Overture Magazine - 2018-19 Season BSO_Overture_NOV_DEC | Page 30

HANDEL MESSIAH
many myths and legends have grown
up around it. We have been told that
Handel himself compiled its mostly
Biblical text or, alternatively, that it
was sent to him by a stranger; that its
success transformed him overnight
from a bankrupt operatic has-been to
England’s most revered composer; that
at its London premiere the king himself
rose during the “Hallelujah” Chorus to
express his approbation. But Messiah’s
real story is much more complicated,
though no less fascinating.
In the early 1740s, Handel was
indeed in considerable professional and
financial trouble. After emigrating from
Germany to England as a young man,
he had enjoyed a celebrated career as the
country’s leading composer of operas,
sung mostly in Italian and enhanced by
spectacular costumes and scenic effects.
But by the end of the 1730s, Handel’s
serious grand operas were falling out of
fashion. The success of John Gay’s much
simpler, English-language The Beggar’s
Opera fueled a new enthusiasm for
popular-style comic operas. Unable to fill
London’s opera houses anymore, Handel
retreated from the field and turned his
genius to sacred dramas, or oratorios.
He was not a novice in this genre.
Even while writing operas, Handel had
composed a number of oratorios, notably
Israel in Egypt and Saul. Typically, his
oratorios were not so very different from
his operas: they told a dramatic story, their
soloists played actual characters and they
were performed in theaters and concert
halls, not churches. But Israel in Egypt took
a new musical approach in that the chorus
became the central character.
And Messiah, while giving the soloists more
to do, still emphasized the chorus
for its climactic moments.
Handel himself did not compile the
group of texts drawn from the Bible’s
Old and New Testaments for Messiah.
Instead, this was the work of Charles
Jennens, a wealthy literary figure who
was a longtime friend of the composer’s
and had created texts for several other
Handel oratorios. But Handel, devoutly
religious, responded with a burst of
almost miraculous creative energy to the
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words Jennens had prepared. Beginning
work on August 22, 1741, he completed
the two-and-a-half-hour oratorio in just
over three weeks. Besides inspiration
from God, he also had a little practical
assistance in this huge task: like most
Baroque composers, he did not hesitate
to borrow from his earlier works. Three
of the choruses in Part I — “He shall
purify,” “His yoke is easy” and “For unto
us a child is born”— are based on music
he’d originally composed as vocal duets.
Messiah was introduced to the world
in Dublin, Ireland in 1742 during Holy
Week (the tradition of performing it
during the Christmas season is fairly
recent). At the invitation of the Duke
of Devonshire, the Lord Lieutenant of
Ireland, Handel had been presenting
concerts of his works there since the
previous November and winning the
warm response that had been eluding
him in London. On that Tuesday, Neal’s
Musick Hall was packed beyond its
capacity; audience members had been
specifically requested to leave their
swords and hoop skirts at home in order
to fit more people into the hall!
The Dublin audience responded with
enormous enthusiasm to the new work,
and another performance was quickly
scheduled. But when Handel brought
Messiah to London in March 1743,
attendance was disappointing and the
critics were unkind. Much of Messiah’s
failure was caused by a heated controversy
that broke out in the city as to whether
such a serious sacred subject ought to be
presented as “entertainment” in secular
concert halls. Receiving few subsequent
performances, the oratorio went back on
Handel’s shelf.
By 1749 when Handel was 64, the
trustees of London’s Foundling Hospital
invited him to present Messiah there at
a charitable fundraising concert. This
time the oratorio aroused no controversy,
more than 1,000 people attended and
for the first time, Messiah enjoyed a
London triumph. From then on, annual
performances during the Lenten season
became a London tradition, soon
spreading throughout Europe. Handel
was finally acknowledged as England’s
leading musical citizen, and he lived long
enough — until 1759 — to be able to savor
the success of the work he loved so dearly.
Listening to Messiah
Messiah’s heroic journey is divided into
three parts. Part I revolves around the Old
Testament prophecies of the Messiah’s
coming and culminates with his birth as
told in the Gospel of Luke. Indeed, more
of Messiah’s text is drawn from the Old
Testament than the New, and, apart from
the Nativity story, the Gospel histories
are seldom used. Thus, the emphasis
falls on the broader meaning of Christ’s
redemption of the human race rather than
on the details of Jesus’ life.
Part II meditates on human sinfulness,
the Messiah’s rejection and suffering
and his sacrifice to redeem humankind;
it concludes with that famous song of
praise and triumph, the “Hallelujah”
Chorus. Finally moving into the New
Testament, Part III tells of the Messiah’s
vanquishing of death and the promise of
everlasting joy for the believer.
Handel did not leave behind a
definitive version of Messiah; instead,
he reworked numbers and re-assigned
arias to different voice categories
depending on the soloists available for
each performance. Messiah’s solo sections
are divided between recitatives, which
place greater emphasis on delivery of
the words, and arias, in which musical
values and the showcasing of the singer’s
technical prowess take precedence. The
tenor’s two opening numbers are a good