The son of a barber-surgeon, Georg Friedrich Händel grew up in Halle in present-day central Germany (just a couple hours’ drive from Johann Sebastian Bach’s birthplace in Eisenach). But he was drawn to distant lands, spending formative years of his youth in Italy and then, in 1712, moving to England. As an immigrant, he became known as George Frideric Handel and remained in his adopted home of London for the rest of his life. Handel attracted powerful royal and aristocratic patrons; he also experienced sensational successes and crushing failures as a musical entrepreneur, managing the production of a prolific series of operas in Italian he marketed for his English audience.

When the opera style that had advanced his reputation went out of fashion, Handel was compelled to reinvent himself by shift ing his focus to the English oratorio—which is basically an opera without the costumes and stagecraft. Even though he still had a few more operatic projects up his sleeve, by the time he composed Messiah in 1741, Handel had ceased writing Italian operas altogether. He continued to compose oratorios until, by 1751, growing blindness made it impossible for him to continue working on his final oratorio, Jephtha.

Messiah thus belongs to a watershed moment in Handel’s career, when he was shift ing his focus away from the genre of tragic opera that had initially made him a sensation in London (with Rinaldo, in 1711). Handel’s Italian operas typically retold stories from mythology or history. A genre calculated to showcase the star singers of the era, it involved spectacular special eff ects as part of the staging. By the late 1730s, the high costs of production were making opera an unsustainable business model, and the English public’s musical taste had changed.

In Handel’s English variation on the oratorio format he inherited, a sense of moral uplift is spiced up by the entertainment value of opera—but without the expense. Messiah’s success over the ensuing centuries caused it to eclipse Handel’s other works of music drama and cemented its reputation as the quintessential English oratorio.

Yet both Handel and his librettist, Charles Jennens, took a risk with Messiah, which tells its story in a very diff erent, indirect way in comparison to the narratives of the composer’s operas and other oratorios. Moreover, its dramatization of the life of Jesus and setting of actual texts from the Bible in a dramatic context touched off a mini-culture war. Th e controversy raged for several years back in London, despite the acclaim the work had received when it was fi rst introduced to Dublin audiences at the conclusion of the 1741/42 season.

Messiah’s evocation of Jesus within the framework of a secular genre that could be performed “for diversion and amusement” even triggered charges of blasphemy, although these were leveled against the circumstances of the work’s presentation at London’s Covent Garden (the central entertainment district) rather than against Handel’s music itself. But a landmark, greatly admired performance in 1750 for the benefit of the newly built Foundling Hospital in London inaugurated an annual tradition of presenting the work there in charity concerts, with the composer conducting or at least attending every year until he died in 1759.

Thus began Messiah’s association with an annual performance ritual involving benevolent intentions: these concerts raised considerable sums for this important childhood charity, which was founded by Thomas Coram to serve abandoned and orphaned children. (In his will, Handel donated the original score to the Foundling Hospital.) Note that these performances always took place in the spring around Easter. It was only after Handel’s death that the association of Messiah with the Christmas season (the focus of Part One) became firmly embedded, particularly in the United States.

Handel also introduced changes at several of these revivals. For the most part, these involved substitutions or rewrites of arias. They reflected practical performance conditions and took into account the limitations or strengths of the particular soloists on hand. In fact, even the Dublin premiere varied somewhat from the score Handel had written out beforehand. For the revival of 1750, for example, since the castrato Gaetano Guadagni was available, Handel recast the aria “But who may abide the day of his coming” to include a dizzyingly virtuosic setting of the phrase “a refiner’s fire.” Messiah has proved remarkably malleable to adaptations in other idioms as well, such as the acclaimed 1992 album Handel’s Messiah: A Soulful Celebration, which presents the beloved score in the light of styles ranging from blues and R&B to hip hop.

Charles Jennens had collaborated previously with Handel and likely compiled the book for Israel in Egypt (first presented in 1739), which anticipates the method of construction of Messiah, arranging actual texts from the bible. But the process is less straightforward in Messiah. Jennens—a wealthy patron who was nevertheless an outsider, disaffected with contemporary English politics—juxtaposes extracts from both the Old and the New Testaments to represent the basic narrative of Christian redemption. Rather than a biographical sketch of the life of Jesus, Messiah concerns the very idea of divinity becoming manifest in human history (hence the lack of the defi nite article—“the Messiah”—in its title).

There is very little dramatic impersonation of characters. The narrative is indirect and suggestive, and, as has been often noted, downright confusing to anyone not familiar with the implied events involving the life of Jesus. Jennens divides the libretto into three acts (although he calls them “parts”), much like the organization of a Baroque opera. Part One centers around prophecy and the nativity of Jesus, ending with his miracles (this is the part of the oratorio that is most closely tied to the Christmas season). Following its evocation of hope comes a condensed version of the Passion story of sacrifice in Part Two. Part Three concludes with the implications of Christ’s redemption of humanity from the fall of Adam.

WHAT TO LISTEN FOR

Handel’s music expresses the universal emotions that underlie each stage of the Christian redemption narrative. The composer was above all a man of the theater, and his operatic genius for establishing the mood to suit a given situation is everywhere apparent. But in opera, Handel typically accomplishes this through a sequence of arias for each important character. The centrality of the chorus in Messiah allows for greater musical variety. Part One establishes a pattern of recitative, aria, and chorus, which then allows for further variation in the other two parts.

Handel draws on the full spectrum of international styles of his era, mixing complex Northern European counterpoint alongside straightforward, Italianate lyricism, majestic French rhythms, and homophonic choruses. He avails himself as well of an astonishing range of colors in the accompanying textures, though with a remarkable economy of instrumentation. Notice, for example, how the trumpets remain silent in Part One until “Glory to God,” and are subsequently kept in the wings until the famous “Hallelujah!” chorus at the end of Part Two. (Incidentally, the glory this chorus depicts refers not to the moment of Christ’s resurrection but to the triumph of redemption).

Consider, too, the compelling psychological range Handel explores, encompassing in Part One alone the fathomless darkness associated with the period of universal waiting for a savior; the oasis-like calm of the brief, purely instrumental “Pastoral Symphony” (“Pifa”), with its evocation of the music of shepherds; and the dancing exuberance of “Rejoice greatly, O Daughter of Zion.” Handel continually finds freshly inventive ways to “paint” the words through music (witness the “straying” lines of “All we like sheep”) but subtler surprises are oft en hidden within his settings as well. In that same chorus, Handel engineers a detour from the cheerful mood that predominates into the tragic minor when the consequences of human failure are suggested.

Amid all this variety, by the end of the briefer Part Three Handel has taken us on a journey that will later become familiar in the symphonies of Beethoven—the passage from darkness to enlightenment and final victory. The “Hallelujah!” chorus may seem unbeatable, yet somehow Handelmanages to follow it with still more glorious music: the soaring certainty of “The trumpet shall sound” and the progression of the choral finale, with its fugal setting of “Amen.” The voices weave together in a serene chant as Handel leaves us with the impression, however brief, that music not only can depict but can even change the world.

In addition to the four vocal soloists and four-part chorus, the edition used in these performances is scored for 2 oboes, bassoon, 2 trumpets, timpani, strings, and continuo with theorbo.

− Thomas May is the Nashville Symphony's program annotator.

Featured on Handel's Messiah — December 15 to 17.

Nashville Symphony & Chorus
Tucker Biddlecombe, conductor 
Raven McMillon, soprano
Katherine Beck, mezzo soprano
Tyler Nelson, tenor
Red Gilfry, baritone

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