Handel composed his three-act opera seria Ariodante in 1735. It was his first opera to be performed at the Covent Garden Theatre, the predecessor of the Royal Opera House. But apart from one revival a ...

Maurice Greene’s oratorio Jephtha is not exactly a secret – it usually gets a mention in articles about Handel’s Jephtha – but this is its first-ever commercial recording. Indeed, it looks rather like ...

Joyce DiDonato and Michael Spyres star in Handel’s Jephtha – the composer's valedictory oratorio. This work bears the marks of the illness that afflicted Handel while he was composing it, but which ...

Handel’s Jephtha was his last original English oratorio, composed in 1751 and drawing on the Old Testament, characteristically describing a victory of Israelites over heathenish others. In this case, ...

Jephtha review: A night at the opera that I would like to forget Allan Clayton has a magnificent tenor voice but it is simply not suited to Handel - one contributing factor that makes this production ...

What would you sacrifice to gain a victory? While this question may be at the forefront of many of our minds in light of the conflict in the Middle East, director Oliver Mears’s new production of ...

Handel and his librettist Thomas Morell in their oratorio about Jephtha’s rash promise are equivocal about the filicide, to say the least, and Royal Opera director Oliver Mears goes further in ...

The State of Israel is at war with its neighbours. No, this is not the World News but a Biblical story that forms the plot of Handel's Jephtha. This is rarely seen, partly because it was not ...

Handel’s majestic final oratorio holds its own in Oliver Mears’s searching new production; Marina Abramović channels Maria Callas; and a well-told tale of when Britten met Auden War is the only ...

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. It is a good thing the Royal Opera did not choose to present an updated staging of Handel’s Jephtha. In the ...

‘Gloomy’. That’s the word. The story of Jephtha in the Book of Judges isn’t a barrel of laughs. Pushed into leading the Israelites in battle against the Ammonites, Jephtha makes a bargain: Yahweh will ...

The story is somewhere along the lines of Abraham and Isaac or Iphigenia in Aulis: Jephtha has obtained divine assistance by promising to sacrifice to God the first living being he sees on his return ...