorale; and much of Moses’ Song is based on the music for another canticle hymning God’s grace, a setting of the Magnificat by Diogini Erba. The antiquity that was claimed as ratifying cathedral music is also a defining characteristic of Israel. Handel’s musical sources here are mostly composers of earlier centuries (Giovanni Gabrieli, Johann Kaspar Kerll , Francesco Antonio Urio, Alessandro Stradella, Nicolaus Adam Strungk, Johann Krieger, Johann Pachelbel, his own teacher Friedrich Wilhelm Zachow), and he leaves in place archaic-sounding harmony and rhythms. His self-quotations likewise sound ‘archaic’, for example the angular fugues conveying the Egyptians’ pain in ‘They loathed to drink of the river’ and ‘He smote all the first-born of Egypt’. Trombones, heard in eleven movements, were so antique in England in 1739 as to be obsolete, and Handel is thought to have used visiting German players. He gives the trombones a special identity in keeping with their connotations of antiquity and extraordinariness. They are the voice of the Ancient of Days, the Old Testament God. To believers in Handel’s time, the story of the Exodus was one of the strongest ‘proofs’ of God’s miracles. Israel is a massive statement and restatement of faith. Handel’s music evokes the idea of God and of His astonishing, inscrutable, unfathomable numinousness: by striking awe into the listener through unexpected harmonic transitions, especially to convey divine power (most astonishingly in ‘And in the greatness of thine excellency’), by firm block movement of voices and accompaniment, and by potent silences. As always, Handel is a master of silence, for a variety of sensations: grief, shock, fear, suspense, contemplation, questioning, and awe.

The very fabric of the music repeatedly and varyingly renders ideas in sound. In ‘The people shall hear and be afraid’, fear is inculcated before any words are heard by six bars of a brusque dotted motif, which relentlessly continues through all but four of the next 60 bars as the Canaanites huddle together. Then they melt away, from eight massed voices to individual vocal lines, barely accompanied, marked piano just before the forte chordal acclaim, with hair-raising intervals, of God’s greatness, which reduces Canaan to inanition: lower voices, monotone, unaccompanied. And then, in a complete change of mood to tenderness and serenity, God’s people ‘pass over’ into safety, the bass pedal note giving their footing security, the vocal rising figure expressing their aspiration to be ‘thy people’, the extension of the scalar motif in the bass vocal line from seven notes to twelve enlarging the numbers of the saved, and their repeated passing over suggesting that ‘the number of the children of Israel shall be as the sand of the sea’. Handel drew his friends’ attention to his adventurousness. Katherine, Lady Knatchbull, relayed to her family that ‘He says the storm of thunder is to be bold and fine, & the thick silent darkness is to be express’d in a very particular piece of musick.’ These two movements follow each other (in the Bible their texts do not), giving Handel splendid scope for his genius for contrast, a favourite shaping device which the text of Israel gave him myriad opportunities to deploy. The ‘particular’ harmonies of ‘He sent a thick darkness’ range in a mere 37 bars across keys with (implied) signatures from six flats to five sharps. Handel sets up expectations which are constantly frustrated, so that the listener shares the Egyptians’ sense of not knowing how to find their way and, when they make a (tentative) move, not knowing where they are. And then the final chord proves to be a preparation for the first chord of the following chorus, which tells of the smiting of the first born: the effect is of a blow to the back of the neck, unexpected yet inevitable, and horrifically repeated, again and again, in the staccato string accompaniment.

Israel famously showcases Handel’s ability to bring texts to life. Some of his ‘enactments’ are brilliantly and wittily illustrative, in vocal lines, instrumentation, texure, metre or all four: the hopping frogs (right up onto the royal bed ‘even in the king’s chamber’); the tormenting flies (you swat away their buzzing demi-semi-quavers and back they come again – London had never before heard violin writing like it); the innocently plopping raindrops turning to drumming hailstones; the drying up of the Red Sea (‘He rebuked the Red Sea’) from eight vocal parts to four with a suspenseful awestruck silence between; the confusion of ‘the horse and his rider’ as the eight parts of the antiphonal choirs tumble together in the waves; the engulfing power of the overwhelming waters, timpani unmellowed by brass. This may be the nearest that the eighteenth century came to the experience of cinema. Handel’s mimetic writing has a great range of sophistication: perhaps he was using different kinds of enactment for different types of listener in his audience, in order to impress as many as possible with the veracity of Scripture (and of course with his mastery of composition).

The verbal text of Israel is challenging to set, being very repetitive (the miracle at the Red Sea has six iterations, God is praised seven times in Moses’ Song), and lacking a sequential narrative. But, as is clear from his operas, Handel relished opportunities to set similar utterances in differing ways. In Moses’ Song the chorus ‘And with the blast of thy nostrils’ and the soprano air ‘Thou didst blow with the wind’, separated by only two minutes of music, are conspicuously different accounts of the same divine intervention. The first is a four-part chorus with three lines of counterpoint, the heaping of waters depicted by a rising soprano line and the upright wall of water formed by a repeated note, contrasting with ‘congealed’ depths (lower voices, almost stagnating). The second is a soprano air, relaxed and flowing. Both attest to God’s omnipotence. The first describes its effects, the second suggests its sublime effortlessness. Oratorio is often now described as opera of the mind, and in Israel more than any other Handel engages our attention to meditate on God’s wonders and care, by repeated, renewed, multi-faceted contemplation.

Afterlife
Handel’s leading singers for his performances in 1739 were Elisabeth Duparc (La Francesina), soprano; William Savage, alto; John Beard, tenor; Gustavus Waltz and Henry Reinhold, basses. Already by the second performance he was inserting arias for Duparc (one English, four Italian) and shortening or omitting choruses. The sole performance in 1740 reverted to the original form. When he revived it for two performances in 1756, by which time he was being assisted by J.C. Smith junior, he substituted movements from Solomon, the Occasional Oratorio and the Anthem on the Peace for the Funeral Anthem, and in this version there were two more performances in his lifetime, in the two following years. Mrs Delany wrote to Mrs Dewes on 27 March 1756: ‘Israel in Egypt did not take, it is too solemn for common ears’. But in its two-part version, with enormous forces, it took very well from 1857 at the Crystal Palace Handel Festivals, second in popularity only to Messiah.

This event is made possible by the Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music and the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies.

Creating new audiences with music as the mirror  The Lowell Milken Center is committed to introducing new people beyond UCLA’s campus to the musical journeys of America’s Jews and engaging them with this wonderfully rich musical heritage. The Center fosters new artistic expression, presents performances and offers educational programming in communities, such as the adult education curriculun, called Stories of Music. Much of this engagement happens through partnerships with local, national and international organizations, and features artists from UCLA, Los Angeles and beyond.

Furthering knowledge and understanding of Jewish music Music of American Jewish experience has its first permanent dedicated academic home with the establishment of the Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience. It unites the academic and the artistic, showcasing artists, scholars and educators to share their sounds and stories. The founding gift from philanthropist Lowell Milken advances understanding of and knowledge about the musical heritage of Jews in America. It also accelerates growth and commitment to the field by contributing to research, scholarship and performance programs at the undergraduate, graduate and faculty levels. The Lowell Milken Center builds upon the activities of the Lowell Milken Fund for American Jewish Music, established at UCLA in 2017, to expand the reach of the Milken Archive and its vast holdings of recordings, scores and historical materials to students, scholars and the public.