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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’S MESSIAH

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

{George Frideric Handel (1685 - 1759)

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.

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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

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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.

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

{First Performances: Messiah in the 1740s

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.

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HANDEL’S MESSIAH

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.

‘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

{The words

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The music

Within the three parts, Jennens arranged the texts into sections similar to scenes in an opera, and then arranged them further into recitative, aria, and chorus. This structure is particularly evident in the more obviously narrative sections of Part I.

Every time Handel performed Messiah he altered it to suit the singers he had at his disposal, so no individual version can be regarded as the definitive score. This could mean anything from re-assigning an aria from one voice type to a different voice type with minimal rewriting, to omitting some arias or choruses completely and substituting new ones. For example, the aria But who may abide exists in six versions, for soprano, alto, and bass, while there are seven versions of He shall feed his flock.

Oratorio vs. Opera

An oratorio was ‘a musical Drama, whose Subject must be Scriptural, and in which the Solemnity of Church-Musick is agreeably united with the most pleasing Airs of the Stage’, according to Newburgh Hamilton, librettist for Samson which Handel composed straight after Messiah. In England at this time, the text of an oratorio was always in English (operas of the same period were in Italian), and there were many more and much bigger choruses than in operas, which in this period often had only one chorus at the very end.

Operagoers were used to an evening’s entertainment at the theatre which lasted five hours, with three acts, so when Handel came to write oratorios he followed roughly the same model, dividing the work into three parts with intervals in between. Oratorios tended to be shorter than operas, and Handel scheduled instrumental works such as entire organ concertos in the intervals to pad out the evening, so that audiences would not go away feeling short-changed. Handel was a keyboard virtuoso, and he performed many of the instrumental works himself.

Handel always intended his oratorios as entertainment, to be performed in playhouses or theatres, and they were never meant to be sung as part of a church service (as Mozart’s masses, or J.S. Bach’s Passions were, for example).

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Scene 1: Darkness to Light

Instrumental Sinfony

Tenor Comfort ye my people

Tenor Ev’ry valley shall be exalted

Chorus And the glory of the Lord

Bass Thus saith the Lord

Alto But who may abide the day of His coming?

Chorus And He shall purify

Alto Behold, a virgin shall conceive

Alto and Chorus O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion

Bass For behold, darkness shall cover the earth

Bass The people that walked in darkness

Chorus For unto us a child is born

Art

Opposite: The Calling of Saint Matthew Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio(1599-1600)Contarelli Chapel, Church of San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome, Italy

Messiah, which was divided by Handel and Jennens into three parts, has been reimagined by Paul Dyer and Constantine Costi into four scenes for these performances. The staging and realisation of each of these four scenes have been inspired by an artwork from the Baroque period, which has been selected by the staging director, Constantine Costi.

{

HANDEL’S MESSIAH AND ART

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HANDEL’S MESSIAH AND ARTScene 2: The Dream

Instrumental Pifa

Soprano There were shepherds abiding in the field

Soprano And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them

Soprano And the angel said unto them

Soprano And suddenly there was with the angel

Chorus Glory to God

Soprano Rejoice greatly

Alto Then shall the eyes of the blind be open’d

Soprano and Alto He shall feed his flock

Art

Opposite: Triumph of Bacchus Diego Velázquez(1628)Prado Museum, Madrid, Spain

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HANDEL’S MESSIAH AND ARTScene 3: Shame and Mourning

Chorus Behold the Lamb of God

Alto He was despised

Chorus Surely He hath borne our griefs

Chorus And with His stripes

Chorus All we, like sheep, have gone astray

Tenor All they that see Him laugh Him to scorn

Chorus He trusted in God

Tenor Thy rebuke hath broken His heart

Tenor Behold and see if there be any sorrow

Soprano How beautiful are the feet

Art

Opposite: The Seven Works of MercyMichelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio(1607)Pio Monte della Misericordia, Naples, Italy

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Scene 4: Ecstatic Light

Bass Why do the nations so furiously rage together

Chorus Let us break their bonds asunder

Chorus Hallelujah

Soprano I know that my Redeemer liveth

Chorus Since by man came death

Bass Behold, I tell you a mystery

Bass The trumpet shall sound

Chorus Worthy is the Lamb

Chorus Amen

Art

Opposite: The Complete Reconciliation of the Queen and her SonPeter Paul Rubens (1621–1625)Louvre Museum, Paris, France

HANDEL’S MESSIAH AND ART

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HANDEL’S MESSIAH

What to listen for: Part I

Messiah begins with a French overture, a form which Handel always used to begin an opera. It has a slow, majestic, double-dotted first section, followed by a faster fugal second section.

The technique of word painting – using the music to depict the text – was an expressive device frequently used in Baroque music, and one in which Handel was particularly adept. There are many examples of this throughout Messiah, beginning with the very first aria, Every valley shall be exalted, sung by the tenor. Handel set the text such that the pitch on the second syllable of ‘valley’ suddenly drops, while the melodic line rises on ‘exalted’. ‘Crooked’ and ‘rough’ are set on groups of short notes, contrasted with longer, held notes for ‘straight’ and ‘plain’. Similarly, in the aria O thou that tellest, the second syllable of ‘arise’ is always higher than the first, and ‘up’ is literally lifted to a higher note than ‘get thee’ which precedes it.

Handel re-composed the aria But who may abide for the castrato Gaetano Guadagni, raising it an octave from bass to alto register, speeding up the second section and adding bravura passages of runs. The orchestra adds the ‘sparks’ of ‘the refiner’s fire’.

It was standard in opera in this period to use recitative to propel the narrative. Recitative is a passage of sung speech in free time, usually with minimal accompaniment on the harpsichord or other continuo instruments. There are very few occasions where Handel uses this kind of ‘simple’ recitative in Messiah, for example when the angel speaks to the shepherds (‘Fear not’). Much more often the recitatives are accompanied by the full string section with dramatic effects. An example is the recitative For behold, darkness shall cover the earth, which introduces the bass aria The people that walked in darkness. Both recitative and aria are in a gloomy ‘dark’ minor key. The accompaniment to the recitative consists of repeated slow semiquavers with barely changing harmony, evoking thick fog rolling in from the sea (‘darkness shall cover the earth’). Both vocal and orchestral parts very gradually start to ascend in pitch on ‘arise’, arriving at the highest point for ‘upon’ (‘but the Lord shall arise upon thee’). In the aria the melodic line rises on ‘have seen a great light’, bursting out into the brightness of a major key. The orchestra and voice are in unison for much of the aria, a style of composition which was especially used to accompany bass singers in late Baroque operas.

Handel inserted a short instrumental interlude into Part I, just before the angel appears to the shepherds in the field outside Bethlehem. He entitled it ‘Pifa’, a reference to a ‘piffero’, a bagpipe-like instrument traditionally played by shepherds. This is a pastoral, a form commonly used in Christmas music in this period. The gentle triple time and drone bass would have immediately set the scene for his audience.

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What to listen for: Part II

After the lightness and positivity of Part I, Part II begins in a much more sombre mood with the chorus, Behold the Lamb of God. It is in the form of the first section of a French overture, the curtain raiser which hints at the drama to follow. The subject is too serious to follow with the usual fugue. Handel stayed in a minor key throughout the entire section which deals with Christ’s death. Even the short chorus, All we, like sheep, which starts in a cheerful major key, ends in the minor to underline the gravity of the last line, 'the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all'. Handel wrote Messiah for professional singers and this very difficult chorus is another example of word painting, with fiendish melismas on the words ‘astray’ and ‘turning’.

To stand or not to stand during the ‘Hallelujah’ chorus

King George II was supposed to have been so moved by ‘for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth’ that he leapt to his feet mid-performance, and when the monarch stood the protocol of the day demanded that everyone else did so too. In a more democratic era this tradition is followed less and less, and in any case the story is almost certainly untrue. There is no evidence that George II ever attended a Messiah performance, and the story of the audience standing ‘together with the king’ comes from a letter written in 1780, by which time both Handel and George II were long dead.

A particularly delightful instance of word painting occurs in the orchestral postlude at the end of the angels’ ‘Glory to God’ chorus. The notes become softer, the texture more sparse and the pitch higher, as the angels gracefully retreat back into heaven.

{

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HANDEL’S MESSIAH

Handel originally scored Messiah for strings alone and no winds, probably because he was unsure whether he could get good enough players in Dublin. Trumpeters and drummers were another matter. They were freely available in military and city bands because of the need to play ceremonial music, and Handel uses them in Messiah for exactly that purpose in Glory to God in Part I, in the Hallelujah chorus, in the bass aria The trumpet shall sound in Part III, and in the final movement, Worthy is the Lamb.

Handel had significant experience in writing choruses and showed incredible variety in his approach, making changes in mood, speed and texture to underline the meaning of the text often in the same chorus. In the Hallelujah chorus he extended the music on the words ‘And he shall reign for ever’: firstly all parts sing it fugally, then the lower parts continue to sing those words while the upper parts and finally just the sopranos sing thrilling long notes at higher and higher pitches on ‘king of kings, and lord of lords’ to demonstrate the breadth of the Messiah’s power.

What to listen for: Part III

By the time Handel wrote Messiah he had already moved away from the three part da capo aria form which was standard in Baroque operas, although some of the arias in Messiah do conform to that structure, for example He was despised in Part II. For I know that my redeemer liveth, he came up with an entirely new musical idea, repeating the opening phrase to unify the three sections of scripture which Jennens provided.

The conclusion of the work, the final chorus Worthy is the Lamb, commences with no introduction other than a single weighty chord from the orchestra. Handel follows this with not one but two fugues, the first on the words ‘Blessing and honour, glory and power’, and the second a massive, complex extended fugue on the single word ‘Amen’.

Part II ends with arguably the best known piece of classical music ever written, the ‘Hallelujah’ chorus. {

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Year Handel Contemporary events

1685 Born in Halle, Germany JS Bach born

1710 Appointed music director to the Elector of Hanover Beijing becomes biggest city in the world

1711 First London opera Rinaldo performed Vivaldi famous throughout Europe as virtuoso violinist and composer

1712 Moves to England permanently Dutch East India company ship wrecked off the coast of Western Australia

1713 Dismissed from the court of Hanover; granted annual pension by Queen Anne of Great Britain Fahrenheit begins to use mercury in thermometers

1714 Composes Te Deum to welcome new royal family

Queen Anne dies; Elector of Hanover proclaimed George I King of Great Britain

1717 Composes Water Musick Thousands die in North Sea floods

1724 Premiere of opera Giulio Cesare First performance of JS Bach’s St John Passion in Leipzig

1725 Premiere of Rodelinda Vivaldi’s Four Seasons published

1727 Composes Zadok the Priest for the coronation of George II

First performance of JS Bach’s St Matthew Passion in Leipzig

1732 Includes oratorio (Esther) for the first time in his opera season Theatre opened at Covent Garden

1733 Rival opera company established in London Slave rebellion in the West Indies

1737 Ill with 'paralectic disorder' Queen Caroline dies

1740 First time schedules no Italian opera performances Maria Theresa becomes emperor of Austria

1741 Composes Messiah and Samson; travels to Dublin Vivaldi dies poor and alone in Vienna, aged 63

1742 Messiah premieres in Dublin Celsius devises centigrade thermometer

1743 Messiah premieres in London Thomas Jefferson born

1745 Messiah included in oratorio season English army rout supporters of Bonnie Prince Charlie at the Battle of Culloden

1749 Composes Musick for the Royal FireworksA rhinoceros exhibited in Paris creates sensation & inspires wigs à la rhinocéros

1750 Messiah performed to huge crowd at the Foundling Hospital JS Bach dies

1751 Begins to go blind; composes JephthaNew Year’s Day occurs on 25 March for the last time in England and Wales

1759 Dies aged 74; 3,000 people attend his funeral Mozart is 3 years old, Haydn is 27

1770 Messiah first performed in America Captain Cook lands at Botany Bay

1789 Mozart's arrangement of Messiah performed in Vienna Start of the French Revolution

1836 Messiah first performed in Australia HMS Beagle carrying Charles Darwin arrives in Sydney

1859 Messiah performed at Crystal Palace, London, by 3,000 people Work begins on the Suez Canal

© Program notes and timeline Lynne Murray 201729