Messiah, An Oratoria in Three Parts
George Frideric Handel
Born February 23, 1685, in Halle, Germany
Died April 14, 1759 in London, England

In London on August 22, 1741, a stout, neatly dressed gentleman in his mid-fifties walked from Grosvenor Square to his home on Brook Street. He hummed a bit of a tune and talked to himself in a curious mixture of German and English as his manservant let him in and took his lace-ruffled coat and tricorn hat. He then seated himself at a desk in his front room and began to write music with amazing speed. For the next 23 days he did not leave his house. His servant brought his meals to the room. On September 14 he signed and dated the completed manuscript and shut it in his desk drawer. There it would remain until he sent it to a copyist to have performance parts made for his coming trip to Dublin. He then immediately began writing another huge work—another oratorio—that would be fully sketched by the end of October.

George Frideric Handel had read the handwriting on the wall: Italian Opera was dead. When he arrived from Germany in 1710 he took London by storm, instantly scoring a huge success with Rinaldo, an opera in the newly fashionable Italian style. He had gone on to dominate the London stage but now, 30 years and 40 operas later, the fickle English public had turned against him. His last few operas couldn't draw flies (even though he threw in some risqué French ballet numbers) and he was close to bankruptcy. He had suffered a stroke in 1737 brought on by overwork and overweight that paralyzed his right arm for several months. No less a person than Frederick the Great, the music-loving Crown Prince of Prussia, expressed the opinion that "Handel's great days are over, his inspiration is exhausted, and his taste behind the fashion." Rumors circulated that he was ready to strike his colors and return to Germany, his career ended.

But Handel was a resilient old warrior, and a course was now set in his mind that he knew would bring him even greater success in his remaining creative years. In 1737 the City of London had begun to enforce regulations that forbade opera performances during Lent. To keep the Haymarket Theater open during this period Handel had written oratorios on biblical subjects sung in English. The public didn't take to the first three, Alexander's Feast, Israel in Egypt, and Saul, but Handel now understood why they had failed. The English middle class loved big, rousing choruses and emotionally accessible songs. His oratorios hadn't achieved a dramatically effective balance between these two elements. He realized that an oratorio must still be music drama—theater—even though staged action was forbidden by a hypocritically pious society. The manuscript in his drawer, Messiah, would be the first step on his new artistic journey. In October Handel attended the opening night of a new Italian opera staged by Baldassare Galuppi and laughed. The laughter wasn't at the two castratos on stage or the absurd musical pastiche pasted together from the works of half a dozen composers, but at the fact that he no longer had to compete with the Italians—he had different plans. He would become the composer of giant events and great feelings.

In February of 1741 Handel was invited by the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, the Duke of Devonshire, on behalf of three charitable organizations to travel to Dublin and give a series of benefit concerts. The Irish are a music-loving people and Dublin had several musical societies that were unusual in that they were organized especially for charitable purposes. Social conditions in Ireland were even worse than in London; the gap between rich and poor was huge and the majority lived in abject poverty. Public-spirited citizens sought to alleviate the miserable conditions in hospitals and the prisons where impoverished debtors wasted away, unable to raise paltry sums to buy their freedom. Handel's music was well known in Dublin and his church music was often played for charity benefits. Messiah was evidently planned for such a benefit concert, which would explain its unique contemplative style, different from Handel's other, more theatrically dramatic oratorios.

The text was compiled from the Old and New Testaments with considerable skill by Handel's friend Charles Jennens, a wealthy man with literary ambitions. The selections from Prophets, Gospels, Epistles of St. Paul and the Revelations of John were blended into a libretto that Handel found musically inspiring and beautifully suited to vocal interpretation. The aristocratic Jennens (somewhat of a pompous twit) later wrote to a friend: "I shall show you a collection I gave Handel called Messiah which I value highly, and he has made a fine entertainment out of it, though not near so good as he might have done. I have with great difficulty made him correct some of the grossest faults in the composition." Handel was notoriously short-tempered (he once suspended a balky soprano from a window by her ankles until she promised to sing an aria his way) but his gratitude to Jennens led him to endure his meddling with uncharacteristic patience. He later remarked after a performance of Messiah: "I should be sorry if I only entertained them; I wished to make them better."

Handel arrived in Dublin in November of 1741 and immediately announced a subscription series of six concerts that December and another set of six in February of 1742. Although the score and parts of Messiah were in his traveling bags, it was not until April 13 of 1742 that he premiered the new oratorio. The occasion was a grand charity concert "For the Relief of the Prisoners in the several Gaols, and for the Support of Mercer's Hospital in Stephen's-street, and of the Charitable Infirmary on the Inn's Quay." The eagerly awaited performance took place in the New Music Hall on Fishamble street, and the importance attached to the event is evident from the request made in a newspaper notice that ladies leave their skirt-hoops at home and gentlemen not wear their swords. This made it possible to squeeze a record audience of some 700 people into a hall designed for 600. The soprano and alto soloists were old friends of Handel from the London opera stage: Christina Avoglio and Susanna Cibber. The tenor and bass soloists were drawn from local church choirs, as was the chorus. The orchestra was small but good: the Dublin State Band led by Matthew Dubourg (the irascible Jonathan Swift of Gulliver's Travels fame called it "a club of fiddlers" but Handel was delighted with its excellence.) The performance was one of the greatest artistic triumphs of Handel's life. The Dublin papers lauded "the most finished piece of Musick" and spoke of "exquisite Delight." Even warmer praise was voiced for Handel's generosity in donating all proceeds to charity, leading to the release of 142 prisoners whose debts were paid.

Despite its resounding success in Dublin, Handel didn't present the oratorio to the London public until March of 1743. (It was at this performance that King George II was said to be so stirred by the grandeur of the Hallelujah chorus that he stood in reverence, thus beginning a tradition that lives on today.) Even then Handel refrained from using the title Messiah in advertisements, calling it "A new sacred Oratorio." The reason for this was the prudish piety of the English public. As Paul Henry Lang writes: "Here it was, the unbelievable: Holy Scripture in the flesh, uttered—nay, sung—by the most lascivious and immoral of persons, theatre folk, and accompanied by a detestable band of fiddlers in the Play-House, that damnable institution where no true Christian could enter without being soiled." Handel could write such a work for Dublin where it served a charitable purpose, but not for London, which did not approve of appropriating the Word of God for dramatic purposes. What eventually made Messiah acceptable to Englishmen were yearly performances Handel began to give in 1749 to benefit the Foundling Hospital in London. Even so, voices continued to denounce it as blasphemous. The Bishop of London still forbade performances of Messiah in Westminster Abbey well into the nineteenth century, long after the oratorio had become a religious landmark in the English-speaking world.

Which brings up the question: what, exactly, is Messiah? (Handel always called it just "Messiah" without a "The" in front.) For Handel an oratorio was not church music, not even religious music. He was a man of the theater first, last and always. That Messiah's text comes entirely from the scriptures does not make it liturgical music. Handel told the story of Christ with the same musical style and technique that he wrote his dramatic arias for the opera and brilliant choral anthems for royal coronations. Inspired by the human drama of the story, he sought to move his audience to just and moral action ("I wish to make them better"), not instruct them in ecclesiastical doctrine. Handel united three disparate and seemingly conflicting genres in his oratorios: Old Testament stories, Shakespearean dramatic characterization and classical musical form. The result was a very personal and gripping form of music-drama that explored human character at moments of extreme emotion.

Pathos and sorrow are expressed in Italianate ariosos with sighing, descending phrases and expressive silences. Anger bursts forth in "scourging" choruses that derive from the North German Passions of Bach and Telemann, as well as "rage" arias direct from the opera house. Joy flowers in the lush coloratura trills and runs of solo cavatinas and lightly dancing rhythms of madrigal-style choruses. He constantly translates word-pictures into sound: the heavens shake (as do the Basso's running sixteenth-notes), people walk in darkness to a hesitating, circuitous tune in dark string octaves, angel's wings beat softly in ethereal strokes of the violins, sheep wander in meandering figurations that really do "go astray," people turn "every one his own way" in twisting, rolling contrapuntal lines, and the orchestral violins literally physically thrash their instruments with a violently leaping melodic line as the tenor sings "Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron."

But the central protagonist of Messiah is the chorus. We never directly hear Christ's voice and the solo airs, although sung by individual voices, still express the thoughts and feelings of humanity as a whole. By making the chorus the principal actor in the oratorio, Handel was able to achieve effects of pathos, dramatic power and overwhelming grandeur that are still unsurpassed. Beethoven esteemed Handel above all other composers for the elemental intensity of his music and was still studying his works on his deathbed. Mozart, who admired Messiah so much that he made his own "modernized" orchestration for a performance in Vienna in 1789, exclaimed "When he chooses, he strikes thunder!" Handel had learned to "strike thunder" in the ceremonial anthems he wrote for the coronations and birthday celebrations of English kings and queens. The British public loved these triumphant, rumbustious outbursts of powerfully rhythmic choral shouts supported by trumpets and drums (historian Charles Burney called it Handel's "big bow-wow" manner.)

Messiah has its share of grand "coronation anthems," the Hallelujah Chorus being the most familiar and wonderful of the lot. It greets the Redeemer who will emerge triumphant from the tomb, building with unflagging dramatic intensification from a joyous opening to an irresistible climax. Paul Henry Lang wrote: "When the Hallelujah Chorus is thundered, its wondrous strains exuding power and pomp, the audience gets to its feet to greet a mighty ruler in whose presence we do not kneel but stand at attention." Handel wrote 17 more oratorios after Messiah's triumphant premiere in 1741. His operas, out of fashion, faded into obscurity and the man Edward Fitzgerald called "a good old pagan at heart" mistakenly came to be thought of as primarily a religious composer. A pagan he was not, but a humanist, a dramatist who sought to capture in music those critical moments when the human spirit rises to meet the supreme tragedy and possibility of life.

Program notes Copyright © 2009 by Matthew Naughtin