George Frederick Handel took to oratorio late in life. His earlier activity as an opera composer had brought him only mixed returns. He had some successes, but had even more failures, and was twice bankrupt as a result of over-lavish and commercially unsuccessful opera ventures. It was when he was in his mid-50s, in debt, and in poor health after suffering a stroke, that he turned to the new genre and thereby found his metier.
The Messiah, , first performed in Dublin in April 1742 - and lately performed again with a mutatis mutandis that was by no means universally acclaimed - is Handel's best known work in this form. A less popular oratorio, however, is of greater interest to the meteorologist. Israel in Egypt, , written in 1739, is largely concerned with the plight of the Israelites in their Egyptian bondage, and includes one of the most powerful musical depictions of a hailstorm to be found anywhere in classical music. The aria "He Gave Them Hailstones" follows the Biblical text from Exodus, and describes one of a sequence of plagues sent by God to trouble the Egyptian Pharaoh.
There were 10 plagues altogether. The first was that of water turning into blood; then followed three plagues of pests. Frogs were followed by mosquitoes, and they, in turn, by flies; and there was a disease of livestock, similar, it would seem, to foot-and-mouth disease. An epidemic of boils which afflicted man and beast was followed by the lethal storm of hailstones, after which came locusts, darkness and the death of first-born children. Of the 10 plagues, no fewer than eight have their origins in meteorology.
The seventh plague, musically immortalised by Handel, was "a very grievous hail", and is reported thus in Exodus: "The Lord sent thunder and hail, and lightning running along the ground, and rained hail upon the land of Egypt. And it was of so great bigness as never before was seen in the land of Egypt since that nation was founded; and the hail destroyed all things that were in the fields, both man and beast; and it broke every tree of the country."
Astute students of Old Testament meteorology will know that while hailstorms are uncommon in Egypt, they are by no means unknown, and occur mainly in the winter near the Mediterranean coast. It is also apparent that this was a very localised phenomenon; although the storm spread throughout "all the land of Egypt", we are told that the land of Goshen, the eastern part of the Nile Delta where the Israelites lived, was unaffected.