The history of English oratorio begins with Handel's Esther. Probably performed for the first time in 1718 at Cannons, the country seat of James Brydges, Earl of Carnarvon and later Duke of Chandos, it had to wait until 1732 to be heard in London, initially in something like its 1720 version with singers from the Chapel Royal under Bernard Gates and then in Handel's own greatly expanded arrangement at the King's Theatre. Esther was biblical, but not scriptural. The libretto, imitated from Thomas Brereton's English adaptation of Racine's Esther, took its subject from the Bible, but the text consisted entirely of newly crafted verse, although Handel's 1732 revision incorporated the whole of his coronation anthem My heart is inditing, with its original words from Psalm 45 and Isaiah. Handel's next oratorios, Deborah, Athalia and Saul, followed much the same pattern. But with Israel in Egypt, composed in the autumn of 1738 and first performed in April 1739, he ventured into new territory with an oratorio of which the text came more or less directly from the Bible. A second scriptural oratorio, Messiah, had its first performance in Dublin in 1742, reaching London in 1743. This chapter is concerned primarily with the origins of these two works.

In Italy, where Handel had composed his first oratorios in 1707 and 1708, the genre was by definition non-scriptural, but in Germany it had become increasingly intertwined with the scriptural forms of historia and actus musicus, particularly the Passion, forms normally performed in a church and not called oratorios. No such tradition existed in England. The Cannons Esther has sometimes been described as a ‘masque’, but there is no firm basis for this in the sources. Handel seems to have called it an ‘Oratorium’, a Latin term that had already passed into German, though it is unlikely that he saw that as the full title, as often implied. As cultivated by Handel in London, oratorio was from the start a theatrical genre. For this reason it was regarded with suspicion by many devout Christians, who considered the theatre a locus of debauchery and foul language, no fit place for the representation of sacred subjects, even without staging. Singing Holy Writ in this morally dubious environment would have been a further step toward blasphemy.