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An oratorio is the Italian term for a place of prayer, an oratory, specifically the one in the Chapel of the Congregation of the Oratorio in Rome. Oratorios, never staged, substituted for operas during Lent when opera productions were forbidden. Oratorios, however, were not strictly ligurgical, a part of a religious service.

Handel and J. S. Bach were exact contemporaries, born within 100 miles and a few weeks of each other. These two greatest exemplars of the late Baroque were destined never to meet. After four years in Rome Handel had moved to London in 1711 to pursue a career as an opera composer and did not return to his native Germany. Bach remained his entire life within the region of his birth and never wrote operas. Of the two composers Handel was by far the better known. His success in opera, then as now the most prestigious (and expensive) genre, guaranteed his fame.

Several events, however, conspired to destroy Handel's successful career as a composer of more than 40 operas. First, a rival opera company, the Opera of the Nobility, bid up the prices for the most sought-after singers. Handel's company, the Royal Academy of Music, founded in 1720, in which he had invested his personal money, went bankrupt-and so did the Opera of the Nobility. Handel tried again with a second opera company.

A second reason for the failure of Handel's operas, after two decades of success on the stage, percolated up from a lower social strata. The low-brow ballad opera appealed to English audiences for several reasons: It was sung and spoken in English, the ballads were known tunes, the subject matter was current and the cast included everyday people rather than Italian opera seria's historical and mythological characters. John Gay's The Beggar's Opera of 1728 was a huge success; it even found a place in its libretto to poke fun at such conventions of opera seria as the deus ex machina, a god by machine who mechanically resolved the plot dilemmas.

Although Handel himself was deep in debt by 1741, the proceeds from his new work, premiered on April 13, 17 42, in Dublin's New Music Hall, went to the three local charities. Handel conducted the subsequent 30-plus performances, mostly benefits for the foundling hospital whose board he had joined. Handel kept performing the work every year and arranged 12 versions. Because of the many rearrangements, there is no definitive version of the work. Today's version, from 1753, casts an alto (our countertenor), rather than a soprano, singing in Part III , "If God is with us" in C Minor, transposed down a fifth from the original G Minor. The work ends in D Major.

The large amount of money he raised for charity led Charles Burney to note, "Messiah has fed the hungry, clothed the naked, fostered the orphan. more than any other single musical production. in this or any country." Another wrote, "Perhaps the works of no other composer have so largely contributed to the relief of human suffering." In addition to relieving human suffering, it may also be true that Handel relieved spiritual suffering in that, as one writer ventured to assert, Handel had done more in his music to convince thousands of men that there is a God than all the theological works ever written.

The idea of setting mostly prose passages from the Bible was new for Handel, whose other oratorios, like his many predecessors in this genre, usually set in Italian or Latin, were dramatic, poetic settings of Biblical events. The Passions set by Bach and others all assign the role of Christ to a singer (usually a low voice). Messiah differs here as well in that the Messiah never sings at all. The Rev. Charles Jennens's Biblical quotations were more frequently taken from the Old Testament than from the New. Jennens thought the oratorio would ensure that "the Solemnity of Church Musick is agreeably united with the most pleasing Airs of the Stage." In London Messiah was initially advertised without its name for fear of Church disapproval because it was performed in a secular theater.

Messiah was written in an extraordinarily short amount of time, from August through September 1741. Part One took only six days, Part Two nine days, and Part Three was completed in another six days. The orchestration took only two more days. Therefore, 260 pages of manuscript were completed in the amazingly short period of 24 days. Evidently, however, Jennens was not pleased with Handel's scoring, finding in it "some weak parts, which [Handel] was too idle & too obstinate to retouch, tho' I used great importunity to perswade him to it."

Handel's influence continued to wane in the opera world, but was replaced permanently by his success in oratorios, especially Messiah. When, at the end of the century, Joseph Haydn heard the "Hallelujah" Chorus in London, he wept and famously exclaimed, "He is the master of us all!"

Handel expressed a desire to die on Good Friday, but in fact died the next morning, Good Saturday, April 14, 18 59. He conducted Messiah only 8 days earlier. Handel was buried in Westminster Abbey; over 3,000 mourners attended his funeral. His statue there shows him holding the manuscript for one of the arias of Messiah, "I know that my Redeemer liveth."

-Andrea Olmstead

Ms. Olmstead has been the Society's Christopher Hogwood Research Fellow since 2005. The author of three books on Roger Sessions and of Juilliard: A History, she has published numerous articles and CD liner notes, produced recordings, and taught Music History for 32 years.

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