Program Notes for Handel’s Messiah
George Frideric Handel was one of the most admired composers of the Baroque era. Although today he is most well-known for his oratorios, especially Messiah, he was most famous in his own day as a composer of 42 Italian operas (many of which have been reintroduced to audiences in the last few decades as part of the major revival of Baroque opera in the late 20th century). Other famous pieces by Handel include other choral works, such as the Coronation Anthems and orchestral works, including the Water Music and The Music for the Royal Fireworks and many concerti grossi.
Handel was born in Halle, Germany in 1685 – the same year as two other Baroque masters, Johann Sebastian Bach and Domenico Scarlatti (although they never met, Handel and Bach share another interesting connection: both died after unsuccessful cataract surgery performed by the same surgeon, John Taylor, who has gone down in history as a medical charlatan). Handel’s father was determined his son should become a lawyer, and did not encourage his interest in music. Bowing to parental pressure, Handel enrolled in law school, but soon dropped out to become a professional musician, working for the Hamburg Opera Theater, first as a violinist and harpsichordist, and later as a composer. Hamburg was Germany’s most important center for Italian opera, and the energy and vitality of the theater must have whetted the young composer’s appetite for this new and wildly popular genre, because Handel left the next year for Florence, opera’s birthplace.
After three years in Italy, Handel returned home to Germany in 1710, where he took charge of musical life at the court of Hanover – but Handel abandoned his post on a trip to London, where he lived for the rest of his life (Handel must have experienced heart-stopping anxiety a few years later when the Elector of Hanover – the employer he had deserted – was crowned King George I of England).
From 1711 to 1741, his first thirty years in his new home, Handel was a man of the theater. Not only did he compose nearly forty operas during this period, but he founded and managed his own opera company. Each season, which lasted from mid-autumn until late spring, he composed and produced a series of operas, hiring the most admired Italian singers, rehearsing the orchestra (in his own home), renting performance halls, arranging for publicity, and managing ticket sales.
But in the late 1730s and 40s, disaster struck Handel’s opera company. The popularity of Italian opera in London declined sharply, and box office revenues collapsed. Additionally, a rival opera company (the “Opera of the Nobility”) was founded in 1737 which competed with Handel’s company for this diminishing audience while at the same time driving up the costs of opera production, as star singers demanded higher and higher fees, and audiences demanded increasingly spectacular (and therefore expensive) stage effects.
In response to this series of disappointments, Handel turned to oratorio. He probably didn’t make a deliberate decision to change the focus of his compositional life; oratorio began as a short-term solution for his financial difficulties. Oratorio could be produced much less expensively than opera: English singers were far less expensive than Italian divas; costumes, sets, and stage machinery were not required; and oratorio required far less rehearsal time, since they were neither staged nor memorized.
Handel composed 29 oratorios, including Israel in Egypt (1738), Saul (1738), L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato(1740), Samson (1743), Semele (1743), Hercules (1734), Belshazzar (1734), Judas Maccabeus (1747), Joshua (1748), Susanna (1748), Solomon (1748), Theodora (1750), and Jephtha (1751), in addition to Messiah.
The idea for an oratorio called Messiah came not from Handel, but from Charles Jennens, a wealthy Englishman and literary scholar who edited Shakespeare’s plays. Jennens had been an admirer of Handel’s since at least 1725, when he had become a subscriber of Handel’s published operas, purchasing their scores as they were published. The two met in the mid 1730s, and Jennens soon after began collaborating with Handel, provided him with libretti for two oratorios before Messiah (Saul and L’Allegro), and two after (Belshazzar, and probably Israel in Egypt).
Jennens compiled the libretto of Messiah from the Bible, primarily the Old Testament (even the title of the work is a Hebrew word taken from the Old Testament). Rather than telling the story of Jesus narratively, it presents the significance of the Christian Messiah as a theological idea. Despite its religious subject matter, the libretto (and therefore the entire work) is clearly conceived of operatically: the Biblical texts were chosen and arranged by Jennens in the traditional operatic forms of recitative and aria (as well as choruses, and two pieces for orchestra alone), and the work’s three parts are subdivided into separate scenes, much like an opera. The program of the first performances included Jennens organization of the libretto:
I (i) The prophecy of Salvation; (ii) the prophecy of the coming of Messiah and the question, despite (i), of what this may portend for the World; (iii) the prophecy of the Virgin Birth; (iv) the appearance of the Angels to the Shepherds; (v) Christ’s redemptive miracles on earth.
II (i) The redemptive sacrifice, the scourging and the agony on the cross; (ii) His sacrificial death, His passage through Hell and Resurrection; (iii) His Ascension; (iv) God discloses his identity in Heaven; (v) Whitsun, the gift of tongues, the beginning of evangelism; (vi) the world and its rulers reject the Gospel; (vii) God’s triumph.
III (i) The promise of bodily resurrection and redemption from Adam’s fall; (ii) the Day of Judgement and general Resurrection; (iii) the victory over death and sin; (iv) the glorification of the Messianic victim.
Messiah is typical of a Handelian oratorio in its length: Parts One and Two each last about an hour, with a shorter final part. Although this may seem long to modern audiences, Baroque oratorio performances typically lasted even longer: Handel usually performed other works between the acts of the oratorio, often organ concertos featuring himself as the soloist.
Handel began Messiah on August 22, 1741, and completed it twenty-four days later. The scholar Clifford Bartlett writes that “such speed was not unusual, nor was the time of year. Not much happened in London during the summer, so it was a good time to get ahead with the preparation for the next season . . . Bach could produce a cantata, organizing the copying of parts, and rehearse and perform it every week: Three weeks to compose an oratorio without the immediate responsibility for organizing the performance was, therefore, ample. But, however hasty the composition, the power of the musical imagination, the wealth of ideas, the depth of inspiration, and the sheer variety of invention continue to astonish.”