Jephtha is Handel’s last oratorio. Work on setting down Act I was started on 21st January 1751 and completed on 2nd February in accordance with Handel’s method of composing which was to make a working score with a certain amount of abbreviated and simplified notation. From this the copyists had to produce the final “clean” text and parts for the performers. A start was then immediately made on Act II but only written down as far as the first part of the great chorus which forms the spiritual centre of the whole work. After the lines “How dark, O Lord, are Thy decrees! All hid from mortal sight?” there is a note in already somewhat unsteady handwriting in which Handel says he had reached this point on 13th February 1751 when his left eye began to give him trouble and his face was in pain. Then, days later, on his sixty-sixth birthday, the composer resumed work, and made a note that on 23rd February he was feeling somewhat better and could start again. However, when the chorus was completed on 27th February he had to break off again, this time for almost four months during which he conducted oratorio performances, took the waters in Bath and Cheltenham, but found no relief from his eye trouble - it was cataract. By the time he started writing down Act III, on 18th May 1751, he was already completely blind in his left eye, and the vision in his right eye was deteriorating steadily. Work accordingly proceeded slowly. On 15th or 17th July the ,,Theme sublime of endless praisc“ chorus was completed and, in all probability, it was with this that the work should have ended; the second scene was added because the act would otherwise have seemed too short. On 30th August the whole work was completed. The first performance took place on 26th February 1752; and there were six more performances during Handel’s lifetime. And so, although this work was more successful than Handel’s own favourite child which had caused him so much anguish, i.e., Theodora, it was by no means a success. The introverted style of the ageing Handel, which had already been a characteristic of Theodora, confused even the composer’s most faithful adherents. Mrs. Delany wrote, in 1758: “The oratorio last night was Jephtha; I never heard it before; I think it a very fine one, but very different from any of his others".
The story of Jephtha is in the Old Testament in the Book of Judges, Chapter 11: Jephtha, driven out by his halfhrothers from Gilead, grows up to be a Godfearing "mighty man of valour” in exile, while Gilead is subjugated by the children of Ammon. After eighteen years of enslavement the elders of Gilead appeal to Jephtha to deliver them from the Ammonites. Jephtha vows to Jehovah that if he is victorious he will make an offering to the Lord of the first being to come forth from the doors of his house to meet him on his return. This turns out to be his daughter, and Jephtha sacrifices her in keeping with his vow.
This material was first used for an oratorio by Carissimi (before 1650), and in London Maurice Greene availed himself of it in 1737 for one of the few works written in competition to Handel’s oratorios. Handel knew Carissimi’s composition and used its final chorus in Samson. Handel’s librettist, Thomas Morell, knew at least the words of Greene’s oratorio from which he lifted a few lines almost verbatim. In other respects, though, he pursued different paths, finding new characters, writing in a love story and, above all, eliminating the human offering which seemed so barbaric to the enlightened theologian Morell and his audience.Jephtha’s daughter - nameless in the Bible - is called Iphis (doubtlessly in allusion to Iphigenia, whose fate so closely resembled that of Iphis) and is the betrothed of the youthful hero Hamor, who, like ]ephtha’s wife Storgè, Jephtha’s brother Zebul, and the Angel, are entirely Morell`s inventions. Whereas Zebul is hardly more than a vehicle to get the story rolling, and whereas Hamor serves primarily as a foil for Iphis’s love and gaiety, the central personages of the drama are clearly contrasted characters: Jephtha, who is transformed from the carefree hero to the broken, despairing father; Storgè, whose ability to prophesy is combined with the instincts of a maternal animal; Iphis, whose innocent love of life is sharply differentiated from the gloomy background of the action. It is above all though these characters - alongside the neo-Classical overtones of pronouncements by the chorus, which are almost all in the style of comments from the chorus in Classical tragedy - that Handel’s musical characterisation bursts into flame.
On the other hand Morell’s text has a central weakness which even threatens the fundamental significance of the drama in the way the conflict is resolved. On the one hand there is the ambiguity inherent in the formulation of ]cphtha’s vow, as if a sly escape-route is being left open - “What, or whoe’er shall first salute mine eyes / Shall be for ever Thine, or fall a sacrifice". On the other hand the entry of the Angel as a messenger of the "Holy Spirit” is an unusually clumsy variant of the deus ex machina technique; and the closing scene is a bourgeois family idyll in which the characters who have hitherto behaved with such oppressive vitality are left to melt away in sentirnentality. Even Handel was not ableto rescue this scene entirely.
The greatness of the composition is apparent not only in how the music enhances the positive moments contained in the libretto, particularly in characterising the personages, but also in the way it glosses over the negative features. And just as Morell did not hesitate in the least to alter radically the myth of the sacrifice so as to meet the mood of an enlightened, mid-eigthteenth century, London audience, neither did Handel hesitate to interpret the text in the way he saw fit, and in certain cxtreme instances to compose against the text. Two motives appear, above all, to have guided him in this: anxiety about the credibility of the characters, and the tragic conviction that the real theme of the work was the suffering of mankind in the hands of blind, unalterable fate. ]ephtha’s story affected Handel more personally than any other of his oratorio texts - not only on account of the tragic biographical circumstances under which the composition was completed but also, and more immediately, through the basic theological and philosophical questions which Morell tended to side-step while Handel turned them to good account in his composition. This is the explanation for the extraordinary emphasis placed by the composer on the “How dark, O Lord” choral passage, and on the very first words of the libretto “It must be so”, which are prefixed to the first recitative as a sort of motto for the whole work. This also explains Handel’s alterations to the text the most significant of which affects the central chorus “How dark, O Lord”: Morell’s final sentence reads “What God ordains is right!" - Handel sct this to music but then changed it to “Whatever is, is right”, a quotation from Pope’s didactic, philosophical Essay on Man.
The work begins with an overture which Handel borrowed from the stage music he had written in 1749/50 for Tobias Smollctt’s tragedy Alceste; only the Minuet was freshly composed (the greater part of the Alceste music had already been used shortly before for The Choice of Hercules because Srnollett’s piece was never staged). The main reason for this transfer (which was not at all unusual with Handel) was certainly to save work. All the same the piece with its ceremonial approach and the arcadian triplet episodes in the Allegro is thoroughly appropriate in its new home. Its tonality of G minor gains central importance during the course of the work. It is in this key that the first motto of the recitative bars “It must be so” is pronounced; it is in this key (as a dominant of C minor) that parts of the central chorus at the end of Act II are sung; and it is the related G major which is used as a contrast for ]ephtha’s first, carefree aria, for the entry of Iphis when her father returns, and for the Angel’s scene. Just which of the two spheres was central in Handel’s mind can be deduced from the G minor middle section of the Angel’s aria.
After the G minor motto the first scene is dominated by Zebul’s two-part aria (F) and the chorus with which the people abjure the Ammonites’ idolatory (D) - although Handel describes the “dismal dance around the furnace blue” (a quotation from Milton’s Nativity Ode) with much more feeling than the text implies. Both movements use themes from Franz Wenzel Habermann’s Philomela pia of 1747, a collection of six masses which Handel found so stimulating that he borrowed material from them for three arias and six choruses - although not without completely re-working this material. The second and third scenes introduce us to the protagonists of the action. Handel’s ability to create rounded characters meets with initial success in the way it gives shape to the completely schematic structure of the text (four times recitative and aria, and then recitative and duet). Jephtha appears as a carefree, self-assured warrior in an aria that is both martial and courtly. Storgè, who is lamenting the coming separation from Jephtha, is introduced in a strikingly intensive aria with obbligato flute (used, as is often the case with Handel, as a symbol of mourning) as an extremely emotional character. The tonal relationship of the two arias symbolizes proximity and contradiction at one and the same time: G major and E minor. With the entry of the young loving couple, key and cadence change: the arias of Hamor and Iphis have a simpler tonal relationship to one another as well as to the preceding pair of arias E major - A major), and only the duet finds a new level (F major), All the three movements are even more closely related through their seemingly modern cadence and its careful grading: with a touch of gallant coquetry for Hamor, lyrically intimate for Iphis, rising to an amazingly Mozartean turn in the duet.
The fourth scene brings ]ephtha’s vow - in a strangely conventional accompagnato - and a great chorus of supplication from the people to Jehova, dominated by an exceptionally chromatic double fugue which, again, is derived from material in Habermann’s mass. The shadow already thrown on the story by this chorus is intensified in Storgè’s visionary scene: a short, but right from the start intensively declaimed, recitative leads into a wild F minor aria - the only F minor passage in the score apart from the “All our joys to sorrow turning” section ofthe closing chorus of Act II - in which “scenes of horror” arise vividly before our eyes from the depths. Iphis tries to disperse her mother’s premonitions with a completely delicate and simple song sounding rather like a bourree (E flat). The stylised dance - which, in this second aria of hers, introduces a melodic cantilena - will characterise all the later arias of Iphis, the innocent victim.
The final scene of this act depicts the Israelites about to go into battle: “The might of Israel`s God" is celebrated in a mighty G major chorus overflowing with brilliant acoustic colours depicting the forces of Nature which Jehovah can both unleash and tame.
The first half of Act II is dominated by the Israelites’ victory celebrations. Cherubim and Seraphim have determined the outcome of the battle - their "unbodied forms” which “ride on whirlwinds directing the storms" provide the work’s second great musically-descriptive chorus with its visionary sounds (for which Handel has again adapted themes by Habermann). Its apparently neutral C major supports the picture of "unbodied forms" and, at the same time, serves as the starting point for the act to develop towards its sombre ending in C minor. The victory arias of Humor (addressed to Iphis) and Zebul (in a generally moralizing tone) are, by comparison, conventional and unimportant. And, in fact, Zebul’s one was only taken over in 1753 - presumably to do a favour for a singer - from the opera Agrippina written in 1709 (!). Between them, though, is the gentle rondo-like “Tune the soft melodious lute” of Iphis - in A major, like her first aria, and giving a fresh nuance to the delicate, bright picture which Handel paints of this most charming of all his female characters. This picture even overrides ]ephtha’s Triumph aria whose courtly sounds (once again originating from Habermann) remind us of Jephtha’s first aria. A short triumphal chorus brings the first half of the act to an end in B flat major.
It is G major that the second, decisive half of the act opens and the whole story unfolds. Iphis unsuspectingly approaches her father - the whole scene never departs from the basic key in a sort of ritual development (clearly patterned on the festive scenes in Act III of judas Maccabaeus) with siciliano-like sinfonia, the gavotte-like song of Iphis, and the two-part reply from the choir. The turn to E flat major is all the more effective when Jephtha launches into his “Horror! confusion!” recitative, followed immediately by the change to C minor for Jephtha’s aria of despair and the closing chorus. The aria utilizes a theme from the opera Lotario (1729), but intensifies it to a paroxysm of horror through unisono passages, interrupting each other, on the strings and occasional, intentionally falsely declaimed, fragments of the text and outcries in the voice part. This surely represents the utmost limit of dramatic expression which an eighteenth century composer could achieve without totally destroying the aesthetic conventions of aria-composition.
From this point onwards the path descends into the metaphysical darkness of the C minor chorus. The catastrophe new doubly threatens those who were already emotionally involved - whereas ]ephtha’s C minor aria sticks to the da capo aria form, the borders between accompagnato and aria disappear in Storgè’s “First perish thou, and perish all the world!” outburst. At this point the ariaform dissolves in a surge of contradictory emotions (B minor). Hamor offers himself in a short, seemingly breathless G major movement as a sacrifice; then the excitement gathers intensity in a quartet whose combination of controlled pathos and individualization of the singers, together with extreme economy of scoring, points the way forward to Mozart’s ensemble technique. At the same time it reminds one of Handel’s first venture in this technique, the terzet in Acis and Galatea whose final bars likewise return symbolically in the closing ritornello. Iphis takes leave of the world in a songful largo whose B minor contrasts subtly with the B minor outburst of despair from her mother. The gently complaining mood of the music does not correspond with the tcxt but reveals how Iphis feels in her innermost being: “Happy they!" is a gesture of farewell full of sadness, and “this vital breath with content I shall resign” does not sound contented at all but mortally sad. However it is also poised and dignified in the face of death. The contrast is all the harsher with Jephtha’s collapse in the following accompagnato - up until the agonizingly detailed musical description of speech being stifled.
This is the point at which the way is opened for the closing chorus conceived entirely along the lines of Classical tragedy and composed by Handel in a way that elevates it far above all the other choruses in the work. The text is split up into four sections and composed with growing intensification, The first section, after the emphatic opening declamation (in sixths) "How dark!”, becomes a eompactly chorded movement with throbbing rhythm; the second one starts as a two-part canon gradually overlaid with other voices, its revolving theme, formed of emphatic sixth, octave and seventh jumps which come and go. This first part theme, together with the canon technique employed in the second part, point up the significance of the text (“All our joys to sorrow turning, and our triumphs into mourning - as the night succeeds the day”). The third section is a fugato whose tonally unstable theme, vacillating between E flat major and C minor, symbolizes the uncertainty mentioned in the text (“No certain bliss, no solid peace”); furthermore Handel imbued the theme with a hidden symbolical meaning in that he developed it from passages contained in a mass by Habermann to the words “Et in terra pax", which for Christian believers, such as Handel was throughout his life, gave an incredibly negative turn showing more clearly than anything else how intimately involved he was with this work. The fourth part, finally, is totally dominated by the fatalistic cadences of the Pope quotation (“Whatever is, is right!”), which again summarize the tonal framework of the whole chorus: first, the seemingly positive brightening of the opening in C minor, into G major and C major, then into F minor, A flat major, B flat major, E flat major and, finally, three times in a row, into C minor.
Act III begins with an abrupt transformation from despair and anguish into ecstatic visions of the Life Beyond - a transformation which the trained theologian Morell knew from the stories of the church’s saints and martyrs, and which he had tried to embody in his text for Theodora. Jephtha begins, too, in a mood of utter despair, with an intense arioso which turns into an accompagnato; the “Waft her, angels, through the skies” aria depicts at one and the same time Jephtha’s seclusion and the images of angelic hordes in translucent, completely dematerialized colours, Iphis learns about the incursion of transcendency in plain, natural notes, corresponding to her character which Handel shows here, too, as simple, close to nature and unsophisticated: even her farewell to earth is a charming, wistful siciliano, her vision of “brighter scenes above” a hymn-like song couched in a richly contrapuntal string setting. Subtlety marks the relationship of the keys to one another as well as to be central keys of the whole work: Jephtha’s arioso is in E minor, his aria in G major; Iphis takes her leave in E minor, too, and sings her hymn in E major.
Without any recitatival caesura there then follows the chorus of the priests protesting against fulfilment of the sacrifice - a sombre A minor piece which develops into a chromatic double fugue - shorter, but even more intensive than the “O God, behold our sore distress” chorus in act I to which it corresponds precisely in both musical structure and dramatic intention.
After the enormous tension which characterized the whole central part of the work from the Sinfonia before Iphis’s entry up to this chorus, a weaker impression is inevitably made by the appearance of the angelus ex machina and everything that comes afterwards. The finale of the Violin Sonata, opus 1, No. 13 (a viola part added) serves for the Entry Sinfonia; the Angel’s announcement is treated as a secco recitative. Right up at the height of the Work are Jephtha’s prayer and the chorus, presumably intended as closing chorus. The latter is a quite simple arioso in B flat major, the parallel key to G minor which, with its pseudoostinato scale movement and its anthem-like tone, reminds us of Iphis’s E major vision and of the “It must be so” motto at the beginning. The former, also in B flat major, is a mighty movement in solemn mood using the technique of lining up and intensifying fugal and chordal sections which Handel generally saved up for his closing choruses.
The family idyll which constitutes the closing scene does not appear to have concerned Handel vcry much. The arias allocated to Zebul, Storgè and Hamor arc almost interchangeable (in triple time, violini unisoni, unbroken major key, conventional forms and cadences). Only Iphis’s aria strikes a more individual note.