Photo: Andrew Houston The Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, with Stephen Cleobury 2 George Frideric Handel 1685–1759 Messiah Part the first 1 Sinfony Grave – Allegro moderato 2 Accompagnato Comfort ye my people 3 Air Ev’ry valley shall be exalted 4 Chorus And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed 5 Accompagnato Thus saith the Lord of Hosts 6 Air But who may abide the day of His coming 7 Chorus And He shall purify 8 Recitative Behold, a virgin shall conceive 9 Air O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion 10 Chorus O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion 11 Accompagnato For behold, darkness shall cover the earth 12 Air The people that walked in darkness 13 Chorus For unto us a Child is born 14 Pifa Larghetto e mezzo piano 15 Recitative There were shepherds Accompagnato And lo, the angel of the Lord Recitative And the angel said unto them 16 Accompagnato And suddenly there was with the angel Chorus Glory to God in the highest 17 Air Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion 18 Recitative Then shall the eyes of the blind be open’d 19 Air He shall feed His flock like a shepherd 20 Chorus His yoke is easy, His burthen is light 3 Part the second 21 Chorus Behold, the Lamb of God 22 Air He was despised 23 Chorus Surely, He hath borne our griefs 24 Chorus And with His stripes we are healed 25 Chorus All we like sheep have gone astray 26 Accompagnato All they that see Him, laugh Him to scorn 27 Chorus He trusted in God 28 Accompagnato Thy rebuke hath broken His heart 29 Arioso Behold, and see if there be any sorrow 30 Accompagnato He was cut off out of the land of the living 31 Air But Thou didst not leave His soul in hell 32 Chorus Lift up your heads, O ye gates 33 Recitative Unto which of the angels 34 Chorus Let all the angels of God worship Him 35 Air Thou art gone up on high 36 Chorus The Lord gave the word 37 Air How beautiful are the feet 38 Chorus Their sound is gone out into all lands 39 Air Why do the nations so furiously rage together 40 Chorus Let us break their bonds asunder 41 Recitative He that dwelleth in heaven 42 Air Thou shalt break them 43 Chorus Hallelujah! 4 Part the third 44 Air I know that my Redeemer liveth 45 Chorus Since by man came death 46 Accompagnato Behold, I tell you a mystery 47 Air The trumpet shall sound (David Blackadder trumpet) 48 Recitative Then shall be brought to pass the saying 49 Duet O death, where is thy sting 50 Chorus But thanks be to God 51 Air If God be for us 52 Chorus Worthy is the Lamb that was slain 53 Chorus Amen Ailish Tynan soprano · Alice Coote mezzo-soprano Allan Clayton tenor · Matthew Rose bass Choir of King’s College, Cambridge Academy of Ancient Music leader Rodolfo Richter Continuo: Peter Stevens organ* · Alastair Ross harpsichord Joseph Crouch cello · Timothy Amherst double bass Stephen Cleobury 5 Messiah by the Cam Handel composed Messiah at a crucial point in his career. Following the collapse of his his operatic enterprises in London in 1741, he took up an invitation to give a season of oratorios in Dublin, and among the works he took with him in November of that year was the newly finished Messiah, written in a space of barely three weeks during the summer. Messiah sets a series of biblical texts compiled by Charles Jennens, and is exceptional among Handel’s English oratorios in centring on the figure of Christ. While this was far from unusual in the Lutheran tradition of Handel’s native Germany, where settings of the Passion story in particular were well established, it was unheard of in the more puritanically inclined anglophone world. The Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin (Jonathan Swift, of Gulliver fame) had already objected to members of his choir singing in oratorio performances at William Neal’s new Music Hall on Fishamble Street (‘a club of fiddlers’, he called it). It was only because Messiah was to be given expressly as a charity performance that the cathedral choirs of St Patrick’s and Christ Church were allowed to take part, with their lay clerks singing the male solos. With that potential problem neatly bypassed, the premiere took place on 13 April 1742. Yet despite its popular success in Ireland, a critical row erupted the following year in the English press over the prospect of a performance of Messiah in London the following year. For the work’s first performance at the King’s Theatre, Haymarket, in March 1743 the title was therefore suppressed, and it was billed simply as ‘A New Sacred Oratorio’. Eventually the more conservative religious sensibilities were mollified, and Messiah established itself as a regular fixture in Handel’s London oratorio seasons. The three parts of Messiah portray Christ’s incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection, the central tenets of the Christian story familiar to audiences whatever their religious beliefs. More specifically, Part One moves from Isaiah’s prophecy of the Messiah, through the announcement to the shepherds of Christ’s birth (from St Luke’s Gospel, the closest the work comes to a conventional narrative), to a celebration of the redemption and healing that He brings. ‘He was despised’ provides the emotional heart of the great Passion sequence which opens Part Two, with Christ’s ordeal painted in musically vivid detail by the great surrounding choruses. Following His death, resurrection and ascension, a succession of alternating arias and choruses trace the events of Pentecost and the Gospel’s hostile reception, culminating in God’s ultimate victory (‘Thou shalt break them’, ‘Hallelujah!’). The contrasting tone of Part Three is immediately established by the richly contemplative E major of the opening aria, ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’, its text located firmly and confidently in the present. So reassured, the listener is invited to look forward to the promise of everlasting life, the general resurrection and the final acclamation of the Messiah (‘Worthy is the Lamb’). The secret of Messiah’s long-term success lies in the combination of Jennens’ skilful selection and deployment of scriptural texts (referring to Christ only in the third person) and Handel’s brilliance in animating and shaping them musically with a wide range of musical treatments: supple Italianate melody, skilful Germanic counterpoint and English robustness. His long and cosmopolitan experience as an opera composer tells in the wealth of moods and textures that he creates with an orchestra of just strings, trumpets, drums and continuo (with oboes added later), ranging from the joyful anticipation of ‘Ev’ry valley’, through the anguish of ‘Behold, and see’, to the sheer brilliance of ‘The trumpet shall sound’. And it is Handel’s mastery of such variety and the sureness of his dramatic instinct, in which recitative leads to aria and aria to chorus, that ultimately ensures the effectiveness of Messiah’s narrative trajectory. In the years following Handel’s death, Messiah soon came to epitomise the oratorio genre. The great Handel Commemoration at Westminster Abbey in 1784, which employed some 500 performers, helped place the work at the heart of English musical life. Soon afterwards, two new and extensively reorchestrated versions were made by Hiller in Berlin and Mozart in Vienna. Mozart’s orchestration, designed for a German translation of Messiah, itself became adapted and inflated for English performances. During the 19th 6 century, Messiah reached ever wider audiences through amateur choral societies, which in turn flourished thanks to the oratorio’s popular appeal. The now notorious Crystal Palace performances in Sydenham, south London, reached their peak in the 1870s with some 3500 performers, 3000 of them in the chorus. Cambridge, and the Chapel of King’s College, was the venue for a timely reassessment of Messiah, one that returned to Handel’s own leaner, more focused vision. In June 1894 Arthur Henry Mann, organist and choirmaster of King’s College from 1876 to 1929 and a distinguished Handel scholar, conducted a performance which dispensed with the extra instrumentation, added textural details and altered texts that had accrued since Handel’s death. By 1906, Mann had taken his ‘experiment’ even further, with smaller forces matching the size of Handel’s own, this time deployed in Cambridge Town Hall. ‘The effects of the orchestral parts were most interesting,’ reported the Musical Times. ‘Handel knew the value of contrasts and, after the manner of his time, obtained them. His colouring, too, showed the hand of a master.’ It took more than half a century for Mann’s pioneering ideas to achieve wider currency, but nowadays performing Handel ‘after the manner of his time’ has become virtually second nature, stimulating a public appetite for his hitherto more obscure operas as well as the crowd-pleasing fireworks. So it is fitting that the performance recorded here should mark three anniversaries: the foundation of the University of Cambridge 800 years ago, Handel’s death in 1759 and the 80th anniversary of Mann’s own death, sung by the choir whose modern standards he did so much to establish. Ꭿ MARK AUDUS, 2009 7 Messias an den Ufern des Cam Georg Friedrich Händel schrieb seinen Messias zu einem für seine Karriere überaus wichtigen Zeitpunkt. 1741 hatte er gerade Schiffbruch mit seinem Londoner Opernunternehmen erlitten, als ihn die Einladung erreichte, in Dublin eine Oratorien-Saison zu veranstalten. Er trat seine Reise im November des Jahres an und nahm unter anderem den soeben vollendeten Messias mit, den er während des verwichenen Sommers in gerade einmal drei Wochen komponiert hatte.