Beech Tree News Network

Tis the season for music-Christmas music.  Most songs, many of us know by heart: “White Christmas”, “Santa Claus is Coming To Town”, the list of familiar and beloved tunes goes on and on.  But there’s perhaps no work of classical music more tied to the Christmas holiday than “Handel’s Messiah”.

From 1742 when it premiered all the way up to the present, “Handel’s Messiah” has been everywhere.  The song is by German British opera composer George Frideric Handel (1685-1749).  Charles King’s new book, Every Valley, gives the backstory of the song and its “Hallelujah” chorus.  He says “The Hallelujah chorus comes about 2/3 of the way through “Messiah” so it’s not the finale.  People stand up, getting ready to leave and it’s like “no.  Sit down.  There’s a third more of this thing to go”.

Messiah wasn’t Handel’s idea.  The words came from a friend named Charles Jennens.  Jennens was a wealthy landowner who also suffered from a sense of doom and despair, what we’d now call chronic depression or bipolar disorder.  He’d pull down books from the shelf and copy down bits of the scripture.  He was also working out a philosophy of living.  “I never fail to doff my hat at Charles Jennens for putting that together”, says conductor and writer Jane Glover.  She has conducted “Messiah” over 100 times-most recently, this month at Trinity Church in New York City.  “The first part (of the opera) is the Christmas story.  The second part is the crucifixion.  But then also the resurrection.  And then part three is about redemption”.

In the 1720’s and ’30’s, Handel’s popular Italian-style operas had made him a musical megastar.  But in his 50’s, his popularity was waning.  So, when he was invited to stage a series of concerts in Dublin, he thought that was a way to restart his career.  He sits with this text he’d received from Charles Jennens and try to make something of it.  He was surely thinking “what am I gonna do? I’ve got a bunch of bible verses in the wrong order that I’m supposed to set to Italian opera music.  But he does it.  Handel wrote the three-hour piece for chorus, soloists and nine-piece orchestra in 24 days-260 pages of music!

“Messiah” was a huge hit in Dublin and, eventually, in London.  The song seems to offer a sense of hope and light at a time when both were in short supply.  “Messiah was born in the dark shadows of the enlightenment.  Britain was at war.  The infant mortality rate in London at that time was 75%.  “Messiah is a piece of art that is grappling with what possible basis for hope could there be when you have all this evidence around you to suggest otherwise”.  Just about everyone loved it….except Charles Jennens.  “He was worried Handel had done a cheap job.  He says “I am never gonna offer my words to Handel again to be so abused”.  Handel agreed to make some changes and Jennens softened.  In the end he wrote to a friend it was a “fine composition”.  “Messiah”, named for the American colonies in 1770, six years before this was even a country.  It was performed in Trinity church.  Over time, “Messiah” has changed in all kinds of different ways.  Handel’s 9-piece orchestra gave way to thunderous musical forces, various trends were implemented, and all sections were dropped.  In all its versions, Handel’s and Jennens’ masterpiece has offered the same message for nearly 300 years: that there is always hope.  “Every generation that has heard this thing has felt that this music is kinda a message in a bottle for them.  It’s a piece of music that does stuff to us.  Have the possibility of hope.  Problems are solvable.  The world is gonna be okay.  And then take that and put it into action”, says King.  (CBS Sunday Morning, 12-22-24).