| ANALYSIS |
At Last, Messiah
On this day — April 9 — in 1742,
Handel's best-loved oratorio, Messiah, had its first public airing. The
occasion, an open rehearsal before the official Dublin opening on the
13th, proved auspicious. The public response was enthusiastic; word
quickly spread through the town that a major musical event was at hand.
The fifty-seven year old composer had arrived in Ireland some months
before, preceded by considerable fanfare. He was an international
celebrity already, and the public was full of curiosity about the man,
whose reputation had dazzlingly preceded him, and his music. Tickets
were hard to come by. He had brought with him a bag full of appealing
treats sure to please- L'Allegro, his highly praised setting of Milton
was one such, as was Acis and Galatea, the Ode for St. Cecilia's Day,
the early oratorio Esther, and even mighty Saul, the incomparable
masterpiece composed only two years earlier. The treats were devoured
happily by the public. Any misgivings Handel might have entertained as
to the acceptability of Messiah's subject matter being performed in a
secular context were assuaged for the moment.
However, that very issue of acceptability surfaced the following year
at the London premiere, as indeed it had in 1739, with Israel in Egypt.
Shocked by the idea of a work based entirely on Holy Writ holding forth
in a profane venue, in operatic, albeit unstaged, trappings, London
clerics and some members of the public hurled epithets such as
"sacrilegious" and "heretical" at Messiah, with even greater vehemence
than those cast earlier at Israel in Egypt.
It took several years for Messiah to find an audience and place.
Handel's own Foundling Hospital performances in the years of his final
decade prompted a number of revisions, including expanded or newly
composed versions of some of the airs, and a general tightening of the
overall structure. This procedure of altering works, sometimes
substantially, in revivals was a common one with him, and not always a
happy one - sometimes indeed causing dramatic and musical chaos in
previously solid works! (One wonders at times: what could the man have
been thinking?) It is a sign of his special devotion to Messiah that
virtually all Handel's changes in it can be considered artistically and
dramatically viable, made to accommodate the strengths/weaknesses of
changing solo artists, but not at the expense of the continuity or
integrity of the work. The recent fashion of presenting Messiah in one
or another of Handel's own performing versions is commendable. I have
chosen a more-or-less "standard" version, one that attempts to showcase
the strengths of those who are participating in it, taking Handel's
practice as example though not adhering specifically to a version he
performed.
Almost immediately after Handel's death Messiah entered into a sad, but
fascinating journey through a couple of centuries of bloat, distortion,
and stylistic misrepresentation. Were it a less hearty work, had it not
the strength of an artistic Samson (Samson, by the way, was completed
barely forty-five days after Messiah) the distortions might have proved
fatal.
The fact that they didn't is proof not just of Messiah's heartiness,
but of its eminence as a true masterpiece, immutable in the face of the
gargantuan choruses, Mahlerian re-orchestrations, and numbingly slow
tempi which have been imposed upon it over time. Even in the face of
stylistic misunderstandings and numerical immoderation, musicians and
audiences willing to search for the underlying message - the truth - in
Jennens's and Handel's collaboration have, I believe, generally found
it. Audiences always seem to respond to honest attempts to get at
Messiah's core. For some, faith is reinforced by the experience. For
others, the satisfactions are intellectual and/or visceral (Jennens,
after all, described Messiah as "a fine entertainment"). Religious
considerations aside, the human drama implicit in the Scriptural
narration is compelling. For those who need it, there is the
satisfaction to be found in Jennens's straight-forward iteration of
Christian orthodoxy - in the reconciliation of Old Testament prophecy
with New Testament fulfillment. As with all great art, the world is a
better place with each generation's discovery of Messiah's message.
What, then, is Messiah? One might begin by saying what it is not. It is
not church music; has nothing to do with things liturgical. Handel's
real church music, usually ceremonial, often celebrating a military
victory or royal birth/wedding/death, can be full of attractive and/or
stirring gestures, but often tends to lack the humanistic core of his
dramatic works. Unquestionably, the center of Handel's creative life
lay in the theater - with opera. Forced by changed circumstances to
forego that medium, he took up, indeed invented, a new medium - not
historically new, of course, but vastly different from any pre-existing
models - that allowed him to stay as close to the aesthetic world of
opera as possible. Oratorio allowed him - here's the truly new element
- to promote the chorus (a benign nonentity in most operas of the
period) to the role of participant and commentator at critical moments
in the drama.
How do Messiah and Handel's other oratorios differ from Bach's
passion-oratorios? I think Bach would never have considered his
settings of John or Matthew suitable for a performance life outside the
church. They are intrinsically liturgical in concept, even if unique in
their expansiveness and complexity. They are firmly rooted in the Good
Friday Lutheran tradition. The secular settings in which they are now
most commonly performed would likely surprise, if not appall, him. Yes,
like Handel's, they draw heavily on the prevailing Italian operatic
models in terms of style, but the coloration, declamation, pacing, and
tone are uniquely of the church, and specifically of the historic
liturgical style of Lutheran Germany of his, and earlier times.
Handel's oratorios, on the other hand - even, and perhaps especially
Messiah - have nothing to do with the church. They may have had some
side purpose/benefit of attracting people to the church through
Scripture. But they are of the theater. They are surrogate operas - all
of them - intended for a diverse audience, not a congregation of
same-thinking believers. It is perhaps ironic that Messiah is the only
oratorio of Handel's that was performed in a sacred building during his
lifetime - the chapel of the Foundling Hospital, annually during the
last decade of his life - though, as Winton Dean points out, "only
after it had won its spurs in several theatres and concert halls and at
least one tavern." I don't know if Handel was a religious man. I know
he was a spiritual one. He seems to have been comfortable living in and
around the Anglican church. He was often, especially in his later
years, seen on his knees at prayer in St. George's Church, Hanover
Square, near his home in Brook Street. I have conducted eleven of
Handel's oratorios over the last eighteen years, plus several oratorio-
length masques, odes and operas "after the manner of an oratorio." That
experience has been a great teacher.
I think the principal lesson I have learned is to respect Handel, the
dramatist, an exuberant musical story-teller who, above all else, is
determined to draw the listener into the story, and thereby perhaps to
change his life. Whenever a librettist gave him an image - be it a
scene from nature, a meditation on a loving relationship, a panegyric
about an unjustly persecuted person or a whole subjugated people, a
hymn to filial devotion, any allusion to conflict, personal or national
- he never failed to find the exactly appropriate musical metaphor.
CITATION
"At Last, Messiah"
Donald Teeters. 2004. The Boston Cecelia.
<http://www.bostoncecilia.org/prognotes/handel-messiah.html> |
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