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Handel’s Messiah: A Brief Overview
By Sarah Ashwood | December 24, 2008
Ah the holidays…’tis the season for gifts, family, food, sleighs, snow, twinkling lights, decorated trees, and Christmas carols. This is also the season where a certain piece of music, Handel’s Messiah, is doubtless performed more than any other. How much do you know about this popular Christmas-time tradition and its composer?
The Messiah, by George Friedrich Handel: the name of this world-famous piece of music is familiar to all, conjuring mental images of black-robed choirs singing in perfect harmony to the accompaniment of a full orchestra. Often performed at Christmas and Easter, Handel’s Messiah is, perhaps, the most famous piece of religious music ever written. Certainly its popularity continues to abide, in both religious and secular circles, as it has for over two centuries. The future of the Messiah looks bright…as it stands, Handel’s most famous work will probably continue to be enjoyed by audiences for generations.
George Friedrich Handel was born February 23, 1685, and died in 1759. Throughout his lifetime, this man composed many famous and enduring pieces of music, classics still with us today. These include such works as Rinaldo, Judas Maccabaeus, Water Music, Semele, Samson, and of course the famous Messiah.
The Messiah was written towards the end of Handel’s life, in September of 1741. Sources say the entire musical score was completed in twenty-four days…just a little over three weeks! On pages 270-271 of Newman Flower’s, George Frideric Handel: His Personality and His Times, is the remark:
“He (Handel) completed the first part (of the Messiah) in seven days, the second part in nine days, the third part in six days, filling in instrumentation two days. The whole of Messiah from beginning to end was set upon paper in twenty-four days. Considering the immensity of the work, and the short time involved, it will remain, perhaps for ever, the greatest feat in the whole history of musical composition.”
Few would argue with this assessment.
Jim Whiting says in The Life and Times of George Frideric Handel: “Set to an arrangement of passages taken from the Bible by a man named Charles Jennens, Handel composed the music (for Messiah) while he was still in London, just before his departure for Dublin. It took him just over three weeks. That seems like a short period to create something that has endured for so long, but Handel was used to composing in short bursts of inspiration.
“ ‘I did think I did see all Heaven before me and the great God Himself,’ Handel is believed to have said during the time that he composed Messiah.”
On page 247 of Handel, Herbert Weinstock lists several of Handel’s oratorios and says of them, “Israel in Egypt particularly, and Messiah almost as much, are epics on a vast, non-human, universal scale.”
Handel’s genius in his musical score of Messiah, as well as in composing it all in such an incredibly short amount of time, is not a disputed fact.
What is a disputed fact, however, is who actually arranged the words to Messiah. True, they were all taken from the Holy Bible, and most historians give credit of the arrangement to a man named Charles Jennens. On the other hand, Flower reports:
“At an earlier stage Jennens wrote of the maggots in Handel’s brain, but never a man had a bigger maggot in his brain than Jennens over Messiah. This rich and superior person never compiled the words of Messiah at all! For nearly two centuries he has had all the credit of doing so; he has shared with Handel the glory of the world’s greatest oratorio. Moreover, every biographer of Handel has followed after the other fellow and piled the credit high upon him. But a half-starved little clergyman named Pooley, who lived with Jennens as his secretary, did the work, the credit of which his master stole, and he has gone down into an unknown grave unhonoured and unsung.”
Flowers goes on to say, “…Jennens…with the manuscript of the hidden and unprotesting Pooley in his pocket, …saw Handel in the summer of 1741, and palmed off Pooley’s selection of Biblical words upon Handel as his own. That the selection was a fine one all posterity has agreed, and Handel certainly believed that the genius of Jennens had given him a wonderful libretto, for in subsequent letter to him he refers to ‘your Oratorio Messiah.’”
So by this account, credit for the lovely, inspiring selection of lyrics for the Messiah, drawn from the pages of Holy Scripture, should not go to the man history long credited them to–Charles Jennens–but to another…his hired secretary, poor Mr. Pooley.
History tells us Handel was actually at a rather low point in his life when he wrote the Messiah. His fortunes has dwindled away to next to nothing, and ill health beset his aging body. Nevertheless, the work for which the great composer will always be remembered was yet to come.
The Messiah, after its completion, was not first performed in London, as Handel was reportedly disgusted by that city’s reception of his previous works. Instead, the Messiah opened in Dublin, where money was trying to be raised to help Irish orphanages and various charities.
The Messiah’s first performance took place on April 13, 1742. Though immediately popular in Dublin, London was slower to receive and accept it. In fact, a great deal of opposition to the Messiah seems to have come from religious sources, who thought such a production unfit for public entertainment.
As is reported in Stanley Sadie’s The Great Composers: Handel, “Then he (Handel) introduced Messiah to London. Musically it was liked, but in certain religious circles the idea of singing Biblical words in a theatre was disapproved… So Messiah only made slow progress at first in public taste; but before long such prejudices were overcome, and it eventually became by far the most popular of Handel’s oratorios.”
Indeed it has.
One of the reasons for the wonderful fame of the Messiah is the almost overpoweringly majestic Hallelujah Chorus. Though this choral/orchestral selection may not have originally been intended to become the highlight, the centerpiece, of the sacred oratorio, in most people’s mind this is exactly what it is.
The tradition of the entire audience rising to its feet and standing for the duration of the Hallelujah Chorus is a long-lasting one. Some say it began with the Messiah’s first performance in the city of London, and was even started by the King of England, himself! So overpowered was he, legend says, by the majestic splendor of this song in proclaiming the glories of the “King of kings and Lord of lords,” that this king of England rose to his feet, standing there in respect until the song had ended.
Some historians say this legend is factual, while others deny the veracity of it. Nevertheless, the tradition was begun and continues to the present day.
George Friedrich Handel was, undeniably, a brilliant composer. And the Messiah is, undeniably, his most brilliant composition. Performances of this musical piece take place every year, all over the world. Not only is it Handel’s most famous musical work, the Messiah is also one of the most famous musical works of all time. As M.T. Anderson says in Handel, Who Knew What He Liked:
“After his death, his fame kept spreading. The choirs that sang his music got larger and larger, louder and louder. As time went on, people sang the Messiah in England, in Handel’s native Germany, and in the new country called the United States of America. The choirs kept getting bigger. Once the Messiah was played by an orchestra of five hundred, with a choir of four thousand people chanting and shouting the music that Handel had once cried over alone in his room.”
Handel’s agony…our ecstasy. Handel’s fast–though hard–work…lasting enjoyment to generations who hear the Messiah.
As Flower says, “When Handel closed the theatre on Deidamia, his fortunes had reached their lowest ebb. And yet out of this welter of suffering came the glorious Messiah.”
And how glad are we, today, that this is so!
Bibliography
Anderson, M.T. Handel, Who Knew What He Liked. Cambridge Massachusetts: Candlewick Press, 2001.
Flower, Newman. George Frideric Handel: His Personality and His times. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1923.
Sadie, Stanely. The Great Composers: Handel. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1968.
Weinstock, Herbert. Handel. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959.
Whiting, Jim. The Life and Times of George Frideric Handel. Mitchell Lane Publishers, 2004.
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