Handel is important for choral music, so he deserves two entries, just like Bach and Vivaldi, and my choice has fallen on one of his later oratorios - which in contrast to Alexander's Feast were not any more very popular with the London public. But that opinion has been overturned in our time. Sir John Eliot Gardiner has described Solomon as ‘the most magnificent,
certainly the most lavish of all Handel’s oratorios’, and it’s true that
the pageant-like structure, and the full and varied orchestration,
especially in the magnificent double choruses, creates a triumphant air.
The magnificent choruses are in fact the identifying element making Handel's oratorios what they are. An oratorio is in fact an opera on a sacred subject, presented in concert instead of on the stage. Like opera, the oratorio contains arias and recitatives. Oratorios are not church music - they were intended for the concert hall, and in character closer to the theater than to the church. At the same time, it are the monumental choruses which make Handel's oratorios different from opera - although opera could contain a few choruses, in Handel's oratorios they are essential as the emphasis is on communal rather than
individual expression. Handel often used choruses
in the oratorios where in opera an aria would appear, as commentary or
reflection on a situation, but he also wrote choruses which take part in the action, or used them in incidental scenes (as in Solomon).
For his stories, Handel used the Bible and especially the Old Testament (including the apocryphal books), as the history and mythology from the Bible were known to each and every middle-class person in 18th c. Protestant England. Audiences may even have felt close to these stories about a chosen people at a time the English with their successful worldwide empire building also seemed somewhat "chosen."
Solomon is really a series of tableaux honoring love, nature, justice and art, drawing on the biblical books of Kings and Chronicles and the Song of Solomon. The poet who compiled the libretto is unknown. Solomon is richly orchestrated, and many of the grand and varied choruses are in eight parts (a so-called double chorus) instead of the more usual four parts.
The first Act celebrates the consecration of the Temple Solomon has built in Jerusalem. Solomon rejoices in the married happiness to his wife, Pharaoh’s daughter (the librettist tactfully making no mention of the Biblical 700 wives and 300 concubines Solomon is supposed to have had), and promises to build his queen a palace.
They express their love for each other and retire for the night as
flower-scented breezes and nightingales' songs lull them to rest. The final number of Act I is the chorus “May no rash intruder,” usually called the Nightingale Chorus, with flutes imitating birdsong over a gentle rustling effect created by strings divided into different parts.
[The Judgement of Solomon, workshop of Peter Paul Rubens, 1617]
The second Act demonstrates Solomon’s wisdom in the famous biblical story of two harlots who each claimed a single baby as her own. Solomon offers to solve the case by splitting the infant in half with his sword, but the real mother rejects this solution and offers to hand the child over to the other woman - as Solomon knew the true parent would do. The First Harlot and the chorus praise Solomon's judgement.
Act 3 begins with the famous sinfonia known as "The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba", a bright and sprightly orchestral piece featuring oboes, that is often anthologized. In this Act we see a state visit from the Queen of Sheba to Solomon's kingdom. The king and his people entertain her with a musical masque of magnificent choruses depicting in turn the "lulling" sound of gentle music, the desire for military glory, the despair of an unhappy lover, and a storm which turns to calm. This is clearly an encomium to the imagined Solomonic nature of British rule in the
mid-18th century, in a golden age of peace and prosperity. The eighteenth-century English elite must have liked to see their land and its culture idealized as a utopia of
humanism and tolerance.
However, this oratorio wasn’t a success in Handel’s lifetime. After the premiere on 17th March 1749, there were only two further performances, and there were no performances of the work outside London, though Handel presented some parts in his charity concerts for the chapel of the Foundling Hospital and borrowed some of the score for use elsewhere. One of the reasons may have been that Solomon's life is presented in three separate scenes, there is no drama and no continuous story line (but that could also be said about The Messiah!). The text by an anonymous poet is not very good, and having read it once more, I now notice the major fault of Solomon: it is purely a song of praise on Solomon (and through him, on the British King George II), and this flattering goes on from the beginning of the oratorio to end - it is just too much, and close to becoming sycophantic.
But all the same, I fully agree with the opinion of Gardiner quoted above - musically, Solomon is certainly one of Handel's most lavish oratorios!
Libretto at Stanford University.
Listen to the Radio Filharmonisch Orkest and Groot Omroepkoor conducted by Peter Dijkstra in a registration by the Dutch television:
Choral Masterworks