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The Glorious
History of Handel's Messiah
George Frideric Handel's Messiah was
originally an Easter offering. It burst onto
the stage of Musick Hall in Dublin on April
13, 1742. The audience swelled to a record
700, as ladies had heeded pleas by
management to wear dresses "without Hoops"
in order to make "Room for more company."
Handel's superstar status was not the only
draw; many also came to glimpse the
contralto, Susannah Cibber, then embroiled
in a scandalous divorce.
The men and women in attendance sat
mesmerized from the moment the tenor
followed the mournful string overture with
his piercing opening line: "Comfort ye,
comfort ye my people, saith your God."
Soloists alternated with wave upon wave of
chorus, until, near the midway point, Cibber
intoned: "He was despised and rejected of
men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with
grief." So moved was the Rev. Patrick Delany
that he leapt to his feet and cried out:
"Woman, for this be all thy sins forgiven
thee!"
Now, of course, Messiah is a fixture of the
Christmas season. Woe to the concert hall in
the United States or Britain that fails to
schedule the piece around the holiday, when,
as well, CD sales and Web downloads of the
oratorio soar. For many amateur choirs, the
work is the heart of their repertoire and
the high point of the year. In most of
Handel's oratorios, the soloists dominate
and the choir sings only brief choruses. But
in Messiah, says Laurence Cummings, director
of the London Handel Orchestra, "the chorus
propels the work forward with great
emotional impact and uplifting messages."
This year, the 250th anniversary of Handel's
death, has been a boon to the Baroque
composer and his best-known work. The
commemoration has centered in London, where
Handel lived for 49 years, until his death
in 1759 at age 74. The BBC has broadcast all
of his operas, more than 40 in total, and
every one of the composer's keyboard suites
and cantatas was performed during the annual
London Handel Festival, which included
concerts at St. George's Hanover Square
church, where Handel worshiped, and at the
Handel House Museum ("See Handel Slept
Here,"), longtime residence of the man that
Ludwig van Beethoven himself, citing
Messiah, said was the "greatest composer
that ever lived."
He was born in Halle, Germany, into a
religious, affluent household. His father,
Georg Händel, a celebrated surgeon in
northern Germany, wanted his son to study
the law. But an acquaintance, the Duke of
Weissenfels, heard the prodigy, then barely
11, playing the organ. The nobleman's
recognition of the boy's genius likely
influenced the doctor's decision to allow
his son to become a musician. By 18, Handel
had composed his first opera, Almira,
initially performed in Hamburg in 1705.
During the next five years, he was employed
as a musician, composer and conductor at
courts and churches in Rome, Florence,
Naples and Venice, as well as in Germany,
where the Elector of Hanover, the future
King George I of England, was briefly his
patron.
Handel's restless independence contrasted
him with the other great composer of the
age, Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), whom
he did not meet. "Bach never moved out of
the cocoon of court patronage or church
employment," says Harry Bicket, a conductor,
harpsichordist and London-based director of
The English Concert chamber orchestra.
Handel, on the other hand, rarely attached
himself to any benefactor for long, although
he would compose court music when asked. He
wrote The Water Music (1717), one of the few
of his pieces other than Messiah
recognizable to the average concertgoer, for
George I, to be performed for the monarch as
His Majesty's barge navigated through a
London canal on a summer evening. "But
[Handel] didn't hang around palace
antechambers waiting for his lordship or
royal highness," says Jonathan Keates,
author of Handel: The Man and his Music.
Such free-spirited musical entrepreneurship
was more than possible in London, to which
Handel moved permanently in 1710. A
commercial boom underpinned by overseas
trade had created a thriving new merchant
and professional class that broke the
monopoly on cultural patronage by the
nobility. Adding zest to the London music
scene were rivalries that split the audience
into two broad musical camps. On one side
were defenders of the more conventional
Italian opera style, who idolized the
composer Giovanni Bononcini (1670-1747) and
brought him to London. Enthusiasts of
Handel's new Italian operas cast their lot
with the German-born composer. The
partisanship was captured in a 1725 verse by
poet John Byrom:
Some say compared to Bononcini,
That Mynheer Handel's but a Ninny;
Others aver, that he to Handel
Is scarcely fit to hold a Candle
Increasingly elaborate opera productions led
to rising costs due, in part, to hiring
musicians and singers from Italy. "It was
generally agreed Italian singers were better
trained and more talented than local
products," notes Christopher Hogwood, a
Handel biographer and founder of the Academy
of Ancient Music, the London
period-instrument orchestra he directs. But
beautiful voices were often accompanied by
mercurial temperaments. At a 1727 opera
performance, Handel's leading sopranos,
Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni,
actually came to blows onstage, with their
partisans cheering them on. "Shame that two
such well-bred ladies should call [each
other] Bitch and Whore, should scold and
fight," John Arbuthnot (1667-1735), the
mathematician and satirist, wrote in a
pamphlet describing the increasing hysteria
of London's opera world.
In the 1730s, the emotional and financial
toll of producing operas, as well as
changing audience tastes, contributed to
Handel's growing interest in sacred
oratorios—which required neither elaborate
scenery nor foreign stars—including,
eventually, Messiah. "With oratorios, Handel
could be more his own master," says Keates.
Despite his fame, Handel's inner life
remains enigmatic. "We know far more about
the environment in which he lived and the
sort of people he knew than about his
private life," Keates adds. Part of the
explanation lies in the dearth of personal
letters. We must rely on contradictory
descriptions of Handel by admirers and
detractors, whose opinions were colored by
the musical rivalries of 1700s London.
Although he neither married nor was known to
have had a long-lasting romantic
relationship, Handel was pursued by various
young women and a leading Italian soprano,
Vittoria Tarquini, according to accounts by
his contemporaries. Intensely loyal to
friends and colleagues, he was capable of
appalling temper outbursts. Because of a
dispute over seating in an orchestra pit, he
fought a near-fatal duel with a fellow
composer and musician, Johann Mattheson,
whose sword thrust was blunted by a metal
button on Handel's coat. Yet the two
remained close friends for years afterward.
During rehearsals at a London opera house
with Francesca Cuzzoni, Handel grew so
infuriated by her refusal to follow his
every instruction that he grabbed her by the
waist and threatened to hurl her out an open
window. "I know well that you are a real
she-devil, but I will have you know that I
am Beelzebub!" he screamed at the terrified
soprano.
Handel, who grew increasingly obese over the
years, certainly had an intimidating
physique. "He paid more attention to [food]
than is becoming to any man," wrote Handel's
earliest biographer, John Mainwaring, in
1760. Artist Joseph Goupy, who designed
scenery for Handel operas, complained that
he was served a meager dinner at the
composer's home in 1745; only afterward did
he discover his host in the next room,
secretly gorging on "claret and French
dishes." The irate Goupy produced a
caricature of Handel at an organ keyboard,
his face contorted into a pig snout,
surrounded by fowl, wine bottles and oysters
strewn at his feet.
"He may have been mean with food, but not
with money," says Keates. Amassing a fortune
through his music and shrewd investments in
London's burgeoning stock market, Handel
donated munificently to orphans, retired
musicians and the ill. (He gave his portion
of his Messiah debut proceeds to a debtors'
prison and hospital in Dublin.) A sense of
humanity imbues his music as well—a point
often made by conductors who compare Handel
with Bach. But where Bach's oratorios
exalted God, Handel was more concerned with
the feelings of mortals. "Even when the
subject of his work is religious, Handel is
writing about the human response to the
divine," says conductor Bicket. Nowhere is
this more apparent than in Messiah. "The
feelings of joy you get from the Hallelujah
choruses are second to none," says conductor
Cummings. "And how can anybody resist the
Amen chorus at the end? It will always lift
your spirits if you are feeling down."
Handel composed Messiah in an astounding
interlude, somewhere between three and four
weeks in August and September 1741. "He
would literally write from morning to
night," says Sarah Bardwell of the Handel
House Museum in London. The text was
prepared in July by the prominent
librettist, Charles Jennens, and was
intended for an Easter performance the
following year. "I hope [Handel] will lay
out his whole Genius & Skill upon it,
that the Composition may excel all his
former Compositions, as the Subject excels
every other Subject," Jennens wrote to a
friend.
There were several reasons for the choice of
Dublin for Messiah's debut. Handel had been
downcast by the apathetic reception that
London audiences had given his works the
previous season. He did not want to risk
another critical failure, especially with
such an unorthodox piece. Other Handel
oratorios had strong plots anchored by
dramatic confrontations between leading
characters. But Messiah offered the loosest
of narratives: the first part prophesied the
birth of Jesus Christ; the second exalted
his sacrifice for humankind; and the final
section heralded his Resurrection.
Dublin was one of the fastest-growing, most
prosperous cities in Europe, with a wealthy
elite eager to display its sophistication
and the economic clout to stage a major
cultural event. "So it was a great advantage
for Handel to make the voyage to Dublin to
try out his new work, and then bring it back
to London," says Keates, comparing the
composer to Broadway producers who tried out
plays in New Haven before staging them in
New York City.
Messiah's success in Dublin was in fact
quickly repeated in London. It took time for
Messiah to find its niche as a Christmas
favorite. "There is so much fine Easter
music—Bach's St. Matthew Passion, most
especially—and so little great sacral music
written for Christmas," says Cummings. "But
the whole first part of Messiah is about the
birth of Christ." By the early 19th century,
performances of Messiah had become an even
stronger Yuletide tradition in the United
States than in Britain.
There is little doubt about Handel's own
fondness for the work. His annual benefit
concerts for his favorite charity—London's
Foundling Hospital, a home for abandoned and
orphaned children—always included Messiah.
And, in 1759, when he was blind and in
failing health, he insisted on attending an
April 6 performance of Messiah at the
Theatre Royal in Covent Garden. Eight days
later, Handel died at home.
His total estate was assessed at 20,000
pounds, which made him a millionaire by
modern standards. He left the bulk of his
fortune to charities and much of the
remainder to friends, servants and his
family in Germany. His one posthumous
present to himself was £600 for his own
monument at Westminster Abbey, final resting
place for British monarchs and their most
accomplished subjects. Three years after
Handel's death, the monument by French
sculptor Louis François Roubillac, was
installed.
Abroad, Handel's reputation—and that of his
best-known composition—only continued to
grow. Mozart paid Handel the supreme
compliment of reorchestrating Messiah in
1789. Even Mozart, however, confessed
himself to be humble in the face of Handel's
genius. He insisted that any alterations to
Handel's score should not be interpreted as
an effort to improve the music. "Handel
knows better than any of us what will make
an effect," Mozart said. "When he chooses,
he strikes like a thunderbolt."
CITATION
"The
Glorious History of Handel's Messiah'"
Jonathan Kandell, Smithsonian
magazine. 2009.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com. Dec.
2009
<http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/The-Glorious-History-of-Handels-Messiah.html?c=y&story=fullstory>. |
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