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later became, so this was a chance for Beethoven to popu- larize Handel’s oratorio Judas Maccabeus, written 50 years earlier, as well as to demonstrate his own facility at the piano. Beethoven performed this for the King of Prussia, and the cellist used the king’s cello. The “conquering hero” is the king himself. Beethoven wrote this and the two cello sonatas for the concert.
The Handel oratorio celebrates the victory of the Jewish people over the Greek Seleucus, who was given Babylonia by Alexander the Great, which included Anatolia, Persia, the Levant, Mesopotamia, and what is now Kuwait, Afghanistan, and parts of Pakistan and Turkmenistan. Some 200 years before Christ, Judas Maccabeus led the Jewish people to victory over Seleucus and into a partnership with Rome, which later, by the time of Christ, disintegrated. The Seleucids were overthrown by Pompey a hundred years before Christ.
Handel’s idea of Jewish music is very different than Ernest Bloch’s, and this aria of victory sounds more like early Beethoven than anything Handelian or Jewish. Beethoven was 26, and already a great composer. The next year he wrote the great E-flat Piano Sonata, Op. 7, which also features repeated notes like the Maccabeus variations. Handel was a devout Lutheran. He had been hired from Germany to bring greatness to England. But while understood by royalty, who brought him over, he was vilified by the British public. He wrote the oratorios Solomon, Esther, Joseph and his Brethren, Saul, and Judas Maccabeus, as well as Israel in Egypt, possibly to wrench his work away from jealous Puritan criticism of his “profane” theatricality. When Handel wrote Israel in Egypt in 1739, its opening was desolate and running with blood and grief. When he rewrote it in 1756, it was filled with cymbals and acceptance. He wrote Israel in Egypt when his opera company had gone bankrupt, he had suffered a stroke and lived in great pain, and was the victim of plots to sabotage his career. Esther had been received with outrage by the Anglican church; the Bishop of London prohibited it from being performed. Still, Handel went ahead anyway, safe in the patronage of the royal family, who attended.
Israel in Egypt had its posters torn down and its perform mances disrupted by the devout. A minister described it as “the will of Satan.” Handel said, “I have read my Bible very well, and I will choose for myself.” But two years later he wrote Messiah, to a text by Charles Jennens (the author of Israel in Egypt), who had written it to fly in the face of the deists, who believed that Christ was not divine. Faced with debtors’ prison, Handel composed it in 24 days. The title was considered blasphemous and had to be dropped from the marquee. Jonathan Swift, the dean of St. Patrick’s, refused to allow it to be held in a church, and it opened in the Fishamble Street Music Hall. But four years later Handel was playing to empty houses and again facing bankruptcy. Blind and sick, he was restored to fortune that same year (1745) by Judas Maccabeus, because the British mistook it for an ode to England’s supremacy. In choosing to write variations on Judas 50 years later, Beethoven was choosing an unknown work with a deep history of triumph and tragedy. It was a subtle act of rebellion, of asserting his own genius despite his status at the time. He was playing for kings, but his great pieces were ahead of him.
His Judas was transfixed with the joy of what must have been Handel’s recognition of his own greatness in the face of everything.
FELIX MENDELSSOHN (1809—1847) Sonata for Cello and Piano No. 2
in D Major, Op. 5
Felix Mendelssohn was a child prodigy who wrote his most famous piece, Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when he was 17. Like Thomas Mann, he was raised in a cultured and wealthy family. Mann became a writer when his family lost their money, but Mendelssohn remained wealthy his entire life. The family’s private orchestra debuted his early symphonies. His uncle bought an estate so the family could adopt its Christian name (this is where the name Bartholdy comes from).
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