No sooner was _Saul_ finished (September 27) than Handel, four days later, began the composition of _Israel in Egypt_. _Saul_ was first performed on January 16, 1739, and enjoyed a moderate success, but _Israel_ (April 4) was a failure, even after it had been shortened and made more attractive by the insertion of Italian opera songs.
_Israel in Egypt_ is the most conspicuous example of a strange and almost unaccountable habit which from about this period began to show itself in Handel's methods of composition--the incorporation of large quantities of music by other composers. Samuel Wesley was the first person to draw attention to this practice of Handel's, though only in a private letter of 1808. In 1831 Dr. Crotch, in his professorial lectures at Oxford, named no less than twenty-nine composers whom Handel had "quoted or copied." The researches of Chrysander, Dr. Max Seiffert, Ebenezer Prout, and Sedley Taylor eventually proved beyond dispute that not only _Israel_, but several other works of Handel were largely made up from the music of other men.
Chrysander maintained that Handel began appropriating other men's ideas as early as 1707, for not only _Rodrigo_ and _Agrippina_, but also _La Resurrezione_ and the _Laudate pueri_ show obvious reminiscences of Keiser's opera _Octavia_ (Hamburg, 1705). These were probably subconscious, like Handel's reminiscences of Scarlatti and others at this period; they need not be taken any more seriously than Schubert's frequent reminiscences of Beethoven. But in _Atalanta_ (1736) and _Giustino_ (1737), Prout discovered quotations and adaptations several bars long from a _Passion_ by Graun, which is known to have been composed not many years before. Further fragments of this _Passion_ were identified by Prout in _Alexander's Feast_ and the _Wedding Anthem_ (1736); _Saul_, like _Israel_, incorporates several movements from a _Te Deum_ by Urio (_fl_. 1660). From this date onwards until the end of his career Handel systematically drew upon the works of other musicians.
There has been much controversy over this question, and many attempts have been made to explain away Handel's "borrowings" so as to leave no moral stain on his character, which indeed, by all contemporary accounts, was scrupulously upright. Sedley Taylor (1906) was certainly anxious to clear Handel's character, but still more concerned to arrive at the exact truth, and his method of presenting the evidence throws a new light on Handel's procedure. He showed that in most cases Handel made frequent alterations in the music which he utilised, almost as if Stradella (to cite one name out of many) had been a young pupil to whom he was giving a lesson in composition.