“A Darkness Which Might be Felt”

This chapter considers Handel’s invention of the English oratorio in relation to its Italian antecedents and seeks to demonstrate how Samson (1743) in particular reimagines the Italian oratorio as an English genre. Samson’s engagement with and emancipation from the ordinances of Italian opera and oratorio connect Handel to Fux, whose biblical oratorio La fede sacrilega nella morte del Precursore, San Giovanni Battista (1714) is examined in detail in order to define the axis that lies between generic servitude (in this work) and imaginative autonomy (in Samson). The comparative analysis of both works is contextualized by an appraisal of Handel’s reputation as an “entertainer,” a reputation which has eclipsed his radical transformation of genre and his liberation of English dramatic music from the servitude of Italian opera, an enslavement of which his contemporaries had long complained.