and then there was Saul

With Saul, after 40-odd operas, Handel shifted across to oratorio. There are lots of official explanations: English audiences had turned away from Italian opera seria; English law prohibited drama about biblical events on the stage. His cantatas and celebratory pieces had been hugely successful especially with the royal set. But perhaps he sought freedom from convention? And anyway, several oratorios from Handel were more operatic than some of his opera seria output. This is one.

Music of Saul

It's one of the earliest oratorios from Handel. It has (to me) a sense of extraordinary musical release - release from the conventions of da capo arias required in opera seria, and release from the restriction of drama to individuals and interpersonal interaction, instead exploding to the noise and the energy of chorus, taking it back to the Greek sense that the chorus tells all.

Now that is a chorus! Saul opens with their crowd-shout, "How excellent thy name O Lord!", as David stands mute in front of Goliath's head. Click here to listen to the music of his chorus, and watch their dance of triumph.

Sophie Bevan as Michal and Iestyn Davies as David, Glyndebourne 2015

Not that this work lacks individual songs of great beauty. The women's voices hold the drama high, and Saul has some excruciatingly complex arias as his madness prevails. But most famous is the sweet, quiet prayer of David, as he begs forgiveness for Saul, "Oh Lord, whose mercies numberless."

Here's our David, Iestyn Davies, in rehearsal in London for the second performance at Glyndebourne.

Upcoming alert! Iestyn Davies is Orphee in Gluck's Orpheus and Eurydice in Melbourne in December. Here he's in rehearsal for the role for a recording with a baroque ensemble (and Sophie Bevan, who sings Michal in our Saul.) Here's his version of the most famous of Gluck's arias “Che faro senza Euridice”. But the AO production will be very different - here's Bachtrack's review of the 2024 Sydney version.

Saul the oratorio

This is the first of the famous oratorios, premiering at King's Theatre in 1739 (by which time the theatre had hosted 25 Handel operas. It's an oratorio, (in English) and it was produced as such, to great acclaim and the budgetary advantage of concert performance. But no money was spared in the orchestration - Handel required "a large orchestra with many instrumental effects which were unusual for the time including a carillon (a keyboard instrument which makes a sound like chiming bells); a specially constructed organ for himself to play during the course of the work; trombones, not standard orchestral instruments at that time, giving the work a heavy brass component; large kettledrums specially borrowed from the Tower of London; extra woodwinds for the Witch of Endor scene; and a harp solo." More in Wiki.

The libretto was from an extraordinary member of the landed gentry - Charles Jennens, who would go on to write libretti for other oratorios of Handel including Messiah. The source is the Bible's First Book of Samuel, where Jennens found fabulous characters, and character development, particularly in Saul's meeting and fraught relationship with David, who would succeed him, and David’s growing love for Saul’s son Jonathan, who refused to destroy him. Jennens had a story of changing characters to start with. It's all here..

6 And it came to pass as they came, when David was returned from the slaughter of the ∥Philistine, that the women came out of all cities of Israel, singing and dancing, to meet king Saul, with tabrets, with joy, and with †instruments of musick.

7 And the women answered one another as they played, and said, *Saul hath slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands.

8 And Saul was very wroth, and the saying †displeased him; and he said, They have ascribed unto David ten thousands, and to me they have ascribed but thousands: and what can he have more but the kingdom?

9 And Saul eyed David from that day and forward.

David Playing the Harp Before Saul, 1655 by Rembrandt

Here's Rembrandt's depiction of this strange relationship.

"The deep human suffering of the tyrant king was never expressed so well as in this work. Rembrandt, the greatest master of rendering the human soul in painting, filtered out of the twenty-five-hundred-year-old story what he had to say to his own seventeenth century Holland, while at the same time he fashioned a musical solution to spiritual suffering with the use of an eternal allegory of uplifting influence of artistic beauty."

More on this site of Rembrandt's paintings.

Handel's oratorio offers the story in grabs of drama. The synopsis of the oratorio is here with description of how near it came to opera. (Our production simplifies the plot into two Parts, the break roughly mid Act 2 as described here.

'Though oratorios are usually described as unstaged operas, this libretto abounds with stage directions: Saul throws his spear three times, characters exit, David leaps out of a window, and David orders the Amalekite messenger to be slain mid-aria (“Impious wretch!”). Indeed, there is more action indicated in the libretto of this “unstaged” work than in most operas on London stages of the period, and contemporary companies have performed successful stagings of the work, notably at Glyndebourne in 2015.' That's what we're watching.

Our production

We glimpsed this production of Saul in 2022, whilst exploring the patchy history of English opera.

For details about Handel's English years, go to this blog.

For a first glance at the Kosky production of Saul, here's my earlier blog.

This Glyndebourne production of Handel’s Saul marks the company debut of the brilliant and provocative Australian opera and theatre director Barrie Kosky. He delves deep into this score of heart-breaking beauty and intensity to create an associative dreamscape, a Baroque nightmare world in which this mythic tale of a Lear-like mad king and his crumbling family unfolds...

The characterisations of Saul and David are among Handel’s most powerful and vivid, making Saul , in the words of Handel scholar Winton Dean, ‘one of the supreme masterpieces of dramatic art, comparable with the Oresteia and King Lear’. More here.

How to sing Hallelujah!

A quick clip here of Kosky on this production. He calls himself an 'extravagant minimalist' . The imagery of his Saul is more extravagant than minimal. (Never did an opera have such a celebratory adorned buffet table!) But 'minimalist' might explain the handling of movement and jerky emotion-triggered action, especially of the chorus.

Guardian reviewer: Kosky "presents the narrative in a series of vivid, beautifully imaginative stage pictures – brightly coloured in the opening scenes, louring monochromes later – with a riotous collection of wigs and costumes that cheerfully muddle the 18th and 21st centuries."

And a local note: the subsequent triumph at Adelaide Festival (2017) brought the whole dreamscape including Christopher Purves' Saul and that white swan to these shores. It also starred the wonderful West Australian soprano Taryn Fiebig as Michal (in the blue dress, below) in one of her final and finest performances.

Lyn 28/5/25