PROGRAM NOTES

In July 1741, Handel’s librettist Charles Jennens wrote to a friend: "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 excell all his former Compositions, as the Subject excells every other subject.  The Subject is Messiah." 

In fact, within the month Handel was hard at work.  He began composing Messiah on August 22 and finished a rough score by September 12, a little more than three weeks later.  By this point in his career, Handel had finally accepted that his beloved Italian operas were simply not popular with the London audiences, who found them pretentious and unintelligible.  Instead, Handel decided to offer the public a new kind of "sacred entertainment," one that dealt with suitably uplifting sacred themes in plain English.  In Jennens’s words, these oratorios would ensure that "the Solemnity of Church-Musick is agreeably united with the most pleasing Airs of the Stage." 

Handel’s other oratorios are all dramatic re-tellings of Biblical events.  Messiah is something very different.  The libretto is entirely made of Biblical quotations that comment on the events at hand, instead of enacting them.  This was an elegant way around the chief eighteenth-century objection against sacred oratorio, for Jesus himself never actually sings.

The idea of putting the central story of Christianity on the concert stage was a novel and potentially shocking idea.  Putting this story entirely in the form of quotations from both the Old and New Testament avoided making the Passion story into an unstaged opera.  But this also opened the way for a far greater breadth of symbolic reference. Charles Jennens used a passage from St. Paul to sum up his musical sermon: "God was manifested in the Flesh, justify’d by the Spirit, seen of Angels, preached among the Gentiles, believed on in the World, received up in Glory." All this is more than a simple retelling of the life of Christ.  Jennens’ web of quotations draws our attention away from the actual events and towards the theological implications of Jesus’s story. In Part II, for example, the tremendously dramatic story of Christ’s crucifixion is conveyed entirely through the language of the Old Testament, since these are the prophecies that the Crucifixion is seen to fulfill.  And Part III has no plot at all; it is actually a version of the Anglican burial service, emphasizing the resurrection of the body and Christ’s victory over sin.

On first glance, the grandeur of Jennens’s conception is not particularly reflected in Handel’s instrumentation. Just after he finished writing Messiah, Handel began composing his oratorio Samson, and for that he used an especially large and colorful orchestra. Handel planned to premiere Messiah in Dublin; perhaps because he was unsure of the resources available to him there, he scored Messiah for the standard baroque orchestra of strings, oboes, bassoon, trumpets, and drums. Using only these simple means, however, he makes astonishingly telling effects. For example, we first hear the trumpets only "from a distance, and softly" in the chorus "Glory to God," without their usual accompaniment of drums. Their full brilliance is revealed much further on, well into the “Hallelujah Chorus,” where they are finally heard onstage with the timpani.

Though it doesn’t call for any exotic instruments, the musical language of Messiah is itself extremely rich. Handel was a real cosmopolitan; his own conversation was an eloquent mix of at least four languages, and his musical discourse was no less international.  The score of Messiah easily accommodates the English anthem tradition, the Italian opera aria, the tumultuous crowd-scenes of German Lutheran Passions, and even the sharply-dotted French opera overture, in its first oratorio appearance. This musical wealth was somewhat lost on Jennens, who thought that the score was not up to his libretto and complained vociferously about "some weak parts, which [Handel] was too idle & too obstinate to retouch, tho’ I used great importunity to perswade him to it."
 
Jennens’s pressure to alter parts of the work (particularly the overture, "in which there are some passages far unworthy of Handel, but much more unworthy of the Messiah," according to Jennens) seems to have materially contributed to a major breakdown for Handel in April of 1743, "a return of his Paralytick Disorder, which affects his Head & Speech."  Jennens wrote shortly thereafter "that a letter I wrote him about it contributed to the bringing of his last illness upon him ...  This shews that I gall'd him."  Interestingly, Handel scholar Frederic Fehleisen has pointed to the structural importance of the Overture in spelling out some of the most telling harmonic moments in the work; the whole is bound together in a tonal scheme so important that the threat of undoing its crucial threads seems to have made Handel physically ill.

After a rapturous welcome in Dublin, Messiah received a decidedly mixed reception in London, where Jennens noted "a clamor rais’d against it, which has only occasion’d it’s being advertis’d without its Name." Perhaps because of this controversy, Handel seems to have been reluctant to present Messiah the following season. Only in 1749 did it become a regular part of Handel’s season.  Unlike our tradition of Christmas Messiahs, these performances always took place just before Easter. The next year these annual Messiahs began to serve as a benefit for a new local charity. The "Hospital for the Maintenance and Education of Exposed and Deserted Young Children," otherwise known as the Foundling Hospital, welcomed Handel to its board of governors in 1750, and from then till Handel’s death a performance of Messiah in the Hospital Chapel became an annual event.  Charles Burney later commented that this piece has "fed the hungry, cloth’d the naked, fostered the orphan, and enriched succeeding managers of Oratorios, more than any single musical production in this or any country." A remarkable legacy for a remarkable work.

-Robert Mealy