Judas Maccabaeus

About the work

Handel wrote Judas Maccabaeus in the summer of 1746, and it was first performed at Covent Garden on 1 April 1747. Thomas Morell's libretto, drawn from 1 Maccabees and Josephus, tells the revolt of the Maccabees against the Seleucid king Antiochus IV: the death of their father Mattathias, Judas taking command, the victories, the cleansing and rededication of the Temple in Jerusalem, and peace.

It was written for a British occasion. Handel and Morell wrote it after the Battle of Culloden and dedicated it to the Duke of Cumberland, and the Jewish story was the vehicle: a concert oratorio on Jewish history by a Lutheran composer, not Jewish liturgical music. It has long been associated with Hanukkah, the festival of the rededication.

The libretto has the victory, not the oil. 1 Maccabees gives the eight days of dedication; the miracle of the oil that burned for eight days comes from the Talmud, and isn't in Morell's text. Rabbinic tradition puts the light at the centre and the battles at the edge, so here the candle-lighting show carries the light, before the set begins.

"See, the conqu'ring hero comes" was borrowed: Handel wrote it for Joshua (1748) and added it to Judas in later revivals. It is now the best-known number in both.

There is a thread to Elijah, the set that plays on the Ring nights: both turn on refusing idols. "We never will bow down to the rude stock or sculptur'd stone" is the refusal Elijah makes on Mount Carmel.

Where the music comes from

Every note is transcribed by hand from a public-domain score: Vincent Novello's vocal score of Judas Maccabaeus, published by Novello, Ewer and Co. in London, read from the copy on the Internet Archive (handelsoratorioj00hand, from the University of Toronto's music library). The soloists and the chorus are read note for note; where the keyboard reduction's inner voices are hard to read, its harmony, rhythm and register are kept and the voicing is approximate. The Overture, which the vocal score gives only as a keyboard reduction too small to read reliably, is read part by part from the full score Handel's publisher's successor William Randall printed in London in 1769 (judasmacchabaeus00hand_0, from the University of North Carolina's music library). The timing follows the scores' tempo markings, and where a number has none, a tempo that suits it; not a recording.

There is no choir in the sample library (the VSCO 2 Community Edition orchestra), so the sung lines are played on instruments, each character's on its own, and the chorus on strings with woodwinds doubling. Handel's continuo harpsichord, which the library doesn't have, is a Surge XT harpsichord. Trumpets and timpani are kept for the martial numbers. The battles get the sounds a staged production would give them, under the music. Every pitch is Handel's.

The stage

From the street the porch is the back of the scene, as on the Ring and Elijah stages.

The scenes are rendered once and play on all eight nights, so they can't show which night it is: the porch carries the same warm glow every night, and the night's own lights are shown in its candle-lighting show.

Who is who

Blue and white are the colours of the tallit, and later of the flag of Israel.