A brilliant overture, stately at first and gradually developing into minuet rhythm, opens the work, which at once reveals the blind captive, Samson, temporarily released from his menial toil because of the feast of Dagon, and lamenting his deplorable plight as he hears the fiery chorus of the priests, ‘Awake the trumpet’s lofty sound.’ His father and his friend come to lament with him just after his touching tenor song (‘Torments, alas!’), and as they ask which of his sorrows is greater, blindness or captivity, Samson sings one of the noblest laments ever written, ‘Total eclipse: no sun, no moon, all dark amidst the blaze of noon,’ a song which touched Handel so deeply in his latter days of blindness that he wept at the performance, as did the audience with him. Samson nobly tells his friends that his punishment is deserved and that there is no hope for him; but at times he furiously denounces his foes, especially in the dramatic outburst, ‘Why does the God of Israel sleep?’ which is followed by an elaborate choral fugue (‘Then shall they know’) on two subjects, one given by the altos, the other by the tenors. The first part closes with a beautiful chorus in which his friends point his thought to the joys of a future life for compensation for all his earthly sorrows. The second part discloses Delilah trying again to entice her husband, but he now understands her treachery and answers her sensuous song with the emphatic ‘Your charms to ruin led the way.’ He then has a visitation from the giant Harapha who taunts him on his present condition. The colloquy between the giants produces two of the finest arias of the oratorio--Harapha’s dashing and boastful bass aria, ‘Honor and arms scorn such a foe,’ and Samson’s proud answer, ‘My strength is from the living God.’ Micah finally bids Harapha to call on Dagon to ‘dissolve the magic spells that gave our hero strength,’ after which is heard the broad, devout six-part chorus of the Israelites, ‘Hear, Jacob’s God.’ The part closes with a massive double chorus--in which Israelites and Philistines, in choral strife, extol their respective deities.