Athalia (oratorio)

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Athalia is a musical composition by George Frideric Handel, his third oratorio. The structural and rhetorical achievements in Athalia project a dramatic concept that may be unique in Handel's output. Commissioned in 1733 for the Publick Act in Oxford — then a center of nationalist and Jacobite sentiment — Athalia was composed in the midst of a controversy about Handel's advocacy of Italian opera and may have been a pragmatic reaction to this: Handel bowed to English musical taste by writing an oratorio, a genre with which he had had two previous successes. It was first performed on 10 July 1733 at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, conducted by Handel himself [1].

He may have chosen Jean Racine's Athalie as the basis for his libretto because of Jacobite allusions in its plot. Handel uses rhetorical planning and symbols to reinstate many ideas of Racine's that are lost in Humphreys's libretto. The tonal plan of the oratorio hinges on key associations with rhetorical significance. Handel's musical treatment echoes the original play's division into five parts, the characters' psychological duality and their polarization in pairs, and the acceleration of the dramatic pace towards the end.

The rhetorical and structural coherence of Athalia effects specific interpretive choices for performance. It also reveals a musical and dramatic form that anticipates the operas of Gluck and Mozart. It may represent a particular and persuasive example of the influence of French aesthetics on Handel.

[edit] References

• Tellez, Carmen Helena, "Musical Form and Dramatic Concept in Handel's Athalia", Doctor of Music, Indiana University, 1989. Dissertation Number: DA9135209(author)