With the final performance of Deidamia in February 1741 Handel bade farewell to Italian opera. The success of his English oratorios, confirmed by the reception of Messiah in London in 1743, led him into a new creative phase. Messiah was followed by Samson in February 1743, and played in competition with the Earl of Middlesex’s attempts to keep Italian opera alive in the Haymarket. But his company, as with the two Italian opera companies that had played in London before, was collapsing. In August 1743, Horace Walpole wrote to his friend Horace Mann:

‘I am sorry you are engaged in the Opera. I have found it a most dear undertaking! I was not in the management: Lord Middlesex was chief. We were thirty subscribers, at two hundred pounds each, which was to last four years, and no other demands ever to be made. Instead of that, we have been made to pay fifty-six pounds over and above the subscription in one winter. I told the secretary in a passion, that it was the last money I would ever pay for the follies of directors.’
But Middlesex persisted nonetheless, and a further season was mounted.

For his next work, Handel turned away from Old Testament texts to Greek mythology. Reviving a libretto that had been written by William Congreve in 1705, and possibly with the assistance of Newburgh Hamilton, Handel chose the story of Semele. It is clear from his re-arrangement of the text that he considered this work an Italian opera in all but name. Congreve’s libretto was rewritten to accommodate the da capo aria form that was the basic musical structure of the opera seria. Handel combined these arias with extensive choral sections, and provided more accompanied recitative’s than he was to write in any other work.

Semele was first performed at the Covent Garden Theatre on 10th February 1744. It was presented ‘after the manner of an oratorio’, that is in concert form rather than fully staged, but many recognised it for what it really was. In his copy of Mainwaring’s ‘Memoirs of the Life of the Late George Frideric Handel’, Charles Jennens was to write next to the listing of Semele as an oratorio: ‘not an oratorio but a baudy opera’. Handel already had many enemies in London at this time, and this direct challenge to the opera company in the Haymarket did not make him any new friends. Indeed, he had argued with the Prince of Wales himself. Mrs. Delaney, Handel’s neighbour in Brook Street, wrote to her sister: ‘Handel says the Prince is quite out of his good graces!’.

The day after the first performance, Mary Delaney reported her impressions of Semele to her sister: ‘…it is a delightful piece of music…There is a four-part song that is delightfully pretty; Francesina is extremely improved, her notes are more distinct, and there is something in her running-divisions that is quite surprizing…’. Referring to Handel’s enemies as ‘the Goths’, she continued: ‘…there was no disturbance at the play-house and the Goths were not so very absurd as to declare, in a public manner, their disapprobation of such a composer.’

But the audience was confused. More used to sacred works from Handel’s pen during the Lenten period, the ‘baudy’ nature of Semele’s story was a little too much for them. Mrs. Delaney was concerned that, as Semele was a ‘profane story’ her husband ‘does not think it proper for him to go.’ Opposition to the work was growing: ‘…Semele has a strong party against it, viz. the fine ladies, petit maitres, and ignoramus’s. All the opera people are enraged at Handel…’.

Semele ran for just four performances initially, with two further performances in December of the same year. The music for these last two was slightly re-written, and Handel interpolated arias from Arminio, Giustino and Alcina. But this was no more successful, and after 1744 Handel never revived Semele again.