The Choice

When Handel introduced English oratorios to London in the 1730s, he did not confine himself to sacred subjects, exploring also Classical myths, with texts based on Roman and Greek literature. The Choice of Hercules marks Handel’s last realisation of a Classical tale. It started life in 1749 as music for Alceste, but the Covent Garden production was cancelled, leaving Handel with an hour of superb music on his hands. By the summer of 1750 he had adapted several numbers and added new ones, and in 1751 it premiered as ‘an additional New Act’ concluding a performance of the ode Alexander’s Feast. Much of the music from the original conception (the story of a loyal wife who dies to save her husband and is subsequently rescued from the Underworld by Hercules) transferred easily to its new guise, for example the noble opening Sinfonia, originally intended to mark Hercules’ return from the Underworld, now entirely apt for the entrance of the young Hercules in the new drama.

Throughout his life Handel was an inveterate recycler both of other people's music and his own; The Choice of Hercules (1751) consists for the most part of music he wrote the year before for Tobias Smollett's Alceste, a play intended for Covent Garden's 1750 season but never performed. Unwilling to see his efforts go to waste, Handel contrived an hour-long "interlude" based on a poem by Joseph Spence and probably adapted by his regular librettist Thomas Morell… –Mark Walker