John Koegel
Professor of Musicology
California State University, Fullerton

George Frideric Handel’s famous English-language oratorio Israel in Egypt is one of the great Baroque choral masterpieces. Composed in October 1738, it was premiered in April 1739 as part of the composer’s new oratorio season at the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket in London. The work tells the Exodus story of the enslavement of the Israelites during their Egyptian captivity and their release from bondage under the leadership of the prophet Moses. The libretto was likely compiled by Charles Jennens, mostly from the Old Testament books of Exodus and Psalms. Jennens was also responsible for the libretto for Handel’s Messiah, taken from both the New and Old Testaments. Israel in Egypt is unusual in that it is one of few oratorios that has no cast of individually named characters, although the chorus represents the nations of Israel and Egypt. As with other sacred oratorios, this work was not intended to be staged and no costumes or scenery were used.

Because of its then-novel nature as primarily a choral oratorio without an emphasis on solo vocal arias, the first version of Israel in Egypt was not a success at its premiere in 1739. A contemporary writer commented on this original version thus: “it did not take, it is too solemn for common ears.” The composer quickly revised it to suit English concert-goers expectations, by adding a few arias and other material and by omitting some choruses. One reason for Handel’s ultimate success with his oratorios was that his audiences were familiar with the biblical stories set in several of his works, particularly with Messiah and Israel in Egypt. With the latter work, contemporary audiences particularly identified themselves with the Old Testament Israelites and their enemies the ancient Egyptians. They saw England as a Protestant island nation against its continental European Catholic enemy—viewing themselves as God’s chosen people.

Israel in Egypt would undergo later revisions by the composer himself and by others over the course of its history. For example, composer and conductor Felix Mendelssohn promoted the work, as he did with J. S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, but from an early 19th-century editorial and musical perspective. With the Händel-Gesellschaft (Handel Society) musical edition beginning in the mid-19th-century, and its successor, the even more accurate later 20th-century scholarly musical edition of all of Handel’s complete works, the Hallische Händel-Ausgabe (Halle Handel Edition), the musical score to Israel in Egypt has been stripped of inappropriate later additions to arrive at a more accurate edition for use by choruses and orchestras everywhere. It is indeed a centerpiece of the choral-orchestral repertory today.

 Handel’s oratorios generally fell out of fashion for a time after his death in 1759, even though he was viewed as England’s national composer. (He had become a naturalized British citizen by an act of Parliament in 1727). However, grand music festivals featuring his choral music and other works began to be celebrated by the end of the 18th century in London and elsewhere. The Handel Commemoration of 1784, held in London’s Westminster Abbey, involved 525 performers, and it was repeated there in three following years and again in 1791, each time with more performers. Handel celebrations were later held in the Abbey in 1834 and 1838. Israel in Egypt was well represented in the numerous Handel festivals held in England (and also later in Germany), although the composer might not have recognized the mammoth 19th-century performing practice style then prevalent. In the very earliest days of recording music, the Handel Festival of 1888 at London’s Crystal Palace even featured the wax cylinder recording made there during the festival by Thomas Edison of an excerpt from Israel in Egypt. (The cylinder survives today and can be found on YouTube.)

 Before Handel began to premiere his sacred, English-language oratorios regularly beginning in 1739 in London, he had made his public reputation primarily as an opera composer. Between 1711 and 1739 he composed 37 Italian operas, all for performance in London, and many in the opera seria (serious opera) form, which emphasized the importance of the solo aria over the other components of the form (instrumental music, vocal duets and ensembles, and vocal recitative). Most of these operas were first performed at the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket, with some being premiered at Covent Garden Theatre. For many years Handel seemed to exercise a near monopoly on the composition and performance of Italian opera in London, from which he earned a substantial profit and became a rich man.

However, by the mid-1730s, a competing opera company, the Opera of the Nobility, was established at Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre as a rival company by members of the English nobility and elite class. The aristocratic directors of this new opera company engaged Italian composer Nicola Porpora and the very famous castrato singer Farinelli for their new company. With the two opera companies competing vigorously in producing Italian opera for an English-speaking audience, it became increasingly difficult for Handel, who was very active in producing his own works, to pay expenses and earn a profit, especially since the star Italian opera singers demanded huge salaries. This was one of the reasons for his switch to composing sacred, non-staged oratorios for the season of 1739. To further entice audiences to patronize his oratorios, Handel, a virtuoso organist, would often perform his own organ concerto movements with orchestra between the acts of his oratorios, improvising during his performances.

Handel’s Israel in Egypt presents a compendium of many of the compositional techniques of his time, from the high contrapuntal art of independent choral voice against voice, including fugue-like writing; to block chordal writing (one chord per word or syllable); elaborate melismatic vocal writing of numerous notes per syllable of text; and the use of vocal duets and recitative and aria. However, unlike in his other oratorios, especially Messiah, in this work the composer avoids the regular alternation of lengthy recitative and aria that was the highlight of Italian Baroque opera. The score to Israel in Egypt includes a highly original orchestration, and his instrumental parts musically evoke elements of the drama of the Exodus story. The substantial use of trombones, rare in London for this genre at the time, is especially notable. However, Israel in Egypt is essentially a choral oratorio.

Mirroring the Exodus narrative, Handel musically depicts pestilence and plague with frogs, flies and lice, locusts, hailstones, and fire. A leaping repeated instrumental motive suggests jumping frogs; violins buzzing in very quick 32nd notes depict flies and lice; whirling 32nd-note violin figurations represent locusts; and hailstones and fire are painted musically through insistently repeated 8th- and 16-note patterns.

Handel uses expressive dissonance and changes in tonal center to color and reflect the text at important moments. For example, quickly changing harmonic centers in the short, 37-measure chorus “He sent a thick darkness over the land” (Exodus, 10:21) move through implied key signatures with six flats to five sharps—a far harmonic distance—suggesting the mystery of the darkness that God called forth on the land.

Very important among its other principal musical attributes, Handel’s choral masterpiece Israel in Egypt demonstrates his wonderful ability to represent most sensitively the meaning of the biblical words he sets through musical means. According to the late American musicologist Howard Smither, the leading expert on the oratorio, “Handel seems always to have been acutely aware of the expressive possibilities of the words in his choruses, and his text settings abound in striking effects of word-painting and symbolism. In no other oratorio, however, did he employ as much outright pictorialism as in Israel in Egypt.”

Don’t Miss GRAMMY® Award-winning Pacific Chorale in Handel’s Israel in Egypt Saturday, March 29, 2025 at 8pm.