Handel’s Israelite Oratorio Libretti: Sacred Drama and Biblical Exegesis by Deborah W. Rooke (review)

Libretti exist at the interface of authorship, musical composition, performance, dramatic practice, intellectual contexts, audience reception, and national trends, so there can be plenty to say about them. Given that scrutinizing them in isolation from their music is still often considered unworthwhile, it’s gratifying to see Oxford University Press publishing a monograph on Handel’s oratorio libretti. Deborah Rooke (an Old Testament scholar), however, appears insufficiently versed in the material she has undertaken to analyse. For example, she categorizes Theodora three times as an ‘Israelite oratorio’ (pp. 207, 228, 245), but Theodora is about Christian martyrdom in fourth-century Antioch and contains no Israelites or references to them. Moreover, she does not address all the libretti that could be designated (as the subtitle has it) ‘sacred drama’, and the choice of ten out of the fifteen libretti concerning the Israelites is not explained. The list of ‘Israelite’ oratorios at the end of the book omits Alexander Balus, Belshazzar, Israel in Egypt, Joshua, and the Occasional Oratorio.

Rooke lists feminist and gendered readings of the Old Testament as a research interest. The accounts of the biblical narratives, especially those that concern women, are the most novel and (to those familiar with previous studies) the most rewarding parts of the book. The chapter on Susanna, focusing on Susanna’s marriage, is a useful corrective to Winton Dean’s still influential account in his Handel’s Dramatic Oratorios and Masques (London, 1959).

Rooke’s method is first to describe the libretto’s biblical source and usually its chief intermediary sources, then to describe the libretto, and finally to compare libretto and source(s), deducing the librettist’s aim. The biblical source(s) and the librettists’ departures from them are described in more detail than hitherto, and these parts of the book, containing the most original work, will be the most valuable to students of the librettists’ contribution to Handel’s output. The writing is clear, and so is the process, but it entails considerable repetition. In the chapter on Esther, for example, four pages of description (pp. 25–9) yield only a single line of substantive original comment (p. 30).

Less repetition and fuller treatments of the primary texts would have been helpful. The accounts of the libretti are selective, sometimes astonishingly so. The discussion of Samson omits Dalila (the lead soprano role and agent of the hero’s plight). To describe Saul in Saul without mentioning the climactic Elegy on his death (musically one-sixth of the work, verbally the librettist’s greatest effort) is inexplicable, except inasmuch as it is necessary for the (inaccurate) conclusion that Saul is ‘transformed from . . . a tragic figure into . . . the embodiment of evil’.

The ‘Conclusion’ to each chapter, usually less than half a page, generally repeats the findings of previous studies and seldom adds to them. Unfortunately it often simplifies or overrides issues raised in the preceding pages. The search for a new angle on a libretto frequently leads Rooke to a skewed or superficial account. Like several others, the ‘Conclusion’ to the chapter on Solomon reiterates the standard claim that the oratorio glorifies George II. But the chapter itself does not consider the libretto’s political references, focusing instead on Solomon’s relations with women. By stressing the ‘harlot’, ‘foreign’, ‘other’ identities of those women in the Bible, yet failing to consider the oratorio’s possible references to George’s foreign mistresses, it raises the reader’s eyebrows as much as the king’s liaisons did those of his subjects. The tendency of English eighteenth-century spoken drama to offer multiple meanings was established as long ago as 1963 (John Loftis, The Politics of Drama in Augustan England (Oxford)), and has been well absorbed into studies of contemporary music theatre, oratorio included; it is scarcely addressed here (only once in a ‘Conclusion’).

The subtitle ‘sacred drama’acknowledges that these are dramatic...