ON HEARING THE “CHRISTMAS” PORTION
OF HANDEL’S MESSIAH
It’s late November or early December.
You’re looking through listings of upcoming concerts and broadcasts and browsing through CDs in the stores. What work appears time and time again?
Without question, it’s Messiah, George Frideric Handel’s incomparable oratorio, which has become the signal work of the Christmas season for millions of people the world over. In fact, Messiah is most likely to be the one of Handel’s many compositions that you know or know about, perhaps primarily through the magnificent “Hallelujah” chorus.
In the case of Messiah, the public’s familiarity is a tribute to Handel’s success at communicating through his music. It was so in his own lifetime, and it is so today. A foundation for understanding that communication is offered in the following sections, “Handel, England, and Oratorio” and “About Messiah”, and a more detailed examination of Handel’s remarkable musical language is presented in the section “Hearing the Christmas portion of Messiah”.
Handel, England, and Oratorio
Handel, that remarkable composer of so much English music, was born in Halle, then in Saxony, in 1685. He received his musical training there and in Hamburg before journeying to Italy early in 1707 to expand his experience. For the three years he was there, Handel absorbed the style that had made Italy the premiere center of Baroque composition (despite France’s rivalry). Returning to Germany, he accepted the appointment to serve the Elector of Hanover, George. During this period of service, Handel visited England twice, earning an early reputation there as a master of the contemporary style. So great was his success that no less a personage than Queen Anne provided him with an annual pension. Understandably, Handel found England a congenial place and overstayed his leave from the German court. At the death of Queen Anne in 1714, none other than George of Hanover, to whom Handel was still obligated, succeeded to the throne of England. The rapprochement between Handel and King George I took more than a year, but in the end the king maintained Handel in his service and even doubled the pension that Anne had previously bestowed.
So it was that Handel had been creating music in and for England for nearly 30 years before he wrote Messiah in 1741. He had devoted a good portion of his career to composing operas in the Italian style to entertain the social elite at theaters which he directed in London. He had also composed many choral works for the nobility, for occasions such as coronations, entertainments, state celebrations and funerals, and instrumental music for both court and church. And he had already ventured into the sphere of the oratorio with considerable success, particularly after Pepusch and Gay’s Beggar’s Opera in 1728 undercut the popularity of Italian opera with its parody of the opera seria and its use of a libretto entirely in English. However, Handel refused to let the popular taste of the day dictate his compositional style. As a result of the changing public taste, along with production problems such as outright brawling between rival singers and increasing financial demands by the singers, he saw his opera company decline and finally fall into bankruptcy in 1737. He also suffered occasional attacks of paralysis which weakened him, interrupted his work, and led him to return to Germany for a time to recover his health.
When he returned to England, Handel’s focus shifted almost entirely from the opera to the oratorio. Certainly this made sense financially. He could draw on his compositional skill without the expenses of theater machinery, props, costumes, and drama rehearsals, since oratorio, unlike opera, was not a staged work.
Handel’s oratorios follow the tradition, established early in the seventeenth century, of treating serious subject matter from respected poets such as Milton or themes from the scripture, suitable for public presentation in penitential seasons when secular theater was deemed inappropriate for a Christian society. Most of his oratorios were stories from the Hebrew scriptures or the history of the Jewish people: Esther, Judas Maccabeus, the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt, Joseph and his brothers, Samson, and Jephtha, for example. However, he treated a more abstract subject in his Triumph of Time and Truth and a Greek myth in Herakles.
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