| ANALYSIS |
LA
Philharmonic Program Notes: Messiah
“Will he or won’t he?” That was
the question gripping London music-lovers in
the spring of 1741. The “he” was Handel, and
the issue at hand was whether or not he
would leave England for good.
Handel initially found success in England.
He had settled there nearly three decades
earlier and taken British citizenship in
1727. His seasons of Italian opera, which
were why he came to London in the first
place, were wildly popular, and he enjoyed
the favor of the royal family, including an
appointment as Composer of Music for His
Majesty’s Chapel Royal in 1723 and the
invitation to compose the Coronation Anthems
for George II’s accession in 1727. He was
England’s unofficial official composer, and
the thought that he might pick up and head
for the continent worried many of his
admirers.
In the 18th century, the measure of success
for every composer was opera. Handel spent
his journeyman years in Hamburg and Italy,
and his success as a composer of Italian
operas – the Italians hailed his Agrippina
with cries of “Viva il caro Sassone” (Long
live the beloved Saxon) – brought him to
London, where his opera Rinaldo premiered in
1711. For the next three decades, he
composed more than 30 operas for various
theaters there, but by the mid-1730s, the
audience for his operas was shrinking and
London’s operatic scene was characterized by
intrigue and competition. Handel’s operatic
seasons were increasingly unprofitable and
fraught with strife; at the same time, the
public demonstrated a keen interest in his
English-language oratorios. These works
combined sacred subjects with the techniques
of dramatic composition Handel had mastered
during his long career as an operatic
composer, and many of them included the kind
of elaborate choral writing characteristic
of the composer’s sacred and occasional
output. Handel took a last stab at opera
with Deidamia, which opened in January 1741
at the Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre, where
Handel was mounting his 1740/41 season.
Deidamia held the stage for only three
performances; the one on February 10 was the
last performance of a Handel opera under his
direction. The score was colorful and
accomplished, the libretto among the better
set by the composer, and the cast boasted
the debut of a new prima donna, but none of
this meant success for poor Deidamia.
Handel, who had made his reputation as a
composer of Italian opera, was now at a
crossroads, and many in London feared he
would leave for the continent, where the
genre continued to flourish.
Aware of Deidamia’s disappointing reception,
one of Handel’s old collaborators, Charles
Jennens, tried to whet the composer’s
appetite for a new project. Jennens had
already written the libretto for the
oratorio Saul and the text for the third
part of L’allegro, il penseroso, ed il
moderato; in a letter dated July 10, 1741,
he wrote, “Handel says he will do nothing
next Winter, but I hope I shall perswade him
to set another Scripture Collection I have
made for him, & perform it for his own
Benefit in Passion Week. I hope he 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. The Subject is
Messiah.”
So we have Handel, in the summer of 1741,
facing an uncertain future in London and
contemplating taking a winter off, with
Jennens’ scripture collection kicking around
his house on Brook Street. An invitation
from Ireland to participate in a charitable
season of oratorio concerts “for the relief
of prisoners in several gaols, and for the
support of Mercer’s Hospital in Stephen’s
Street, and of the charitable infirmary on
the Inns Quay” couldn’t have come at a more
opportune time, and Handel decided to spend
the 1741/42 season in Dublin. He composed
Messiah in August and September, while still
in London. His autograph manuscript includes
exact composition dates: He began the work
on August 22, finished Part One on August
28, finished Part Two on September 6,
completed the work on September 12, and
completed the orchestration September 14.
The modest forces employed indicate that
Handel intended the work to travel.
(Handel’s oratorios for London, Saul for
example, typically display more lavish
orchestration.) Handel most likely did not
work closely with Jennens during
composition; in fact, the writer was
surprised to learn the composer was planning
a Dublin premiere. “I heard with great
pleasure at my arrival in Town, that Handel
had set the Oratorio of Messiah,” Jennens
wrote in a letter dated December 2, “but it
was some Mortification to hear that instead
of performing it here he was gone into
Ireland with it.”
Handel started his Dublin season on December
23 with a performance of L’allegro at the
Great Music Hall in Fishamble Street, the
site of all of his Dublin concerts. The
premiere of Messiah on April 13, 1742,
marked the culmination of his time there. It
was a resounding success. The Dublin Journal
reported that at the open rehearsal, the
work “was performed so well, that it gave
universal Satisfaction to all present; and
was allowed by the greatest Judges to be the
finest Composition of Musick that ever was
heard…” and heaped similar praise on the
premiere: “Words are wanting to express the
exquisite Delight it afforded 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 work has since
established itself as the most popular of
its kind, affirming the genius of Handel’s
pursuit of English-language oratorio. He
never wrote another opera after Deidamia,
but Handel followed Messiah with fifteen
further English-language oratorios. We have
Messiah to thank for paving the way for such
disparate works as Haydn’s Creation,
Mendelssohn’s Elijah, Elgar’s Dream of
Gerontius, and John Adams’ El Nińo.
Handel’s Messiah is in three parts. Jennens
sent a preface for the libretto to Handel in
Dublin that draws on Virgil and the Bible to
set the tone for the work:
Let us sing of greater things. (Virgil,
Eclogue IV)
And without controversy, great is the
mystery of Godliness: God was manifested in
the flesh, justified by the Spirit, seen of
angels, preached among the Gentiles,
believed on in the world, received up in
glory. (I Timothy 3: 16)
In whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom
and knowledge. (Colossians 2: 3)
Part One describes the advent and birth of
Christ, with the chorus “For unto us”
demarcating the transition from one to the
other. Part Two details the life of Christ,
his resurrection, his ascension to heaven,
the preaching of the gospel by his apostles,
and a vision of his ultimate victory. Part
Three celebrates the redemption of humankind
– its eventual resurrection and receipt of
eternal life – brought about by Christ’s
death.
The work opens with a “Sinfony,” Handel’s
first use of the operatic French overture
form (dotted grave introduction followed by
a contrapuntal allegro moderato) in one of
his oratorios. The work’s richest
accompanied recitative follows, with a vocal
line whose heightened expression and use of
repetition takes the number into arioso
territory. The vigor of the ensuing aria,
“Ev’ry valley,” with its word-painting for
“the crooked straight, and the rough places
plain,” sets the tone for the first half of
Part One, as Jennens lays out a series of
prophetic texts anticipating the coming of
Christ and Handel matches them with music of
great variety, contrast, and inventiveness.
Throughout Part I, the music seems to be
moving toward D major, from the D-minor alto
aria “But who may abide” through the D-major
alto aria and chorus “O thou that tellest,”
to the chorus “Glory to God,” where the
trumpets enter for the first time to
reinforce D major. (A good rule of thumb for
spotting D major in Messiah is that if you
hear trumpets, the music is in that key.)
In Part Two, Handel wanders away from D
major in a sequence of numbers depicting the
suffering of Christ on earth. For example,
one of Messiah’s most moving numbers, the
alto aria “He was despised,” is in E-flat
major, as far away as Handel could get from
D major. The key choice allows for a deeply
humane portrayal of Christ – the warmth and
nobility of the strings in the opening
ritornello is certainly Handel at his most
eloquent – while simultaneously underscoring
the distance the “man of sorrows” depicted
in the aria has to travel to reach the
triumphant D major of the “Hallelujah”
chorus’ celebration of Christ enthroned
alongside God that closes Part Two. The
custom of standing during the chorus dates
from the first London performance of
Messiah, which took place on March 23, 1743.
The 18th-century Scottish essayist and poet
James Beattie the origins of the tradition
in a 1780 letter: “When Handel’s ‘Messiah’
was first performed, the audience was
exceedingly struck and affected by the music
in general; but when that chorus struck up,
‘For the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth,’ they
were so transported they all, together with
the king (who happened to be present),
started up, and remained standing till the
chorus ended: and hence it became the
fashion in England for the audience to stand
while that part of the music is performing.”
Part Three opens with one of the most
astoundingly conceived arias in Handel’s
output. Throughout Messiah, Handel comes up
with original musical solutions to the
problems posed to an 18th-century composer
by Biblical texts. Where 18th-century poetry
typically presents one, constant affect or
emotion, the Bible’s ancient Hebrew verses
delight in contrast, and Handel had to
rethink musical forms rooted in 18th-century
poetry to set Messiah’s Biblical texts. In
the case of “I know that my redeemer
liveth,” Handel takes three contrasting
ideas – “I know that my redeemer liveth,”
“And tho’ worms destroy this body,” and “For
now is Christ risen” – and crafts a sort of
rondo form, with “I know that my redeemer
liveth” functioning as the main theme, and
the sections beginning with “And tho’ worms
destroy this body” and “For now is Christ
risen” acting as contrasting material. But
the whole is constructed so artfully, with
such expressive unity, that Handel’s formal
innovation is (probably properly)
overlooked, his art transcending his craft.
“I know that my redeemer liveth” again
places us far afield from D major (the aria
is in E major), but Handel soon brings back
D major in “The trumpet shall sound,” an
aria that could have come straight from the
opera house. Its three-part, A-B-A structure
(in this case, dal segno rather than da
capo) and its obbligato trumpet are exactly
what an opera audience would expect for a
triumph aria.
Messiah closes with a resplendent chorus
that brings together all of the musical and
dramatic threads running through the work.
(Interestingly, Handel sets the same text
from Revelation chosen by J.S. Bach for the
final movement of his cantata “Ich hatte
viel bekummernis,” one of his more ambitious
works in that genre.) It is the grandest
chorus Handel ever wrote, with an opening
combining solemnity and celebration followed
by a fugal “Amen” of overwhelming power. It
marks the culmination of a work that has
become an icon of western culture – even if
you know nothing else about classical music,
you know the “Hallelujah” chorus. Edward
Synge, the Bishop of Elphin and one of the
leading Irish ideologues of the 18th
century, captured this in his summation of
the work: “As Mr. Handel in his oratorio’s
greatly excells all other Composers I am
acquainted with, So in the famous one,
called The Messiah he seems to have excell’d
himself. The whole is beyond any thing I had
a notion of till I Read and heard it. It
Seems to be a Species of Musick different
from any other, and this is particularly
remarkable of it. That tho’ the Composition
is very Masterly & artificial, yet the
Harmony is So great and open, as to please
all who have Ears & will hear, learned
& unlearn’d.”
CITATION
"About
The Work: Messiah'" John Mangum, Los
Angeles Philharmonic. 2013.
http://www.laphil.com/. Nov/Dec. 2013
<http://www.laphil.com/philpedia/music/messiah-george-frideric-handel>. |
|
|
