| ANALYSIS |
Messiah In Other Hands
The Foundling Hospital
committee’s
reference to a score of Messiah being procured from Ireland
so
that the work could be performed ‘for the Benefit of other
Persons’ provides a reminder that several performances were
given
under other auspices during Handel’s lifetime: Handel
apparently
did not object to this, provided he had given his permission. In Dublin
the Charitable Musical Society gave annual performances from 1744, and
the score referred to in the Foundling Hospital minutes was presumably
one that Handel himself had supplied (or left behind) for the
Society’s use. As early as February 1744, Messiah was
performed
in London by the Academy of Ancient Music at their normal venue, the
Crown and Anchor Tavern. In 1749, Messiah was performed in the
Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, as part of the musical celebrations
accompanying the opening of the Radcliffe Camera: further Oxford
performances followed regularly from 1756. In 1750 Messiah reached
Salisbury, and a series of performances in the Bristol and Bath area
began in 1755. Messiah entered the repertory of the Three
Choirs’
Festival in 1757: for the first two years the Festival performances
took place in ‘secular’ buildings as evening
concerts, but
in 1759 the performance at Hereford took place in the morning at the
Cathedral — probably the first performance of Messiah in such
a
building. Once established in festival programmes, particularly if they
had charitable financial objects, Messiah quickly became a regular
annual component. Other provincial centres that saw relatively early
performances of Messiah were Cambridge (1759), Birmingham (1760), Bury
St Edmunds (1760), Liverpool (1766), Newcastle (1778) and Derby (1788).
After 1767, the year in which a full score of Messiah was finally
published, general access to the music itself ceased to be a problem:
before that, performances may have derived from only a handful of
manuscript scores.
While it is true that performances of Messiah spread quickly outside
the composer’s immediate circle within a few years of
Handel’s death, a certain continuity from his own
performances
was preserved in London. Smith the younger continued Handel’s
series of performances at the Foundling Hospital until 1768, and at
Covent Garden Theatre until 1774. The Foundling Hospital performances
continued under other directors until 1777. A subtle change of musical
emphasis came in 1771, when the financial accounts of the Foundling
Hospital performance record that thirty professional chorus singers
were supplemented by ‘26 Chorus Singers Volunteers not
paid’. For the first time singers began to outnumber the
orchestra, and the total number of performers crept upwards. The two
performances of Messiah at the ‘Commemoration of
Handel’ at
Westminster Abbey in 1784 multiplied the performers to such an extent
that the work became a different musical experience. Though it is
difficult to ascertain precise numbers, Messiah was rendered on these
occasions by about 500, approximately equally divided between singers
and instrumentalists. The performers in 1784 seem to have been drawn
largely from those of professional status, including lay clerks from
ecclesiastical establishments.
The
nineteenth century
The magnitude and general style of the Commemoration set the tone for
the large festival performances of the nineteenth century in which
amateur singers increasingly took part. The spread of musical literacy
(partly through the tonic sol-fa movements), allied with the production
of cheap vocal scores, brought choral singing within the range of many
more performers. The use of vocal scores was in itself something of a
practical revolution: Handel’s singers, like his orchestral
players, had performed from single-line part-books. Amateur or
semi-professional choral singers formed the backbone of the performers
for the provincial festivals that expanded in the nineteenth century in
parallel with the construction of the large town halls. Messiah
attained and retained its strong hold on festival programmes: often it
was the only ‘classic’ work to be performed
complete.
In London, the formation of an amateur choral society in 1833, the
Sacred Harmonic Society, held the key to the future. In 1836 the
Society determined to abandon programmes of miscellaneous selections
and to concentrate on complete oratorios, beginning with Messiah
Following the lead of the Sacred Harmonic Society, amateur singers took
over Messiah performers were numbered in thousands and audiences in
tens of thousands. The foundations were thus laid for the triennial
Handel Festivals at Crystal Palace that continued into the twentieth
century.
Our image of Messiah performances between 1855 and 1920 is inevitably
dominated by the serried ranks of the spectacular festivals, there were
certainly many more smaller-scale performances, accompanied by organ or
an ad hoc orchestra, arranged by smaller choral societies and the
flourishing choirs of churches and chapels, and geographically
distributed throughout Britain. Choruses or sections of Messiah were
also extracted for liturgical use in church as anthems or motets, a
trend that had started in cathedral part-books a century before,
possibly even before Handel’s death. The
‘Hallelujah’
chorus as a separate item had appeared in London’s charity
services as early as 1758.
Additional
accompaniments
The change in the aural ‘image’ of Messiah that
came about
in the nineteenth century involved orchestral sound as well as choral
weight. The musical directors of the large festivals normally hired an
orchestra for the duration of the programme, and specially-commissioned
works by (for example) Sullivan or Dvorak naturally employed the full
resources of the contemporary symphony orchestra. For the festival
Messiah performances, those instruments that were currently available
but had not been part of Handel’s score — flutes,
clarinets, trombones, bass drum — were not left idle.
A very different path was followed in continental Europe in
performances directed by Johann Adam Hiller in Berlin in 1786 and by
Mozart in Vienna in 1789. Both adapted Handel’s music to the
artistic conventions of the current ‘classical’
orchestra,
involving some colouristic use of wind instruments that was removed
from Handel’s own orchestral style. Mozart’s
arrangement is
naturally of independent interest. His source, a reprint of the English
full score of 1767, controlled his choice of variant movements, as well
as supplying a few corrupt readings in musical details. The words were
translated into German, but Mozart generally preserved
Handel’s
vocal lines and string parts, adding parts for flutes, oboes,
clarinets, bassoons, horns, trombones, trumpets and timpani. The
re-writing of Handel’s trumpet parts was enforced by the
change
in players’ techniques. Some fifteen to twenty years later,
Beethoven showed a different sort of creative interest in Messiah,
copying fragments into his sketch-books. During his first visit
toLondon, Haydn attended the Handel Commemoration of 1791 Westminster
Abbey: his own later oratorios were stimulated by this experience.
To the
present day
Although the social changes accompanying the First World War attenuated
the choral festival tradition to which ‘additional
accompaniments’ were practically relevant, Messiah remained
resilient in both ‘small’ and
‘large’ vises as
a part of the living musical repertory of Britain. Events took an
unexpected turn in the 1960s with a fashion for
‘sing-in’
performances with minimum specific rehearsal, thus reviving the
large-scale Messiah that had otherwise seemed to be a thing of the
past. In general, however, modern festival performances are not on a
scale that positively demands additional accompaniments and the choice
usually falls on a strength version of Handel’s own scoring.
By the time Prout’s edition was published, trends towards a
closer re-examination of Handel’s own versions of Messiah ,
and
towards performances of an ‘authentic’ type, were
already
under way. The publication of a facsimile of Handel’s
composition
autograph by the Sacred Harmonic Society in 1868, and of a booklet
concentrating on textual details of the score by the Master of the
Queen’s Music (who had care of the autograph scores in the
Royal
Library) in 1874, show that Messiah’s popularity was inducing
an
interest in its original form and circumstances. By the 1890s, the
conflict between the sight of Handel’s score and the sound of
the
festival performances was producing a strong reaction. It is
interesting to compare George Bernard Shaw’s reviews of
festival
performances in 1877 and 1891. The first concentrates mainly on
technical details of the performance, while the second concludes:
Why, instead of wasting huge sums on the
multitudinous dullness of a Handel Festival does not somebody set up a
thoroughly rehearsed and exhaustively studied performance of the
Messiah in St James’s Hall with a chorus of twenty capable
artists? Most of us would be glad to hear the work seriously performed
once before we die.
By 1894 Arthur Henry Mann had taken up the challenge with a performance
of Messiah in the chapel of King’s College, Cambridge. In
order
to produce a performance as close to the circumstances of
Handel’s as possible, Mann sought out all available Messiah
sources: the rediscovery of the Foundling Hospital score and performing
material seems to have been made at his instigations. In combining
scholarship with a practical intent, Mann may be regarded as the father
of modern Messiah studies: his papers and annotated score reveal that
he had subjected the sources to extensive and coherent interpretation
that must command the admiration of a modern Messiah scholar.
Mann’s lead was not much taken up during the next
half-century.
With the 1950s, however, interest in Messiah entered a new an exciting
phase. Several factors contributed to this — the introduction
of
well-organised music study courses at British universities, the
increased availability of the sources and the advent of the
long-playing record. Handel scholarship revived dramatically, in the
approach to the Handel anniversary of 1959. A more specialised
‘Messiah industry’ suddenly took up the study of
the work
in earnest.
The more recent history of Messiah has been dominated by the
establishment of professional ‘Baroque’ orchestras
using
period (or replica) instruments played in the appropriate manner.
Although it will no doubt appear in time that this phenomenon was
connected with some musical need of the later 1970s, the thoroughgoing
application of historical and aural imagination to Messiah was long
overdue. The successful ‘authentic’ recording of
the 1754
Foundling Hospital version of Messiah, released in 1980, will surely
form as important a landmark in the history of the work’s
performances as Shaw’s edition. The movement from
performances
such as A. H. Mann’s that employed numerical performing
strengths
comparable with Handel’s, to performances that also try to
recreate the sound of his orchestra and employ musicians attempting to
approach the work with the same attitudes as their eighteenth-century
counterparts, is directed not merely through antiquarian curiosity, but
from a desire to come closer to an understanding of the work itself.
Such an understanding can only be beneficial to performances of Messiah
in other circumstances.
CITATION
"Messiah In
Other Hands" Donald Burrows, Academy of Ancient Music. aam.co.uk
<http://www.aam.co.uk/features/9912.htm> |
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