Messiah has become a part of our musical culture to an extent that Handel, sharp businessman though he was, could never have dreamed of when he completed the oratorio over 280 years ago. There can be no doubt that Messiah is the work that has the widest popular appeal in the entire choral repertoire. Indeed, some of the oratorio’s numbers, particularly the famed Hallelujah chorus, have become virtual clichés, instantly recognizable when they are heard in movies or commercials. The very popularity and familiarity of Messiah sometimes stands in the way of our appreciation of this masterwork. For the message of Messiah in fact runs deeper than the hallelujahs that resound at the close of Part II: more than perhaps any other work, Messiah represents a sermon in music, incorporating the entire religious creed of its librettist, Charles Jennens, and its composer, George Frederick Handel. Dr. Edith A. Copley conducts this program, featuring the Prescott Chorale, singers from The Yavapai College Master Chorale and the Flagstaff Master Chorale, and soloists Christine Graham, Olga Perez Flora, James Flora, and Octavio Moreno, and YOU, if you chose to sing!

George Frideric Handel (1785-1759)
Messiah

Handel composed Messiah in just three weeks in early 1741. The first performance was in Dublin on April 13, 1742. Duration 82:00.

Handel and the Oratorio

The Handel scholar Winton Dean has appropriately described the oratorio as “…the most slippery of the larger musical forms”—“slippery” in that, before Handel, it is difficult precisely to define the form. The idea of using a large text in a multi-movement setting certainly dates back to the liturgical dramas and mystery plays of the Middle Ages, but the term “oratorio” dates only from about 150 years before Messiah was composed. “Oratorio” originally referred to the musical devotions of the Congregazione dell’Oratorio, a monastic Order founded in the late 16th century, whose services were held in the oratory of the Roman church of Santa Maria della Vallicella. The Italian and German oratorios of the 17th and early 18th centuries provided a rich historical foundation on which Handel could build. These works set a wide variety of texts, Scriptural, mythological, or allegorical—often using a mixture of recitative, aria, and chorus. However, it was Handel who achieved the musical definition of the oratorio that remains with composers to this day: an extended work for voices and orchestra, usually with a sacred text—in reality, an unstaged sacred opera—that includes movements for soloists and chorus.

When Handel moved to England permanently in 1717, it was to compose and produce operas. He was the acknowledged master of the highly stylized and pompous Italian opera that was the fashion of the time, and with the support of his aristocratic patrons and wildly enthusiastic audiences, he became the most successful impresario in the history of the form. Handel’s operas were showy affairs, featuring ornate sets and stage machinery, ballets, and highly ornamented arias by the prima donnas and castrati that dominated the London stage. However, by the late 1730s, London audiences were tiring of Italian opera, with its elaborate dramatic conventions and plots that were often incomprehensible—even for the small minority who actually understood Italian! Faced with financial ruin, Handel turned to a new form, the English oratorio. Handel’s oratorios from this period, works such as Deborah, Israel in Egypt, and Saul, were dramatic settings of Old Testament stories that were very familiar to his English audiences. Although Handel retained many of the outward forms of Italian opera in these works—recitative, da capo aria, and ensemble—he placed a much greater emphasis on the chorus. The oratorio turned out to be a stroke of financial genius. By abandoning elaborate staging, and using local soloists and choristers, rather than the temperamental and expensive Italian singers he had employed in the 1720s, Handel was able to produce these phenomenally popular new works for a fraction of the cost of his operas. Handel’s place in English musical culture was now secure. Long after his operas and instrumental works had fallen from memory, his oratorios, particularly Messiah of 1741, were being performed again and again.

The first Messiah

In July of 1741, Charles Jennens, who had written the libretti (lyrics) for two of Handel’s oratorios wrote the following in a letter to a friend—the earliest mention of Messiah:

“Handel says he will do nothing next Winter, but I hope that I shall persuade him to set another Scripture collection I have made for him, and perform it for his own Benefit in Passion week. I hope that he will lay out his whole Genius and Skill upon it, that the Composition may excell all his former Compositions, as the Subject excells every other Subject. The Subject is Messiah…”

The libretto fell into Handel’s hands at the perfect time. The composer had just made a final effort to revive comatose Italian opera, by staging two works in London. The performances were flops, and Handel, nearly broke, was giving serious thought to returning to Germany. He decided instead, however, to accept an invitation to go to Dublin, to produce a season of his new English oratorios. Handel wrote Messiah between August 22 and September 14 of 1741, and completed Samson during the next month. He set off for Ireland in November, and began what was to become an incredibly successful series of productions. Handel was able to recoup much of the money he had lost in his futile opera productions, but more importantly, his name became irrevocably tied with oratorio. This success prompted a preoccupation with the form that would last for the rest of his career, producing such works as Belshazzar (another collaboration with Jennens), Judas Maccabeus, and Jeptha.

Messiah was intended to be the grand finale of his Dublin visit, and it was performed at a benefit concert during Holy Week in 1742. The reception of this new oratorio was everything Handel could have hoped for. A public rehearsal of Messiah on April 6 was attended by over 600 ticketholders, who jammed into Dublin’s New Musick Hall. The stuffiness and crowding at this rehearsal caused the promoters to place a notice in the next day’s newspaper asking that ladies “…come without Hoops, as it will greatly increase the Charity by making room for more company.” According to one Dublin reviewer of this first performance:

“Words are wanting to express the exquisite Delight it afforded to the admiring crouded Audience. The Sublime, the Grand, the Tender, adapted to the most majestick and moving words, conspired to transport and charm the ravished Heart and Ear…”

Messiah after Handel

After its success in Dublin, Handel produced dozens of performances of Messiah, the last one only two weeks before his death. Handel always used Messiah as the Holy Week finale for his annual London season, in a performance whose proceeds went to charity. (In fact, it is clear that both Jennens and Handel thought of this as a work for the penitential season of Lent. Today, Messiah is almost exclusively associated with the Christmas season—a much later development.)

Messiah took its time in crossing the English Channel. It was not until the 1770s that performances of the work were heard in Hamburg, Leipzig, Berlin, and Vienna. (Mozart himself produced a re-orchestrated, and streamlined Messiah in 1789.) However, Messiah soon became standard fare for German church choirs, and its influence can be seen in the oratorios of many later Germans, particularly Haydn and Mendelssohn. At about the same time it was being introduced in Germany, Messiah crossed the Atlantic to the Colonies. The first American Messiah was heard in Boston in 1770, and performances were soon heard in Charleston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

It remained popular throughout America and most of Europe from this time onward. (Only the French were slow to accept the work—the first full French production was in 1870.) However, the celebrity of the work approached deification in England in the late 18th and 19th centuries. In 1784, George III sponsored what was to become the first Handel Festival, which featured a massive performance of Messiah by over 500 singers and instrumentalists. Joseph Haydn heard a festival performance of Messiah in May of 1791, and was profoundly moved, reportedly bursting into tears during the Hallelujah chorus. (Haydn’s oratorios—particularly The Creation of 1798—were directly inspired by Handel’s works, especially Messiah, as were the oratorios of Mendelssohn.)

This tradition of jumbo-sized performances reached its peak in the Victorian Age. A Handel Centennial performance, held in the opulent Crystal Palace in 1859, employed 2700 singers and more than 400 instrumentalists, and a London performance at the turn of the century featured a choir of more than 4000. (We can only imagine what these elephantine groups did to the sixteenth-note lines and delicate counterpoint in choruses such as Lift Up Your Heads…) George Bernard Shaw, always an acute observer of musical tastes, wryly proposed that Parliament make any performance of Messiah by more than 48 singers a capital offense!

Messiah — What to Listen For

As in most of Handel’s oratorios, the music of Messiah uses the forms of Italian opera in which he was so skilled. The opening Symphony follows the form of a French overture: a slow section with pompous dotted rhythms followed by a lively fugue. The brilliant da capo form that was the vehicle for operatic vocal display is retained in a few of Messiah’s “airs,” such as Ev’ry Valley. Da capo like this are set in ABA form, with the second “A” section providing the soloist an opportunity to ornament. Most of Messiah’s arias, however, are set in a through-composed form, without large repeated sections, that better suits the irregular Biblical prose of its text. Arias and choruses are typically introduced by recitative, but in Messiah, Handel also makes frequent use of the Arioso, a through-composed form that was becoming increasingly popular in the mid 18th century. Arioso movements do not typically feature the type of vocal display heard in the more showy arias. The most important musical moments in Messiah are found in its choruses. While most of these are in the freely developing quasi-fugal form typical of his opera choruses (some of Messiah’s choruses were, in fact, written originally for Italian words and recycled into the oratorio!), the chorus takes a much larger role in developing the sense of the work’s text than in any of his operas.

The text of Messiah is unique among Handel’s oratorios. Most of them use heavily-edited versions of epic stories from the Old Testament or Classical mythology. There is a dramatic continuity in these oratorios: they tell a story, in which the soloists and chorus play clearly-defined roles. Messiah, however, is a patchwork of direct quotations from the English Bible. There are certainly moments of great drama in the work, but there is no “plot”—Jennens and Handel followed a somewhat more subtle plan. The oratorio is divided into three sections, which encompass the life of Christ, yet do not serve as a narration. Part I serves as a prologue: the opening dozen numbers are Old Testament prophecies of the Messiah’s imminent arrival. The second half of this section turns to the story of Christ’s birth and the promise of his miraculous power. In Part II, Messiah alludes indirectly to the events surrounding Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. However the expressive content of this section follows a clear development: the opening is a lamentation on Christ’s suffering, which moves gradually towards a joyous acclamation of his resurrection and his might that reaches its peak in the Hallelujah chorus. Part III, which sets texts drawn almost exclusively from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians and the Book of Revelations, is an epilogue of sorts. In closing Messiah, Jennens melded together these texts to form a meditation on Christ’s second coming and His role in humanity’s salvation.