With one notable exception, performances of Handel’s operas and oratorios are still relatively rare in this country. Not that there is any shortage of either: at last count – and scholars keep coming up with more – Handel wrote 42 operas and 29 oratorios. Very often, those terms are interchangeable; there is so much drama in oratorios, they are often performed in semi-staged performances.

There was some sense of ambivalence in a performance of Handel’s Belshazzar in Adelaide this past weekend, billed as the first performance in South Australia.

Handel composed Belshazzar in London over the summer of 1744, a period the Handel scholar Winton Dean has characterised as “the peak of  his creative life”. It is based on a libretto by Charles Jennens, embellished from the Old Testament account of the conquest of Babylon by Cyrus the Great, and the subsequent liberation of the Jews, as recounted somewhat inaccurately in the Book of Daniel.

The first performance was on March 27, 1745 at the King’s Theatre in London. It had only a few revivals in subsequent years, more since the upsurge of interest in Baroque music from the 1960s onwards. Occasionally, it is presented in staged performance, notably...