NOTE:
The
origins of Handel's Messiah are almost as famous as the work itself.
Produced in a miraculously short period of time, rapturously
received at it's premiere in Dublin, the cause of not a little
controversy when first performed in London, and causing the turnabout
of Handel's personal fortunes, both commercially and critcally,
Messiah's origins and history continue to amaze. And it is a
history that is continuing to write itself, as Messiah is re-discovered
and re-imagined in every new generation.
The History of Messiah
It has been calculated that Handel
committed
more notes to paper than any other composer in history. But even by his
phenomenal standards of productivity, he composed Messiah at white
heat. In six days beginning 23 August 1741, he drafted 100 sides of
ten-stave paper; he wrote the whole oratorio in just three weeks.
Yet even as he forged ahead, Handel was, unusually for him, uncertain
about when and where he would perform this new work. He had probably
already received his invitation to give concerts in Dublin, and it may
be for that reason that he wrote Messiah for a sparse orchestra of
strings, trumpets, and drums only, with none of the usual woodwind with
which he so liked to colour his solo numbers: he did not know what
orchestral forces might be available. He added woodwind parts later,
when he began performing Messiah in England. He also wrote for a
combination of soloists—soprano, alto, tenor, and
bass—which is normal now, but which he had never used in his
previous oratorios, and may have been a way of spreading the
recruitment risk. Yet he seems not to have been definite about the
Dublin trip, for with hardly a break after finishing Messiah, he began
his massive oratorio Samson with much larger forces and surely intended
for England.
Handel
left us
frustratingly little correspondence and few paper trails other than his
music, and it is from pieces like these, that we have to glean his
intentions. With hindsight it is clear that Messiah was a turning point
in his career.
He had come to England thirty years before, fresh from youthful
grounding in counterpoint in Germany and melody in Italy, to make his
mark as a composer of powerful music for church and state occasions and
as a master of the new and fashionable Italian opera. It was as an
opera composer that he became famous and remained busily employed
throughout the 1720s. But the 1730s were difficult for him, prompting
him to great creative developments. In this decade he began to be his
own concert promoter, finance director, contractor, and conductor, as
well as composer: the first completely independent major composer in
history. As such, he was always looking for ways to please public taste
that would also satisfy his urge to experiment in music.
Competition from new rival Italian opera companies, and a growing
demand for identifiably English music, with English words and English
singers, led him to accept from friends and acquaintances librettos for
English oratorios: unacted, unstaged works for soloists, chorus, and
orchestra, given as concert performances in a theatre. He had already
written oratorios about the Messiah in Italy (La Resurezzione, 1708)
and for Germany (The Brockes Passion , 1716) when Charles Jennens
offered him the libretto of Messiah. He did not feel the moment was
right for it, but put it on the shelf for nearly three years. His turn
from Italian opera to English oratorio was gradual and unplanned; for
several years he put on mixed seasons of both types of works, and
although he gave his last Italian opera performance a few months before
he began Messiah, he himself did not know this or intend it to be the
case.
Without Messiah, Charles Jennens would be unknown today. But without
Charles Jennens, there would be no Messiah. The idea was his, and he
compiled the libretto before offering it to Handel. It was not their
first collaboration. Fifteen years Handel’s junior, shy,
touchy,
cultivated, the Oxford-educated son of a Midlands landowner enriched by
the family iron business, Jennens was a good amateur musician and a
devotee of Handel’s music. He had copies made for himself of
every note that Handel wrote; he made the long journey to London each
season to hear Handel’s latest compositions; and he fostered
Handel’s career by giving him English texts to set to music.
In January 1739, Handel successfully produced his oratorio Saul, to a
libretto by Jennens based on Scripture. On 29 December that year,
writing to his fellow Handel enthusiast James Harris about their plan
to compile a libretto for Handel based on Milton’s poems
L’Allegroand Il Penseroso, Jennens commented:
“I have been preparing a collection for him from Scripture,
which
is more to my own tast & (by his own confession) to his too;
but I
believe he will not set it this year, being anxious to please the Town
with something of a gayer turn.”
The
‘collection from Scripture’ is the first known
mention of Messiah.
Handel’s
enthusiasm for the Milton project gave Jennens time to do justice to
his chosen theme. By 10 July 1741 he was able to write to his friend
Edward Holdsworth:
“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 [taking the bulk of the box office] 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.”
The
phrase
‘another Scripture Collection’ is a clue that
Jennens was
also the compiler of the libretto for Handel’s only previous
oratorio with words taken directly from the Bible, Israel in Egypt.
Jennens was a devout adherent of the Protestant church, believing in
the fundamental truths and divine inspiration of the Bible. Like many
sincere Christians of his time, he was disturbed by the increase of
Enlightenment free thinking. Respect for scientific proof, rationalist
criticism of sacred texts, and the disruption of old social orders as
London became Europe’s finance capital all contributed to
weaken
the authority of Christian revelation. And in response, dozens of
clergymen and concerned laymen published hundreds of sermons, tracts,
and multivolume folios defending the doctrine that Jesus was the
Messiah prophesied in the Old Testament through whom God offered
salvation to mankind. Messiah is the most lasting of these declarations
of faith, because Jennens had the unique idea of communicating the
essentials of Christian doctrine through Handel’s music.
At
this point in
his career, Handel was finding the English public hard to please and
was considering a return to Germany. Jennens hoped that, as the climax
of a London season, the new oratorio would revive the
composer’s
popularity and income. But Handel did not fulfil Jennens’s
plan
to introduce Messiah to a theatre audience in London during Holy Week.
Taking the new score to Ireland, he carefully waited to perform such a
novel work until he had won Dublin hearts with two highly successful
subscription series of some of his other oratorios, odes, and
serenatas; and then he produced Messiah not in a theatre but in the New
Music Hall, Fishamble St, on 13 April 1742. Along with his principal
performers, he gave his services free for the benefit of three Dublin
charities—a fact much commended in the local press.
No
composer could
have wished for a more enthusiastic reception of a new work. The
capacity audience was deeply appreciative, the Bishop of Dublin
reporting that even “great numbers” of the
“young and
gay” listened with serious attention. Not only was the
performance sold out, the reviews were universally positive:
Words
are wanting
to describe the exquisite delight it afforded to 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 Dublin Journal]
But it
was a
different story when Handel premiered Messiah in London next year, as
part of a season of English-language works in his usual venue, a
theatre. The papers printed objections to the utterance of the sacred
Word of God in a place associated with low-life actors and scurrilous
plays, and Handel suff ered something akin to a nervous breakdown. He
was not helped by Jennens’s outspoken disappointment with
Messiah. Seeing the score now for the first time, Jennens initially
felt that Handel had not always done justice to himself as a composer
or to the Word of God as divine truth. The collaborators, both
strong-willed and intransigent, had a rift. It was Handel who made the
first conciliatory move, and his mollifying letter (now on show in his
house in London’s Brook Street) testifies to his respect for
Jennens as a librettist and as a musician: “Be pleased to
point
out those passages in the Messiah which You think require
altering.”
Messiah
did not
become an established favourite in England until the 1750s, when Handel
began to perform it for charity, as he had done in Dublin. Benevolent
and wealthy London society flocked to hear Messiah in Captain
Coram’s new Foundling Hospital “for the education
and
maintenance of exposed and deserted young children,” and
Handel
later bequeathed to the charity a manuscript score and a set of parts
that can still be seen there.
The
association of
Messiah with the Foundling Hospital must have had a special resonance
for Handel, since the city of his birth, Halle, was (and is) home to a
similar foundation. The Franckesche Stiftung, a large-scale orphanage
for the rescue and training of foundlings, and still a major
educational charity, was established in 1698 by the Pietist
philanthropist August-Hermann Francke, who was also professor of
Oriental languages at Halle University when Handel attended it. Handel
would have recognised the Foundling Hospital as a kindred charity.
By
1784 the music
historian Charles Burney could write of Messiah that “this
great
work has been heard in all parts of the kingdom with increasing
reverence and delight.” It reached Berlin two years later;
and
Mozart performed it in Vienna in 1789, adding or rewriting the parts
for woodwind, brass, and timpani. Both were anticipated by William
Tuckey, the retired choirmaster of Trinity Church, New York, who on 16
January 1770 made extracts from Messiah the second part of a concert in
George Burns’s Music Room in the City Tavern on Broadway. The
advertisement showed real understanding of Messiah: “A Sacred
Oratorio, on the Prophecies concerning Christ, and his
coming.”
Further New York performances of extracts followed, and within the next
decade Messiah reached Boston and Philadelphia. The first complete
Messiah in North America was in Boston in 1818, at Boylston Hall,
establishing a tradition of annual performances there.
It was
Handel’s normal practice to revise his works for each season
in
which he revived them, to suit the soloists he had assembled in his
company. This means that there is seldom a definitive version of a
Handel opera or oratorio. Messiah is no exception; for example, when
for the 1749–50 season Handel acquired the brilliant young
alto
castrato Gaetano Guadagni (later to be the creator of Gluck’s
Orfeo), he composed for him new settings of “But who may
abide
the day of his coming” (originally for bass, then for tenor),
and
“Thou art gone up on high” (originally for bass,
then for
soprano). There is no principal version of Messiah; the original Dublin
performance cannot be reconstructed with certainty. The present
recording follows what have become the most widely accepted choices in
performance.
REFERENCES
"Messiah: The Complete Work" Ruth Smith, henrickson.com 2009
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