Handel’s Messiah is now so closely associated with Christmas that the annual arrival of the holiday itself is naturally preceded by a performance of Handel’s most famous work. But it was not meant to be that way.
A new book by Charles King (professor of international affairs and government at Georgetown University in Wash DC) explores every road leading to the Messiah, and every alley as well. For those who really want to get at the main point of the book, these alleys are a major distraction. Unless you are a voracious reader, I highly recommend this book, but only if you skim through much of it. It’s much like a visitor to Paris who sets out in the morning to visit the Basilica du Sacré-Couer, but gets so enamoured by all the boutiques, cafes and art galleries in Montmarte, that by the time he arrives at Sacré-Couer the visiting hours have ended.
To make the book politically correct, King dilates at length about slavery and an African slave trader who found himself held as a slave on a ship bound for Maryland. While fascinating, this unfortunate fellow never encountered Handel in person. Other people Handel did meet are given an extensive biographical treatment embellished by what can best be described as the “life and times” approach. An example is Susannah Arne, who became the famous Mrs. Cibber on the London stage. “Even Handel seemed to be moved by her talent. Only a year after her debut in 1773, Handel offered her a secondary role” in his new Oratorio, Deborah. Towards the end of her life, Cibber and Handel became close friends. The early career of Susannah is ably told, but then we hit a brick wall with a lengthy lecture on women’s rights, which were nearly non-existent at that time. A status “not unlike enslavement,” writes King, again using slavery like a boogeyman to excoriate society.
A little more to the point is King’s biography of Thomas Coram, who founded the Foundling Hospital in London. If you really need to know the exact number of dukes and earls Coram approached to be contributors to his hospital, it is all here, ready to smother you in detail. If you prefer to fast-forward to why it matters, skip a few chapters: that was the venue in London that became the spiritual home of Messiah performances. “Over the course of the 1750s, the Foundling Hospital’s ‘Annual Music Festival of Messiah’ became one of the most anticipated events of the London season. For the first few years, audiences could expect to see Handel himself in charge, conducting the choir from the keyboard.”
But it was in 1742, on the Tuesday before Easter, that Messiah was first performed. It happened in Dublin before a crowd of 700, in a venue that could “reasonably hold only 600.” The public reaction was a magnitude 9 earthquake in the history of music. “The whole is beyond anything I had a notion of,” reported an Irish bishop. “It seems to be a species of music different from any other.” The world’s greatest oratorio, as it was called, achieved a birth just as spectacular as the subject of its words.
And therein lies the most fascinating aspect of King’s book, which makes it all worthwhile. While Handel wrote the music, the words were courtesy of Charles Jennens Jr. If you have never heard of him, that is not surprising, as his name has been almost entirely erased from the historical record of the great Oratorio.
In an expert investigation, King gives us every possible detail of how Jennens did it. Unlike the other dark alley-ways of the book, these are well worth stepping through slowly. Jennens did not so much ‘write’ the words, as cleverly excerpt passages from the Bible into a coherent narrative of the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus. He sent all this to Handel, who created musical magic with it. The two men met many times, with Jennens acting as perhaps the world’s first music groupie. He was a very frequent guest at Handel’s home, and he hung on every note of every new composition by Handel, mostly in elation but sometimes in scorn. His reaction to Messiah’s unveiling in London in 1743 is extraordinary.
Jennens called it “a farce, which gives me as much offence as any thing relating to the performance can give the bishops and other squeamish people.” Far from a mere twist in an alley, this was akin to a tanker truck explosion that might close both the north and southbound lanes of I-35 in Austin. “Handel managed only two more London performances of Messiah.”
Jennens excoriated Handel, and the response was another extraordinary event in musical history. Handel suffered a paralysis affecting his head and his speech. “He told Jennen’s cousin that the cause was his dispute with Jennens over revising the Messiah.” King does not take the opportunity to end that sentence with an exclamation mark! Jennens himself was also hit by health concerns, lashing out in the most outrageous manner. “I don’t yet despair of making him retouch the Messiah, at least he shall suffer for his negligence,” Jennings wrote to his best friend. By the following spring, Handel and Jennings reconciled long enough for “some unspecified points of composition and phrasing.” This led to two performances of the revised Messiah in April 1745, followed by its spectacular second life that began at the Foundling Hospital in 1750. Even Benjamin Franklin saw a performance at the Hospital in 1757, and it has been performed every year since. “Handel had become nothing short of the architect of British musical sensibility,” writes King.
Unfortunately, he is unable to explain why Messiah, originally established as an Easter performance, became associated with Christmas. “The reason for the work’s slide from spring to winter are hard to pinpoint,” he admits. Whatever the season or reason, “the Messiah is the only piece of classical music that reliably brings audiences to their feet, since listeners typically stand, by unspoken convention, at the ‘Hallelujah’ chorus.” This spontaneous standing ovation was observed this month when the Austin Symphony Orchestra gave a sensitive and joyous rendition of select portions of Messiah at Riverbend (lead photo). Ryan Heller was the conductor of Chorus Austin. If you missed it this year, one can be confident it will be performed again next December, so support our great local Symphony and enjoy the combined effort of Charles Jennens and George Frideric Handel in 2025!
www.austinsymphony.org
EVERY VALLEY: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times that made Handel’s Messiah. It is by Doubleday, and lists for $32.
Photo by C Cunningham