St John’s, Smith Square wasn’t packed on Thursday night. This, the first concert in the Holst Singers’ attempt to present all of Handel’s oratorios at St John’s over the next seven years to celebrate the tercentenary of the start of building work on the church, unfortunately coincided with England’s second World Cup game against Uruguay. Choosing to spend those particular ninety minutes enjoying the skilful playing and admirable teamwork of the Brook Street Band, choir, soloists, and director Stephen Layton proved wise, as it turned out. Humiliating defeat in Latin America did, however, resonate interestingly with the circumstances of Israel in Egypt’s composition and first performances.
The mid-twentieth century’s rediscovery of the dramatic qualities of Handel’s oratorios, both in performance and scholarship, came at the expense of a view of the oratorios as eighteenth-century works. As Winton Dean put it in his classic Handel’s Dramatic Oratorios and Masques (1959), Handel’s profound and sympathetic insights into the psychology of characters ‘of all nations, religions, ages’, all ‘drawn on their merits, with no loading of the dice’, allowed his works to transcend the ‘limited sympathies and narrow didacticism of his librettists’; for Dean, what the oratorios have to tell us about the human condition makes them emphatically ‘not of an age, but for all time’. Recent scholarship, however, has shown us just how interesting it is to look at the oratorios in relation to contemporary politics and religious thinking. These, after all, are the contexts in which their first audiences thought of them. The oratorios were produced during a time which, in Blair Worden’s words, ‘understood aesthetic accomplishment to be the servant of ethics or beliefs’. ‘A Heroick Poem’, wrote John Dryden in 1697, echoing Ben Jonson’s 1640 translation of Horace’s Ars poetica, should ‘delight, while it instructs’. At a time when ‘politics pervaded literature and music theatre’, as Ruth Smith puts it, ‘oratorio audiences would have been behaving anachronistically if they had not found political themes in them’. Neither would the oratorios’ religious subject matter have dissuaded their first audiences from listening out for politics: as Justin Champion has noted, eighteenth-century England – where the monarch was the head of the national church – recognised ‘no conceptual separation between issues of Church and state, religion and politics’.
On 18 April 1739, a letter appeared in the London Daily Post about the previous night’s performance of Israel in Egypt at the King’s Theatre. It praises the large audience, which included the Prince of Wales, for its good taste in ‘sitting enchanted at Sounds that […] express’d in so sublime a manner the Praises of the Deity itself’; so far, so commonplace, we might think. But what comes next is startling: ‘Did such a Taste prevail universally in a people, that People might expect on a like Occasion, if such Occasion should ever happen to them, the same Deliverance as those Praises celebrate; and Protestant, free, virtuous, united, Christian England need little fear, at any time hereafter, the whole Force of slavish, bigotted, united unChristian popery, risen up against her, should such a Conjuncture ever hereafter happen.’
The letter’s analogy of modern England with ancient Israel was a common rhetorical strategy in contemporary religious writing, part of a tradition of typological readings of the Bible that saw Scripture as, in Thomas Preston’s words, ‘a repertoire of timeless patterns applicable to past and present situations’. Anglican congregations were reminded daily in the responses at Matins and Evensong that they were now God’s ‘chosen people’: ‘O Lord, save the King. And mercifully hear us when we call upon thee. Endue thy ministers with righteousness. And make thy chosen people joyful.’ Paraphrases of Biblical passages that discuss the Israelites’ wars to uphold true religion against the heathen peoples of neighbouring lands frequently substitute Britain for Israel, and Spain or France for the Philistines or Egyptians. Isaac Watts’s version of Psalm 115 in his Psalms of David, Imitated in the Language of the New Testament (1718) is subtitled ‘Popish idolatry reproved. A psalm for the 5th of November’, and begins: ‘O Britain, trust the Lord: Thy foes in vain | Attempt thy ruin, and oppose his reign’. It was also frequently employed in sermons, such as the one preached by Thomas Morell (librettist of at least five Handel oratorios) on 9 January 1739/40 at Kew, where he was a perpetual curate: ‘there are some Instances in which our present condition so nearly resembles the State of Israel’, Morell mused, ‘that I doubt not, but while I was reciting the foregoing passage from the History of that Nation, your Minds were fixed at home.’
The ‘present condition’ Morell was referring to was Britain’s naval war with Spain in the Caribbean and off the coast of Latin America – the so-called ‘War of Jenkins’ Ear’ – which had broken out in October 1739. It was in support of that conflict that the London Daily Post letter of 18 April 1739 was written, using Israel in Egypt as war propaganda. The irony, laid on with a trowel, of ‘should such a Conjuncture ever hereafter happen’ refers to the on-going depredation by Spanish guarda costa vessels, commissioned to police illicit trade with Spain’s American colonies, of English merchant ships. In the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), which concluded the War of the Spanish Succession, Spain was compelled to grant to Britain the asiento de negros, a thirty-year contract to supply at least 4800 slaves and 500 tons of goods (after 1716, 1000 tons) per year to Spain’s possessions across the Atlantic. This rankled with the Spanish, who had since the early sixteenth century held a monopoly on all trade with their colonies. The situation was exacerbated by frequent infringements of the treaty on the part of the English, who regularly exceeded the 1000 ton quota. The guarda costas handled the crews of the ships they inspected roughly. On 9 April 1731, Captain Robert Jenkins’s ship, caught in a calm off Havana, was boarded and searched, and Jenkins tortured to reveal the location of the contraband goods he was suspected of transporting; as a contemporary chronicler put it, a Spanish lieutenant ‘took hold of his left Ear, and with his cutlass slit it down, and then another of the Spaniards took hold of it and tore if off, but gave him the Piece of his Ear again, bidding him carry it to his Master King George’.
The story of Jenkins’s ear, as Philip Woodfine notes, was ‘bandied around’ in the English press ‘as a kind of shorthand for Spanish cruelty and disregard of law’. Robert Walpole’s government were keen to resolve the issue diplomatically, but the opposition press demanded war. The buzzword of the campaign was ‘slavery’: not, chillingly, anything to do with the actual slaves British ships were transporting, but as a metaphor for the humiliating plight of British sailors at the mercy of the guarda costas. On 1 April of the same year, the London Evening Post printed on its front page an angry letter on ‘British slavery’, agitating for war with Spain on behalf of ‘the Subjects of Great Britain now chain’d down as slaves in the Dungeons of Spain’. A satirical print of 1738, entitled ‘Slavery’ (a digitised version is available on the British Museum website) shows a Spaniard driving a plough drawn by four Englishmen; Walpole follows, holding the English lion at sword point; in the background, a ship flying the Union Jack is attacked by a guarda costa ship, and Jenkins’s ear is severed by another Spaniard with a vicious-looking knife.
The London Daily Post letter of a year later saw Israel in Egypt’s depiction of the Israelites under the Egyptian yoke – readily understood by the oratorio’s audience and the letter’s readers as analogous to the present situation across the Atlantic – as another part of the opposition campaign for war. The letter’s mention of Prince Frederick is significant: he was, as Smith notes, ‘the figurehead’ of that campaign. Confidence in Britain’s naval supremacy meant that war would recall the awful punishments meted out by God against the Egyptians; He was, after all, on their side. Seen in this light, Israel in Egypt’s celebrated musical representation of the plagues takes on a troubling hue: not just masterly musical mimesis, but a powerful rhetorical incitement to real-life violence. In some ways, the better the performance, the more disturbing this becomes; and this performance was highly accomplished. The Holst Singers’ near-flawless ensemble and persuasive phrasing made the moment in the brutal fugue ‘They loathed to drink of the river’ where Handel draws the polyphonic threads together into a forceful homophonic cadence on ‘He turned their waters into blood’ especially sinister in its Schadenfreude. Likewise, the energetic, committed string playing of the Brook Street Band gave the sledgehammer chords of ‘He smote all the firstborn of Egypt’ – all played here with slashing down-bows – a shockingly immediate ferocity (though the element of religious fervour lent by the orchestra’s three trombones, which, as Anthony Baines and Arnold Myers point out, were in the mid-eighteenth century ‘still used principally in church music’ and therefore ‘maintained strong associations with the underworld or the supernatural’, was muted in this performance due to balance issues).
Perhaps the most disconcerting aspect of Israel in Egypt’s representation of the plagues is its absolute refusal to sympathise with their Egyptian victims. Its grisly depiction of the slaughter of the firstborn is followed not by reflection or lamentation (such as we hear earlier for the enslaved Hebrews in ‘And the children of Israel sigh’d’) but the rejoicing and pastoral tranquillity of ‘But as for His people, He led them forth like sheep’. In movements like ‘Their land brought forth frogs’, sung with stylish phrasing and great attention to the text by countertenor Chris Lowrey (easily the stand-out soloist), we are even invited to laugh at the infestations and attendant disease epidemics (‘He gave their cattle over to the pestilence; blotches and blains broke forth on man and beast’) afflicting the Egyptians and their livestock. In the opening ritornello, the first and second violins gleefully play leapfrog with a bouncy, dotted-rhythm idea; the first vocal entry acts almost like a punch line, the audience suddenly ‘getting’ what the music they have just heard was imitating; this moment almost always, as it did here, raises a chuckle. But to laugh here must require an absolute lack of empathy with the Egyptians’ sufferings. What laughter shares with warfare, according to the philosopher Henri Bergson, is that both call for us to see people – those we laugh at, those we fight against – as less than human; both demand what Bergson called the ‘momentary anaesthesia of the heart’.
War was eventually declared on 23 October 1739. On 1 April 1740, the London Daily Post reprinted their letter of a year previously – by popular demand, it seems – to accompany a performance of Israel in Egypt that evening. As the newspaper’s introduction to the letter admitted, the opening months of the war had not been successful for Britain; there was also widespread fear that France would join the war on the side of the Spanish. ‘[I]f the Effects of our late Humiliation did not go off with the Weather,’ the introduction concluded, ‘it may be hoped, that what is therein said [in both the letter, and the oratorio], on the supposal of a General Popish Alliance against us, may, if attended to, help us forward, in the right Way, to stand our Ground against those that have already; and as many more as shall hereafter, think fit to declare against us.’ Though by April faith in Britain’s naval strength had clearly been shaken, reprinting the letter affirms the continuing faith, of some at least, in Israel in Egypt’s ability to instil fighting spirit.
We might, then, think Israel in Egypt an odd work to choose to begin a celebration. This thrilling performance showed the work at its best; for me, at least, this made the ends to which the technical mastery of its construction and the power of its musical rhetoric were put in its first performances all the more unsettling. This isn’t to say we shouldn’t enjoy Israel in Egypt, or any of the forthcoming instalments in the Holst Singers’ Handel oratorio cycle. It’s just a suggestion that with the help of programme notes, or a pre-concert talk – neither of which were offered – when we laugh at the opening bars of ‘Their land brought forth frogs’, we would be able to know exactly what it is Handel’s music has made us laugh at.
Handel’s Israel in Egypt was performed at St John’s, Smith Square on June 19th 2014.