“If to Fall, for Laws, Religion, Liberty, We Fall”

At the end of 1745, at the recommendation of the Prince of Wales, George Frideric Handel contacted Thomas Morell (1703-1846) to request a libretto. The ordering catchwords of the oratorio nation, law, and liberty themselves emerge from this simultaneously outwardly and inwardly directed patriotism. In that tradition, tlawt meant identity-constituting religious law but also the constitution, guaranteeing precisely the unity of nation and religion. But in the subsequent numbers of tJudas Maccabeus,t a re-evaluation takes place that in a certain respect corresponds to contemporary discourse, above all in the emphasis placed on tliberty,t which is treated in no less than nine sequential numbers of the first act. As already detailed, the second act takes up the theme of the tfallt and culminates in the highly effective chorus: tif to fall, For laws, religion, liberty, we fallt (no. 46), a rather transparent echo of 1 Macc. Keywords:George Frideric Handel; Judas Maccabeus; laws; liberty; religion

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