| ANALYSIS |
America's
Messiah
For musicians, Christmas means Messiah. This
is not a comment upon musicians'
religiosity, but rather upon their finances.
Messiah, Handel's Messiah, is to America's
choral societies and orchestras what La
Bohème is to its opera houses and Nutcracker
to its ballets: the guaranteed full house
that can bankroll a whole season of
deficits. Between Thanksgiving and New
Year's, Handel's oratorio receives hundreds
of performances, from church choirs with
organ accompaniment to major symphonies with
their professional choruses.
With over sixty recorded versions available,
classic sections of music stores become at
Christmas little more than appendages to
tables stacked with Messiahs: early music
versions, Mozart's reorchestrated version,
Shaw's, Pinnock's, Marriner's. The
“Christian-Contemporary music” crowd has
even cashed-in with a pop version called
“The Young Messiah” (a version that has
roughly the same regard for the original as
Attila the Hun had for historic
preservation). The Lord Jesus may have had
many things to say about mammon, but at
Christmas at least, Messiah pays, and pays
well.
But why, from Bangor to San Diego, do
average Americans who would otherwise not
listen to a note of classical music year
after year make performances of this
oratorio sell-outs? Why do they go? And what
is the effect of Messiah‘s popularity upon
our musical culture?
Certainly the primary reason for the
oratorio's appeal lies in the quality of
Handel's music itself. Messiah must rank as
one of the greatest musical achievements of
the eighteenth century. For all its misuse
(I particularly remember Mobil using it to
hail their motor oil), the “Hallelujah
Chorus” remains a masterpiece of musical
structure, the magnificence of the music not
being the result of bombast, but rather the
logical outcome of Handel's manipulation of
antiphonal effects, stunning unisons,
divided familiar-style and contrapuntal
writing, and superimposed textures. The
final chorus (“Worthy is the Lamb”) contains
choral writing the imagination of which
would not be rivaled until Wagner composed
Lohengrin four generations later, and the
aria “Behold and See” is a model of economy
and pathos. In its fifteen measures Handel
seems to set the anguish of the whole world.
But it's not just the music. Great though
Messiah may be, it can be argued that
Handel's best work lies elsewhere. With some
justification, cognoscenti are quick to
prefer his Italian operas to his English
oratorios. During Handel's lifetime, Judas
Maccabaeus was more popular than Messiah,
and the Reverend Charles Jennens, who
provided Handel with Messiah‘s word book,
liked the music in Samson much better. Late
in life, the composer himself is reported to
have said that his oratorio Theodora
contained better writing. While Messiah is a
masterpiece, it is but one of many from
Handel's pen, masterpieces that have not
endured so steadfastly as Messiah. Why?
I think the answer lies in the fact that for
the last two hundred years, English-speaking
Christianity, and in particular, American
Christianity, has found a singularly
eloquent vehicle for self-reflection in
Messiah. Despite much talk to the contrary,
religion remains deeply important to most
Americans. But as many writers have noted,
that religiosity is not denominational or
even confessional in nature. Instead, it is
individualistic, a matter of personal belief
and individual choice not dictated by
bishops, mediated by ritual, or regulated by
the state. Furthermore, American
Christianity is deeply eschatological, the
sense of the impending eschaton being not so
much a dread premonition of a coming doom,
but rather a purposeful optimism. Americans
work for and expect the eventual
establishment of the kingdom of God, that
“city on a hill.”
Messiah speaks to such a Christianity.
Although reminiscent of the lectionary texts
from Advent through Trinity from the Book of
Common Prayer, the oratorio cannot be said
to be denominational (although the lack of
passages dealing with Mary certainly gives
it a distinctly Protestant cast). Its
biblical texts are equally accessible to
Episcopalians and National Baptists,
Methodists and Pentecostals, and until
fairly recently, could be said to be known
by heart by almost all. Unlike Bach's
cantatas and passions, the oratorio requires
neither a liturgical setting nor a
particular occasion for it to be grasped.
And despite the current custom of abridged
Christmas performances (an aberration
largely the result of reduced attention
spans), the oratorio is not seasonal. If the
work points to anything at all, it is
neither Christmas nor Easter but rather the
Second Coming and the individual's faith in
Christ's eventual triumph.
Messiah is a concert work for the concert
hall, and very much in the mold of the
modern Protestant sermon, which entertains
its listener for the purpose of edifying
him. Like his contemporary George Whitefield
(who was also criticized for using
theatrical devices for religious ends),
Handel uses the conventions of the theater
to compel his listener into a personal
encounter with the scriptural texts.
Messiah, contrary to most critics' readings,
is highly dramatic. But its drama is an
interior one, a personal confrontation
between the individual listener and the
story of salvation that Handel unfolds
before him. To a population where that
confrontation is the fulcrum of their lives,
performances of Messiah become almost
autobiographical.
It is because of the religious character of
Americans that Messiah is so important here.
And because of that religious character, it
can be said that Messiah forms the
foundation of America's art music culture.
Not only do performances of the oratorio
undergird the finances of many of the
country's performing organizations, the work
itself is the entrance of tens of thousands
into the realm of classical music. It is not
only the one classical piece that almost
everyone will recognize (hence Madison
Avenue's shameless exploitation of it), but
in many cases it is the only major classical
piece that most amateur musicians will
themselves perform. My own case is not
unusual. Messiah was the first piece of
classical music I heard live, the first one
I performed as an amateur singer, and the
first one I conducted as a professional
musician.
The cultural significance of Handel and his
Messiah for American music cannot be
overstated. But it is a significance not
universally welcomed. For roughly a
generation, there has been a movement among
musicologists to de-Christianize Handel, a
by-product of which would be the reduction
of Messiah to just one more religious work
by a composer who really knew better. In
1966, the biographer Paul Henry Lang felt
compelled to invent a string of mistresses
for Handel (thereby making him “normal”). In
1980, Winton Dean, while acknowledging the
“sincerity” of Handel's Christian beliefs,
concluded that he was really a pantheist and
hedonist at heart. More recently, writers
have argued for a homosexual Handel as part
of a queer studies agenda for political and
social revolution. Handel, a life-long
bachelor, is proving to be fertile ground
for a kind of airy scholarship that prefers
virtuosic innuendo to unambiguous historic
data.
The most generous thing one can say about
the argument for the “gay” Handel is that it
is interesting but tenuous in the extreme.
But the stakes in the argument are high, for
deconstructive musicology makes a farce of
Western civilization by falsifying its
contours. What is absolutely certain about
Handel—from nearly all contemporaneous
sources—is not his sexuality, but rather the
blamelessness of his business dealings, the
absence of gossip regarding his private life
(remarkable for a man as much in the public
eye as he was), and—particularly in his
later years—the pronounced seriousness with
which he took his religion. Very little of
this informs the portrait of the “gay”
Handel. But historic veracity is not really
these writers' goal. Their interest is not
in Handel the artist, but rather in Handel
the tool, Handel the cog in a machine to
denigrate traditional Western moral values.
A chaste Christian Handel is of no use in
such a campaign, but a gay pagan Handel, a
closet libertine who wrote oratorios with
whose texts he had no real engagement, very
much would be.
“Handel” is a battlefield in the culture
wars—in a way that Schubert isn't—because of
Messiah. With a note of personal triumph, a
colleague recently told of a Christian
student who after taking his class on Handel
said that she would never be able to listen
to Messiah again. Score one for politicized
scholarship. Of course that poor student was
not only misinformed about Handel, but
mistaken to value a work only because of the
character of its creator. Yet there is a
truth to her rejection. Try as we may, it
isn't so easy to separate “the dancer from
the dance.” Should the revisionists be
successful in promoting their deconstructed
Handel, I suspect that the public attitude
toward Messiah would be changed too. It also
might not sell as well, and that certainly
would be a pity.
CITATION
"America's
Messiah'" Michael Linton, First
Things. 1997.
http://www.firstthings.com/. Dec. 1997
<http://www.firstthings.com/article/2008/09/005-americas-messiah-8>. |
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