aul was the first of four collaborations between Handel and Charles Jennens, a librettist who has been treated more severely by musical historians than he perhaps deserves. Most of Jennens' contemporaries, friend and foe alike, thought him at times a pompous, over-bearing boor: "Solyman the Magnificent," Dr Johnson called him. Some also recognized a balancing side. He could almost serve as prototype for the classic, educated English squire dilettante: wealthy (but not idly so); amply gifted and cultivated; sanguine; testy about criticism from which, in any event, his position generally shielded him; intellectually curious and culturally ambitious. Taken together, his collaborations with Handel in addition to Saul — Messiah, L'Allegro and Belshazzar — constitute a paradigm of the English oratorio at both beginning and summit.

What Jennens had that appealed to Handel was a refined sense of dramatic principles, a knack for portraying complex characters with economy of means, the ability to synthesize material from various sources into a coherent narrative, and a gift on occasion for vivid imagery. Jennens had a poetic soul, if not always the poet's tongue.

Handel wrote Saul during the summer of 1738, consistent with his customary practice: composition during the warm months; copying, revising and rehearsing in the fall; performances during the winter and spring. It follows by five years his first great English oratorio, Athalia (performed by Boston Cecilia in 1982). During the five year interval, Handel created nine new Italian operas for a dwindling and finally disinterested public. The Cecilian ode, Alexander's Feast (performed by us last season), was composed in 1736. In 1737 Handel suffered a paralytic stroke which affected both body and mind, but during the autumn made a remarkable recovery with the help of the baths at Aachen.

If during the summer of 1738 Handel suffered any lingering effects of his illness the masterful score of Saul fails to reveal it. With this towering edifice Handel, in Winton Dean's words, "raised the Old Testament oratorio to its highest point, and produced one of the supreme masterpieces of dramatic art, comparable with the Oresteia and King Lear in the grandeur of its theme and the certainty and skill of its execution." Jennens, to his credit, preserved from the biblical account the most promising elements: the women's welcome to David, the first javelin-throwing, the episode of the image, the Feast of the New Moon, and above all the visit to the Witch of Endor and raising of Samuel's ghost. He invented Merab's haughtiness from whole cloth, and cast the king's moral disintegration and madness more in Greek terms than Jewish: his is not so much a defiance of Jehovah as an imperious will gone awry, with punishment the inevitable consequence. "A dangerous lunatic is repulsive; a man who refuses to bow when fate has him beaten is a tragic figure," says Dean.

Handel's response to these compelling characters is comprehensive in terms of formal organization and in the smallest details of musical expression. Only four of the thirty arias are in da capo form, and three of these are early when characters are differentiating themselves, and thus profit from the recapitulations. Saul's unpredictability and violence are balanced in the characterizations of David and Jonathan, characterizations that reveal compassion, vulnerability, gentleness. Handel seems to be less interested in David the conqueror than in David the artist, the peacemaker. Jonathan is not as fully realized. His is a tragedy of torn loyalties: father vs. friend. His music is sublime, but we are curious to know him better. Merab and Michal, Saul's two daughters, are, on the other hand, vivid and complete personalities, one the very picture of arrogance and snobbery (at least in the beginning), the other direct, open, "vernal," Dean calls her. In the small roles in Saul Handel's mastery of musical characterization is also sure. The Amalekite, the Witch of Endor, Samuel's ghost, even the messenger Doeg whose dire objective David dodges at the last possible instant — all are memorably realized, and the more remarkably so for the brevity of their appearances.

The most important character though ("on a par with the King himself," says Dean) is the chorus. To them fall the responsibility of portraying the triumphant joy and the despondency of a whole people. In the two monumental choruses that frame Act II, they philosophize, in the first, on the futility of envy and, in the other, warn of the fatal consequences of rage. But they are also direct players in the action. They are the people of Israel.

The orchestra is grand, one of the largest in all 18th century music. In addition to the usual trumpets and drums, winds and strings, organ (as solo instrument and continuo) and harpsichord, Handel calls upon trombones (3), harp, theorbo (lute), carillon (a bell-like keyboard instrument — here a celeste), and deploys them with rich imagination. The instrumental symphonies all represent the passage of time, although the music does not necessarily attempt to characterize the events that take place during these intervals.

With Saul Handel at last found his footing in a medium that was truly indigenous to his adopted home and, more important, that broke breathtaking new ground in the art of music drama. This new mastery was hard won; but it liberated him at last from his self-imposed Italian bondage.

The Boston Cecilia performed this work at New England Conservatory's Jordan Hall in Boston on November 21, 1993.

© 2004 Donald Teeters. All rights reserved.