Theatres and opera houses were also the platforms for the celebrity actors and singers of the age, and these behaved in ways that did not always conform to the moral expectations of the churchmen. Oratorios were invariably performed in theatres, which still carried the resonances of secular drama, where one was expected to create and encounter the patently artificial and contrived, and at a time when many still suspected theatrical practice to lack the essential moral grounding of sincerity and truth. Nevertheless, the idea of going to the very heart of the dominant faith by basing a work on the incarnation, ministry, passion, resurrection and future promise of Christ, was radical within the British and Irish context of the 18th century. Indeed, the very genre of oratorio was originally conceived as a way of presenting biblical stories in a dramatic fashion, and Handel had already set many Old Testament stories in his highly successful oratorios of the 1730s. Nor was it in any way extraordinary for an oratorio to be based on a religious subject. There was, after all, a parallel in the way the “new law” of the Gospel mollified the old, and in the way in which the first of the Reformation confessions set out to modify the Catholic faith. It was also something that was enthusiastically embraced by Anglican clerics of the 17th and 18th centuries, and just as strongly by the Lutherans, who helped form and provide Handel’s own educational background. After all, the Gospels and Epistles already made ample reference to the way in which the New Testament was foretold in the Old, and this tradition was carried even further by the Church Fathers. The libretto that the irascible Charles Jennens sent to Handel at some point in the summer of 1741 was not in itself an extraordinary document within the Christian tradition.
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