I have been digesting last night’s wonderful performance of Jephtha, its last night. I hadn’t realised that Handel lost the sight of his left eye, whilst he was composing the opera, writing on the manuscript (in German), ‘Reached here on 13 February 1751, unable to go on owing to weakening of the sight of my left eye’. Maybe this helps to explain the extraordinary intensity of the third act, which doesn’t feel characteristic of Handel, nor of the mid-eighteenth century. By the summer when he completed the opera, he had completely lost the sight of his left eye and two years later he was blind.
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
I also saw this production – on the same night I was looking at the Haymarket foundation stone (it was very much an evening for looking at carved stone tablets!) Handel also suffered a botched cataract operation by a charlatan who just wanted the fame of having operated on the composer. Very sad to think of it. Did I imagine it or was there a projection of an eclipse of some sort in the Covent Garden staging?
Yes, it was your blog post which alerted me to the production. Charles