handel’s messiah --10/15/25

15 Oct 2025

handel’s messiah --10/15/25

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Today's selection-- from Every Valley by Charles King. In 1742, George Frideric Handel a piece that has proved to be one of the most popular works in all of Western music, the Messiah:

“The Messiah is a work of anguish and promise, of profound worry and resounding joy, all expressed in ingenious, irresistible melodies. Its three parts, or acts, run through ancient prophecies of the birth of a rescuer for the world, then his brutal suffering at the hands of oppressors, then his atonement for the sins of humankind and the promise of eternal life for the redeemed-a set of ideas that, for the Christians who made up the Messiah's first audiences, represented the essence of their faith.

“In 1741, George Frideric Handel had started out with a stack of pages in English, a collection of short quotations gleaned from across the scriptures that were held to demonstrate that Jesus of Nazareth was the foretold savior. He formed them into solo songs, duets, choruses, and recitatives, the musical connective tissue between the work's various ‘scenes.’ He sketched the full musical score in London late that summer, premiered the new work in Dublin in the spring of 1742, and then continued to perform it, or at least attend many of the performances, until he died in 1759.

“Handel was German by birth, but he gained his real musical education, in his twenties, in Italy, among composers, performers, and instrument makers engaged in everything from inventing the piano to perfecting what had come to be called opera. He spent his thirties and forties rising from a newcomer to London feeling his way through the city's rowdy theater world to court composer to the British royal family. By his fifties he was his adopted country's most celebrated public musician. But when he began work on the Messiah, he was approaching sixty and edging toward the final phase of his career, which made this particular work something of a midlife revival-and an odd one at that. In its sung text and subject matter, the Messiah was an anomaly. It would turn out to be wholly unlike anything else Handel ever wrote. Only in the final decade of his life would it become widely known and, even then, with barely a hint of the fame it would achieve long after he was gone.

“Other musicians and choral groups, both in Britain and abroad, took it up in the years that followed his death. The earliest documented concerts in the American colonies, featuring selected portions rather than the entire work, came in New York in 1770, at a tavern on Broadway and then at Trinity Church Wall Street. But it wasn’t until 1784, at a royal commemoration of Handel’s life, held in London’s Westminster Abbey a quarter century after his death, that the Messiah— or by that stage, often The Messiah, even though Handel’s original title left out the definite article— began to occupy the position it still holds today: as a piece of music that seems full of meaning to people who treasure it and stealthily familiar to nearly everyone else.

Statue erected in Handel's honour, in Vauxhall Gardens, London; now in the Victoria and Albert Museum

“The Westminster event was the first time the work was heard at scale, with ‘a more numerous Band than was ever known to be collected in any country, or on any occasion whatever,’ as the public announcement advertised. More than 250 instrumentalists, plus the combined choirs of the abbey, St. Paul's Cathedral, Windsor Castle, and the Chapel Royal, all managed to keep together, a contemporary source marveled, even without ‘a Manu-ductor to regulate the measure’ by waving his hands or pounding on the floor with a stick. ‘I was at the piece call'd the Messiah,’ Abigail Adams wrote to her niece after seeing a similar performance in 1785, while she and her husband, John, were living in London, ‘and tho a Guinea a ticket, I am sure I never spent one with more satisfaction I was one continued shudder from the beginning to the end of the performance.’

‘The concerts at Westminster Abbey would stand as the earliest of countless ‘monster performances’ that, by the Victorian era, would become the accepted standard. Audiences and artists increasingly came to see the Messiah as the very definition of big music, with large emotions attached, even if many people had a hard time explaining exactly why. Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, stumbled to express how Handel had somehow captured the essence of wonder, recapitulating even the enormousness of existence itself. ‘As the master over powered the littleness and incapableness of the performers and made them conductors of his electricity,’ he wrote after attending a concert in Boston in 1843, ‘so it was easy to observe what efforts nature was making, through so many hoarse, wooden and imperfect persons, to produce beautiful voices, fluid and soul-guided men and women.’ The music had weight, listeners felt. It produced a transporting sense that something cosmic and profound was at stake, even when the cares of this world happened to intrude. ‘I should have sometimes fancied myself amongst a higher order of Beings,’ Abigail Adams confided to Thomas Jefferson, ‘if it had not been for a very troublesome female, who was unfortunately seated behind me; and whose volubility not all the powers of Musick could still.’

“Only later, in the twentieth century, would music directors and conductors begin performing the Messiah as it was heard in Handel's lifetime, with fewer instrumentalists and smaller choirs, sometimes on period instruments and with vocal techniques appropriate to the era. Not that Handel would have minded either way. No two of his performances were exactly alike. He rewrote passages, raised and lowered keys, reassigned parts, cut out entire sections, and changed orchestrations according to the circumstances, as all musicians must. And as a composer who made his living from ticketed stage productions as well as the favor of powerful patrons, volume and spectacle were always part of his toolbox. ‘Oh, that I had cannon!’ he is supposed to have wished about one already thundering anthem.

“Yet big or small, history conscious or boldly innovative, the Messiah is now everywhere, especially as the calendar year winds to a close. Concerts by orchestras and choirs of different sizes and configurations are scheduled each year in New York, London, Melbourne, Amsterdam, Montreal, Vienna, Milan, Stockholm, Tokyo, and elsewhere. Across the United States, Canada, Britain, and other parts of the English-speaking world, from the Royal Albert Hall to Lincoln Center to small churches and community buildings, audiences show up to sing the work in its entirety, unrehearsed. Carnegie Hall in New York and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., host sing-alongs, as do venues in Boston, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Chicago, Salt Lake City, Cincinnati, Houston, Portland, Des Moines, Kalamazoo, and many other cities and towns. Accord ing to a blogger who tries to tally them up each year, there were close to two hundred such events in the United States alone in 2023, from a ‘Do-It-Yourself Messiah’ in Waukegan, Illinois, to ‘Handel's Mess Cider’ at a brewery in San Francisco.

“But because the music seems so deeply familiar, it is easy to miss the Messiah's sheer weirdness. Its structure isn't linear or chronological. It has nothing that could be called a plot. Its form is more like that of a found poem, built from Bible verses that have been rearranged and, here and there, edited—a fact that made it an astonishing, and to some listeners even upsetting, innovation at the time. Despite its religious themes, its earliest performances were in secular spaces a music hall, a theater—rather than where many people thought the holy words most properly belonged, that is, in a church. Parts of the sung text would later become iconic, with melodies familiar to millions, such as the ‘Hallelujah’ chorus, now the universal soundtrack of triumph and jubilation. But other segments can seem by turns mysterious, oracular, or baffling. ‘How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace,’ a soloist sings at one point above lilting violins—which turns out to be the Messiah's version of a Christian convert's misquotation of a Jewish prophecy: a passage from the book of Isaiah that the apostle Paul recalled from memory while writing to fellow believers in Rome. Even the music itself represents the oddest possible combination of sacred and profane. It wraps together grand choruses built for a cathedral with arias that were, at the time, most at home in an Italian opera house. Listen to enough of Handel's other compositions, and it doesn't take long to spot the mix of old and new: a secondhand motif, say, or a melody Handel repurposed from another composition.

“Given that its biblical text centers on the advent, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the Messiah is really a work about Easter spring-filled, renewing, joyous—for which it was originally written. But over the past two centuries, it has become associated with Christ mas. The text is full of passages that evoke the season. ‘For unto us a child is born, unto us, a son is given,’ the chorus sings in another passage taken from the book of Isaiah. The melody then bounces stepwise upward— ‘and the government shall be upon His shoulder; and his name shall be called"-before hitting the explosive refrain:

“‘Wonderful, Counsellor, the mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace,’ an infectious line that people always seem to end up humming on the way home. In another section, a soprano slowly recites the famous scene from the Gospel of Luke, of ‘shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night,’ and the shimmering appearance of an angel with the good news of Christ's birth. The violins, shifting into allegro, build the sense of expectation as the chorus enters again, joined by distant trumpets that conductors sometimes place at the back of the concert hall, proclaiming ‘Glory to God in the highest, and peace on earth, good will towards men.’ It is a moment that American listeners of a certain generation often find evokes an unexpected nostalgia—if not for the Bible or the Messiah, then for Linus's recitation of nearly the same text in the Peanuts Christmas special, first televised in 1965.

“The reasons for the work's slide from spring to winter are hard to pinpoint. Hearing the Messiah at Christmastime was already a well established tradition in the early nineteenth century. Performing it then, Emerson worried, shifted the focus away from the glorious resurrection of Jesus and toward his lowly birth, thereby totally missing the theological point—and a sign of how far real faith had declined, he felt, in his ‘unbelieving city’ of Boston. In the twentieth century, the Messiah became part of the more general trend of Christmas's outstripping Easter as the primary Christian celebration while also becoming a broadly secular holiday. All of this has cast the Messiah in a strange dual role: on the one hand, just another part of the commercialization of Christmas, background music to accompany warm spices and the smell of spruce; and on the other, a tool for rescuing the season from itself—an invitation to worry less about a missed flight or a last-minute gift and more about large, ultimate things. After all, ‘that's what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown,’ as Linus puts it.”