Samson: Sinfonia

• Handel completed his oratorio Samson in 1742 in London.
• The inspiration for Samson came in 1739, when Handel was visiting Lord Shaftsbury and heard his host’s brother-in-law read aloud Samson Agonistes by John Milton.

‘Mr Handel (who was highly delighted with the piece) played I think better than ever, & his harmony was perfectly adapted to the sublimity of the poem’

Lord Shaftsbury, recounting the evening Handel heard the poem: (“the piece” is Samson Agonistes)

• Handel’s friend Newburgh Hamilton adapted Milton’s Samson Agonistes for the libretto. In his libretto preface, Hamilton is thrilled that Handel has turning Samson Agonistes into an oratorio:

“as Mr Handel had so happily introduc’d here Oratorios, a musical Drama, whose Subject must be Scriptural, and in which the Solemnity of Church-Musick is agreeably united with the most pleasing Airs of the Stage: It would have been an irretrievable Loss to have neglected the Opportunity of that great Master’s doing Justice to this Work’.”

Newburgh Hamilton

“Handel has set up an Oratorio against the Operas, and succeeds.”

Horace Walpole, a contemporary who preferred Italian opera to the new genre of oratorio, but who had to admit that Samson was terrific. ¹

1. Anthony Hicks, “Handel [Händel, Hendel], George Frideric,” Grove Music Online (2001), accessed October 17, 2019, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000040060.