The terrible beauty of George Frideric Handel’s Israel in Egypt
By Jonathon Van Maren When George Frideric Handel’s Israel in Egypt premiered at the King’s Theatre in Haymarket on April 4, 1739, the audience disliked it. They disliked it so much, in fact, that when Handel put his new oratorio—the first of two he would write that consisted entirely of verses from Scripture—into the opera…
