Jephtha an Oratorio in Score Composed by Mr. Handel with His Additional Quintetto Price tt 2"2"0. [HWV 70]. [Full score] by HANDEL, George Frideric 1685-1759 - 1770

London: Printed for Willm. Randall, Successor to the late Mr. J. Walsh, in Catharine Street in the Strand. Of Whom may be had the Compleat Scores of Messiah, Samson, Judas Maccabaeus, & L'Allegro Il Pensoroso, 1770. Large folio (265 x 374 mm). Full contemporary mid-tan suede with dark red leather title label gilt to spine, marbled endpapers. 1f. (recto blank, verso fine engraved half-length frontispiece portrait of Handel), 1f. (recto title, verso blank), 1f. (list of subscribers, typeset), 1f. (recto index, verso blank), [i] (blank), 2-75, [i] (blank), 77-198, [i] (blank), 200-208 ("An Additional Quintetto") pp.

The fine Houbraken portrait depicts the composer with violin and bow, horns, sheet music, and musicians in Greco-Roman dress playing harp, aulos, lyre, and triangle, serenading a king and queen.

Subscribers include the King and Queen, Charles Burney and various composers, organists, and members of the Church and gentry. With initials "WK" to upper margin of title, possibly the subscriber "The. Hon. Miss Wilhelmina King."

Binding worn, rubbed, and bumped; boards detached. Slightly browned; minor offsetting of portrait to title; first few leaves partially detached. First Edition of the full score. Smith p. 109, no. 3: "Many of the pages are from plates used in Walsh's editions, but with extra bass figurings, and with the original pagination and singers' named cleaned off." BUC p. 434. RISM H579 and HH579.

Jeptha, with a libretto by Thomas Morell, was first performed in London at Covent Garden on 26 February 1752.

"Apart from a few scraps and patches added to various oratorios Jephtha was Handel's last work. ... [Compared with other libretti treating the same subject] Morell's libretto is much fuller, and deviates much further from Judges than the texts set by Carissimi and Greene. Studied in relation to its sources and the music, it throws into the sharpest perspective the spiritual background of mid-eighteenth-century England, the equivocal nature of the Old Testament oratorio, and the peculiar genius of Handel. ... Jephtha is a masterpiece. The grandeur of its theme and the passionate conviction with which it is presented impose a unity that eclipses trivialities. As a creative artist Handel made as noble an end as Bach or Beethoven; ... [in Jephtha] his spiritual horizon was still expanding." Dean: Handel's Dramatic Oratorios and Masques, pp. 590 and 599.

The first full score of Handel's final work, complete with the fine Houbraken portrait.