character.[1] He had just begun the final chorus of Act II.: How mysterious, O Lord, are Thy ways! Hardly had he written the initial movement, a largo with pathetic modulations, when he was forced to stop. He has noted at the foot of the page:
"Have got so far, Wednesday, 13th February. Prevented from continuing because of my left eye."
He breaks off for ten days. On the eleventh he writes on his manuscript:
"The 23rd February, am a little better. Resumed work."
And he sets to music these words, which contain a tragic allusion to his own misfortune:
Our joy is lost in grief … as day is lost in night.
Laboriously, in five days' time—five days!—and formerly he could have written a whole act in the time—he struggles on to the end of this sombre chorus, which illumines, in the darkness that envelops him, one of the grandest affirmations of faith in time of suffering. On emerging from these gloomy and tormented passages, a few voices (tenor and bass) in unison murmur very softly
All that is…
- ↑ The change of tone begins in the second act, with the cry of horror emitted by Jephthah when he sees his daughter coming to meet him. There is to begin with a series of mournful airs sung by Jephthah and the mother and betrothed of Iphis, and then a quartette, in which Iphis' parents mingle their lamentations. To their tears replies the pure voice of Iphis, who consoles them, in a recitative which seems to open the gates of heaven; then follows an aria of great simplicity, full of a courageous resignation which conceals the fear and the anguish that lie beneath it. The emotion waxes more intense; Jephthah sings a recitative which reminds one of those of Agamemnon in Iphigenia in Aulis; at the close the recitative is interrupted, continuing in slower time, growing faint with grief and horror; certain phrases seem written by Beethoven. At last bursts forth the chorus in the midst of which Händel was stricken with blindness.
