HANDEL’S MESSIAH George Frideric Handel (1685 - 1759) From that time to the present, this great work has been heard in all parts of the kingdom with increasing reverence and delight; it has fed the hungry, clothed the { naked, fostered the orphan, and enriched succeeding managers of the Oratorios, more than any single production in this or any country. Charles Burney, An Account of the Musical Performances at Westminster Abbey in commemoration of Handel, 1785 Handel started to compose Messiah on the 28th of August 1741. He had drafted it by the 12th of September, and then spent two more days filling in the orchestration. It took him just seventeen days to write one of the greatest and most enduring musical works, but had it not been for the hostility between King George II and his son Frederick, Prince of Wales, it may not have been composed at all. Handel was born in Germany and worked as a violinist and composer at the opera house in Hamburg for four years. When he was twenty-one he travelled to Italy to work as a composer before moving permanently to England in 1712. Handel produced an enormous number of works in every musical genre of his time. He was one of the most famous and successful opera composers in the Baroque period, and he wrote forty-two Italian operas in all, including Alcina and Giulio Cesare (Julius Caesar), nearly all for the London stage. It was only much later in his career that he turned to English oratorios (a genre he developed), and he composed eighteen of them. Given the fame of his Musick for the Royal Fireworks and the Water Musick Suite, he wrote fewer orchestral works than one might expect, but they include two sets of concerto grossos (his Opus 3 and Opus 6) which are hailed as one of the masterpieces of Baroque music. Handel was a keyboard virtuoso, and he wrote many solo pieces for harpsichord and organ. 13 HANDEL’S MESSIAH Messiah and Politics George, Elector of Hanover, inherited the English throne when Queen Anne died in 1714. He was fifty-first in line and only the Queen’s second cousin, however fifty other closer relatives were ineligible due to being Roman Catholic. Now George I of England, he moved there with his son, also George (later George II) and George’s wife Caroline, forcing them to leave their seven-year-old son Frederick in Hanover. They were not to see him again until 1728, when George I died and George II became king, and Frederick, now aged twenty-one, was finally permitted to travel to England. It was a far from joyful reunion and what little relationship existed between parents and son soon deteriorated into fear and loathing on both sides. His mother Queen Caroline declared him to be ‘the greatest ass and the greatest beast in the whole world’, and seeing him go by was heard to exclaim, ‘Look, there he goes! That wretch! That villain!’. Frederick made a point of opposing his parents in everything. They were still very German, despite having lived in England for fourteen years, so he enthusiastically embraced all things English, including cricket (he played for Surrey), and he also supported the political group which opposed his father’s government. He particularly resented the King and Queen’s patronage of the arts, and because they supported Handel and his opera company, Frederick supported members of the nobility who set up their own rival company. The Opera of the Nobility poached Handel’s best singers and drew the support of wealthy patrons away from Handel’s own company. According to the courtier Lord Hervey, The King and Queen … were both Handelists, and sat freezing constantly at his empty Haymarket Opera, whilst the Prince with all the chief of the nobility went as constantly to that of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. … An anti-Handelist was looked upon as an anti-courtier; and voting against the Court in Parliament was hardly a less remissible or more venial sin than speaking against Handel or going to the Lincoln’s Inn Fields Opera. … Queen Caroline was heard to say furiously that Frederick’s popularity ‘makes me vomit’, while the King stated that ‘he did not think … the ruin of one poor fellow [Handel] so generous or so good-natured a scheme as to do much honour to the undertakers’. Handel managed to keep his company afloat, seeing out the rival company which collapsed in 1737, but he sustained heavy financial losses and the stress took its toll on his health. The ingenious Mr. Handell is very much indispos’d, and it’s thought with a Paraletick Disorder, he having at present no Use of his Right Hand. The London Evening Post, 14 May 1737 With finances tight, and sensing that in any case the London public was beginning to lose its taste for Italian opera, Handel decided to introduce English oratorios into his subscription seasons of opera. The English oratorio was a completely new musical genre developed by Handel for pragmatic as much as 14 artistic reasons. Oratorios were not staged, thereby saving on sets and costumes. They required less rehearsal time, and he could use mainly English singers rather than expensive Italian imports. They proved to be popular not just with the upper-class audience which patronised the opera but with the newly well-off middle class, and they made Handel so much money – for relatively little effort – that he gradually stopped composing operas altogether. First Performances: Messiah in the 1740s On Tuesday last Mr. Handel’s Sacred Grand Oratorio, The Messiah, was performed at the New Musick-Hall in Fishamble-street … Words are wanting to express { the exquisite Delight it afforded to the admiring crouded Audience. The Sublime, the Grand, and the Tender, adapted to the most elevated, majestick and moving Words, conspired to transport and charm the ravished Heart and Ear. The Dublin Journal, 13–17 April 1742 As soon as Handel had completed the scores of Messiah and Samson he travelled to Dublin, arriving there in November 1741. Shortly after arriving he announced a subscription series of six Musical Entertainments (oratorios and one unstaged opera). These sold so well that he announced a second series, and then a charity performance of Messiah, which premiered officially on the 13th of April after a public rehearsal three days earlier. Ladies were asked to come without hoops in their skirts and gentlemen without their swords, to make room for more people. A second performance took place on the 25th of May. Handel had written to friends that he would not mount a subscription season again that year, but apparently buoyed by his success in Dublin he did exactly that on his return to London in August. He scheduled Messiah for the 23rd of March, but even before it was performed he was attacked in the newspapers by those who were scandalised by ‘a religious Performance in a Playhouse’, and the performance was ‘but indifferently relished’. He did not perform it again until 1745 and then once more in 1749, but it was not until he performed it as a charity fundraiser at the Foundling Hospital orphanage in London in 1750 that Messiah really took off. A huge audience of 1,400 attended, and the chapel was so packed that people had to be turned away. A second performance two weeks later was similarly attended, and from then on Handel included Messiah in every season until his death in 1759. 15 HANDEL’S MESSIAH The words ‘I hope I shall persuade him to set another Scripture Collection I have made for him … I hope he will lay out his whole Genius & Skill upon it, that the Composition { may excell all his former Compositions, as the Subject excells every other Subject. The Subject is Messiah.’ Charles Jennens, 10 July 1741 Messiah was conceived by its librettist, Charles Jennens, a cultured man with deeply-held religious principles who had already provided Handel with the libretti of Saul and Israel in Egypt. The libretto, or word-book, consists entirely of short passages from the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, selected and arranged by Jennens. Although Messiah’s subject is sacred, in many ways it is quite different from oratorios such as Samson or Jephtha, which are like unstaged operas. They have a plot and characters who tell the story through recitative (sung speech) and sing arias about their own reactions to what is happening. Messiah has no continuous narrative and only two characters who appear fleetingly – the angels who appear to the shepherds in Part I and the chorus who momentarily become the crowd calling for Christ’s execution (‘He trusted in God’) in Part II. Otherwise soloists and chorus provide commentary, as faithful believers. Like other oratorios it is divided into three parts, similar to the three acts of an Italian opera. Part I is centred around the coming of Christ. It begins with prophecies foretelling the birth of a saviour, followed by the prophecy of the birth of Jesus, and the angel’s announcement of the birth itself to shepherds outside Bethlehem. Part II covers Christ’s crucifixion, his death and resurrection. Part III reflects on the promise of eternal life through Christ’s sacrifice. Messiah is not primarily about the life of Jesus Christ. Rather, it is about the Christian belief in God’s redemption of humankind through the Messiah, Christ, and is a meditation on life and death, belief, faith, and sacrifice. These eternal themes still speak to us, even though our society today is far removed from that of eighteenth-century England with its very strong underpinning of Christianity.