After 20-odd years in London, George Frideric Handel had got fed up with sweating out Italian operas for an increasingly ungrateful public, but instead of quitting in fury he conjured up an entirely original musical form: the closest we ever came to true English opera. Saul, first performed in 1739, was not his first oratorio, but it was perhaps the first with a really serious intellectual purpose. And he meant it to be noticed: he invested enormous money in a new organ, found himself a carillon (a keyboard-operated bell-playing instrument, like an early glockenspiel), hired kettledrums and trombones from the army instruments kept at the Tower – and chose a text of urgent interest in eighteenth-century England and the relatively new Great Britain.The English were not the only nation