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I hope you enjoy the programme.
Hello.
In 1742, in a secular Dublin music hall, the first audience heard Handel's Messiah, a sacred oratorio from its first word comfort, to the chorus of hallelujahs, to the last word, amen.
The librettist Charles Jennings had drawn from biblical texts prophecies about the coming of Jesus the Messiah, the Nativity, the suffering of Christ and his death, and the day of judgment and redemption for all.
Handel continued to adapt his Messiah for later performances and it proved to be one of his most popular works, becoming a favourite of massed choirs around the world far beyond the scale of Handel's original.
Well with me to discuss Handel's Messiah are Ruth Smith, trustee and council.
Member of the Handel Institute.
Larry Zazo, countertenor and senior lecturer in music at Newcastle University.
And Donald Burrows, emeritus professor of music at The Open University.
Donald, I'd like to start with you.
Handel was born in Halle in Brandenburg in 1685.
But he'd been based in London since around 1714.
What should we know about his life and reputation in London?
His reputation in London in the first place was as an opera composer.
He also carried with him experience from the previous years, trained as an organist in Haller.
He signed up for the University of Halle.
That only lasted a year.
He was off to Hamburg, to the Opera House.
He's then composing operas, playing from the harpsichord, leading the performances in Hamburg.
That's while the leading composer is away.
As soon as the composer comes back again, he's off to Italy.
There's no opera in Rome, but he does other things.
He does church music, and it's there he writes his first oratorios.
And he goes to Hanover where he is appointed Master of the Music at the court, but on the condition he makes that he can go elsewhere because he wants to carry on writing operas.
There's no opera in Hanover.
And it's at that point that he then comes to London.
He has to go back to his job in Hanover.
But then he comes back to London again and the Elector of Hanover is in the next in line to the British throne.
Which presumably was to Handel's advantage.
He foresaw this, to put it mildly there.
Apparently, Handel wrote this very quickly within the space of about three weeks or so.
Was that usual for him?
He was a fast, intense worker.
What we have with the autograph is a finished setting of the complete text.
He started that on the 22nd of August. finished it on the 13th of September or whatever.
It so happens that the 22nd of August is also a Saturday this year.
If you wanted to try it out...
Get a few quill pens, a couple of pints of black ink and 250 pages of music paper and see if you can write it out in that time.
It is very quick.
It is very quick, but it's the end of the process.
Composition has happened up to that point.
You don't just write the notes on paper.
A lot of thinking has gone into that.
And a lot of it's going on in his head of arias.
What singers?
Who's going to sing this one?
How's that going to go?
What's the mood?
Is it major or minor key?
Is it fast, is it slow?
And then of course, the business of actual musical themes, ideas that sometimes the words stimulate a particular melodic line.
And quite often because Handel's got a head full of tunes.
He reads some words and thinks hmm, I've got something for that.
And he riffles through his stuff and finds there's an old thing there somewhere that was just perfect for those words.
I think it's really important to mention the issue of borrowing.
I mean what we think of as being such genius and such unique, these great melodic hooks that we think are so original.
Messiah, in fact, handled borrowed from Italian duets.
So one of the famous choruses is...
For unto us a child is born.
And everybody has it in their head.
The original was an Italian duet which begins, No, di voi non vo' fidarmi.
That's why it begins with for, which is a little bit odd from an English standpoint, right?
It handles a German.
But because it comes from another duet, somehow that makes it more memorable to us, I think.
Donald.
Can you tell us exactly what an oratorio is?
Well, in simple terms, it's something you perform in an oratory.
That is to say, a separate building, not for the mass, not for church services, but for presentation of religious topics, which may be from scripture, it may be symbols of characters operating on humans, selfishness or time or that sort of thing, or it may be lives of the saints or something like that.
Opera and then oratorio came along together and they used the same musical forms.
So the transition from opera to oratorio in that case wasn't quite so difficult.
But of course, you need a librettist.
And Ruth Smith, I'd like to ask you about the librettist for Messiah, Charles Jennings.
What was his relationship with Handel like, both personally and professionally?
Jennings started writing librettos for Handel partly because he was a Handel addict.
Any words united with his music become sacred for me, he said, which is extraordinary given that Jennings was a devout Anglican.
He wrote librettos for nobody else and he certainly wasn't looking for fame, because he didn't sign any of them.
They were anonymous, which is why, right into the 19th and 20th centuries, there was some doubt whether this obscure country squire, could actually have put the text of Messiah together.
Or conversely, well, that was an easy job.
It's just scripture verses.
But Jennings wanted to foster Handel's career in every possible way.
He was very generous to Handel in all sorts of ways.
By the time he comes to do the libretto for Messiah, he's got a permanent subscription with Handel for copies of all Handel's music.
He's already acquired all Handel's published music with generous subscriptions.
Now he wants every note.
And he built up an unrivaled Handel collection.
I mean, it's still unrivaled, though now dispersed.
But at the time, it was unique.
So he was wealthy, committed to Handel.
But the Messiah as a libretto, it begins with the word comfort.
Why would that have a particular resonance for Jennings?
Jennings was depressive, lonely.
The times were out of joint for him.
He was concerned as many were many devout Anglicans were about the decline of religious faith in Britain.
He was politically out of joint with the Times.
Jennings believed in the divine right of kings.
The head of Charles I, the executed monarch, Stuart Monarch, was on his seal ring.
He was in a form of internal exile because you couldn't have any kind of public position and any kind of public profession within the military parliament, the church.
The university, unless you foreswore loyalty to the steward, which he wasn't prepared to do.
So he was lonely politically.
He was lonely socially for that reason, partly.
And then there was perhaps the worst thing of all and very much the background emotionally to Messiah, which was the way one of his brothers died his sole surviving brother.
When Jennings was 28 and his brother, Robert was studying for the bar at the Middle Temple, cut his throat and threw himself out of the window.
Now, of course, the suicide of one's brother would be a terrible thing for anybody, but it was particularly, I think, terrible for Jennings, because by taking his own life, Robert was cutting himself off from salvation after death.
Ask the majority of the population in Britain at that time, were they Christian?
They would say yes.
If you were Christian, you believed that there was judgment at death and then there was hell or heaven.
If you had taken your own life, there was hell.
So Jennings was saddled with this terrible recognition that probably his brother would be rotting in hell forever.
So it's no surprise that Messiah begins with the word comfort.
The second part of Messiah.
Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world, the whole world.
And finally, I know that my redeemer liveth is how the final part ends.
And all through, we are being told that all shall be saved.
And Handel, in a crucial chorus, repeats that.
Shall all, shall all be saved.
So there's a very personal reason, I think, underlying his libretto.
Larry Zazo, Handel composes Messiah in 1741, and we'll discuss the first performances in a minute.
But can you tell us about the singers available to Handel, the singers that Handel liked, and why that mattered to him so much?
He was mainly a composer of operas.
He wrote 42, depending on how you count.
42 operas basically two a year between the 20s and 1741, which is when he wrote his last opera.
And right when he was composing Messiah, he was at a bit of a crisis where he was writing something for Dublin.
He did not have access to his usual cohort of extremely versatile opera singers trained in Italy.
Some of them were castrati.
He did have one Italian singer, Avoglio, but he didn't really know who his other singers were.
Why didn't he have access to them at that time?
Well, the opera company closed down and they were terribly expensive and he couldn't afford to bring them over, even if he had them, Ruth.
And also there was a war on.
And there was a war.
Right.
Italian singers weren't that easy to get.
They weren't very keen to travel.
And so fees were even greater.
So they put their fees up even more.
There is some singer inflation even more than there is nowadays, I suppose.
I wish there was more inflation.
So he was he was in a situation where he has started to write some oratorios.
And it was remarked on a very famous quote, which is worth just quoting for very quickly.
Horace Walpole writes to Horace Mann, Handel has set up an oratorio against the operas and succeeds.
He's hired all the goddesses from farces and singers of roast beef.
That's such wonderful.
So who were these singers of roast beef?
What's a different type of singer?
These aren't singers of Italian opera.
These are singers of ballad opera.
So think beggars opera.
Think of the precursors of musicals, a different type of musical style, shorter musical phrases, less virtuosity, more limited vocal range.
And so I think Handel is writing, for he doesn't know whom, but perhaps a singer who's a slightly less trained a singer of English.
And a classic example of that who he didn't know he was going to have was Susanna Kibber.
Some of your listeners might be surprised.
I always thought it was Susanna Sibber.
But are we saying Susanna Kibber now?
So Susanna, born Susanna Arne to Thomas Arne, so born into a theatrical family, an acting impresario family.
She married the son of Collie Kibber, Theophilus Kibber, so she was the daughter-in-law of Collie.
Also a famous actor, impresario.
Thomas Arne had this rival, Drury Lane Company.
She turns up in Ireland.
She's an actress.
She's a tragedian.
She had a terrible, terrible background.
A really terrible husband.
Theophilus was a gambler.
He was a spendthrift.
He was abusive.
He basically pimped her out to an aristocrat called William Sloper.
There was a terrible trial in which all of the dirty laundry was aired.
So there was a huge scandal around that.
A huge scandal.
And she was terribly embarrassed.
But a good singer.
Well, Bernie said that she had a voice like a thread.
So think of someone who could sing in a very declamatory style, very simply, but with incredible pathos and incredible emotion.
Can we confirm or otherwise that you sang the same part as Susanna Kibber?
I did indeed, yes.
And I also sang the same part as Gaetano Guadagni, who was the castrato who sang in 1750.
So you have that virtuosity of the Italian castrato and this wonderful simplicity of Susanna's.
Kibber, it is done by countertenors, but all of that music is equally done beautifully by mezzo-sopranos, I must say.
Donald before we get into the work itself.
As far as I understand, before he wrote Messiah, he was laid low by some serious health problems, including cancer.
A very serious stroke.
I don't think at this stage that was a really serious question.
He seems to have recovered very quickly from the 1737 stroke or whatever it was.
He goes abroad for a time.
He comes back.
He writes the funeral anthem for the Queen in no time at all.
He's back in business.
When you get to his later years he then starts to have health problems that interfere with his work more, and of course his eyesight also goes a little.
But I think really he's back springing to life in the Messiah period.
And before he wrote Messiah, what are the works which lead up to Messiah, as it were?
Earlier in 1741, he'd done his last Italian opera in London.
After that, there were no more Italian operas.
So leading up to 1741, he had been doing opera and oratorio within the theatre seasons.
There comes a time, early in 1741, he didn't really get on with the management at the King's Theatre, which was the Grand Opera House.
He'd gone to Covent Garden, the new theatre, and for a number of years John Rich thought aha, we will do plays and Handel can do some oratorios and operas.
After a few years he found he couldn't really quite afford it.
He didn't have the same resources as the King's Theatre.
So what had happened was he said to Handel you can have my secondary theatre at Lincoln's in Fields.
It's cheaper.
But I think he thought by the end of that I'm not going to be going back to the King's Theatre castrati are so difficult to find these days.
It was the perfect moment when he had this invitation to go to dublin to get out.
Well ruth, let me ask you about dublin.
First of all.
Was everyone surprised that messiah was premiered there?
No, because Handel's music was already known and liked and that was a very good reason for going there.
Handel had a very good friend in the form of the first violinist at the Lord Lieutenant's Orchestra, and the fact that his music was known there was one reason why he might feel confident that he could premiere an oratorio there.
There were two cathedrals with professional choirs and, as anybody who's sung in the choruses of messiah knows, the choruses are not easy, so certainly having professional choirs would be useful.
Dublin had built a new concert hall, neutral ground, neither a theatre where the sacred word might, as turned out to be the case, be objected to.
It was a good concert hall.
It had a good capacity.
There was nothing like that in London.
And also Dublin, like London in fact, had a very strong ethos of philanthropy, which was very much needed because there had been a terrible famine, one of the many Irish famines in Dublin.
And it was said that the Lord Lieutenant felt that it was time that there should be some uplifting public entertainment.
Well, what better than Messiah?
And a very good opportunity to raise money for charitable causes, which it successfully did.
And I think if Handel had been really canny he would have realized this was the way forward for Messiah, not to do it for profit.
Though Jennings himself had said that he hoped that Handel would perform it as a one-off for his own benefit, for his own profit.
But this performance in Dublin for charity absolutely won everybody over, as well, of course, as the quality of the music and the pathos of Mrs Kibber's singing.
Absolutely.
The dress rehearsal was so crowded that the newspaper advertisements for the actual premiere asked the ladies to come without hoops in their dresses and the gentlemen without swords, so that there would be more space for the charitably inclined.
Well, there were rave reviews, one of which said...
Words are wanting to express the exquisite delight it afforded to the admiring, crowded audience.
The sublime, the grand and the tender, adapted to the most elevated and moving words, conspired to transport and charm the ravished heart and ear.
Quite a review.
Larry, have you had reviews like that?
I should point out that you've performed in Messiah on many, many occasions.
Once I was called subtle in my wife's lap.
But I have performed it many times.
It's such a unique piece.
And talking about its place in history and its place in Handel's career, I think going back to what Donald was saying and where Handel was when he was composing the Messiah.
If Handel had his druthers, I think, he was a man of the stage.
He loved operas.
And if he could have, if it could have found a way for it to be profitable, he would have continued happily, I think, writing operas.
So he went to Oratorio not because he was having some sort of spiritual...
He was a spiritual man.
He was a devout.
He went to St.
George's Hanover every week, from what I understand.
However, it was simply a financial issue for him.
And the financial and the artistic are always very close for Handel.
And it simply was the case and, if anyone's interested, Alan Harris has done some wonderful work with the Bank of England and she discovered that by 1739 Handel had withdrawn his last 50 pounds from his cash account and put no more money in his bank account until 1743.
I wondered about this because I noticed that he managed to buy a house in Brook Street in Mayfair in the 1720s.
With respect, he didn't buy the house in Mayfair.
He rented it.
He never bought it.
And as for him being broke...
This is a myth about why he had to go to Dublin with creditors snapping at his heels.
And yes, putting on a whole season of performances, which is the way one did it then walk-up tickets hadn't really been invented yet was very expensive.
So between £12,000 and £16,000, that's a lot.
However, Handel had an annuity from the Crown of £600 a year, which we should multiply by £200.
So he's got £120,000 a year coming in.
However, that is not nearly enough. to have in reserve for a whole opera season so yes he was subsidizing his own opera seasons however by the time he retired and largely only through oratorio he was a multi-millionaire so his oratorio seasons were very very profitable but it really was an accident i think Okay, we're trying to get a sense of why it grips the audience as much as it does.
Why is Messiah different from so many other oratorios?
It's just unlike anything.
Well that's, why is it unlike anything?
I think one of the things is that, whereas with the operas and most oratorios you've got settings of metrical verse, rhymed verse and such like, What's happening with this is you have the different rhythms from the prayer book and from the Psalms, which means that you've got a particular flow to the English language which is not like other things which have been written by poets, shall we say.
So there is something that people recognise about the working of the English language, about religious texts, and Handel has this knack of getting just the right way of setting it to music.
You know, to get the music to fit the mood and the sense of the words.
Ruth?
Picking up on what Donald has said...
Over 60 of the verses that Jennings uses from the Bible are from the Old Testament, much richer in imagery than the New Testament.
And Handel was a genius at evoking emotion through his setting of imagery.
And so much of the imagery in Messiah is active, a potter's vessel being smashed, a refiner's fire.
This isn't pictorial, just it's energetic imagery.
And often Handel also makes us think by giving musical variety to his depiction of a single image.
So at the beginning we have the contrast of darkness and light.
Those that walked in darkness have seen a great light.
But we get it twice over in the words and Handel varies it.
One is melodic, the other is harmonic.
I'm interested that you and Donald both talk about the text and imagery.
Larry, what about the music?
Well, the music, and I've thought about this a lot, why is the Messiah so different?
And as a performer I could say there's no other piece of Handel or any other piece for that matter in which I feel like I have such a connection with the audience.
And, unlike an opera where a character is feeling an emotion and the audience is passively kind of observing that, maybe sympathetically feeling what I'm feeling in this piece and if I just go through my own bits, I'm questioning the audience.
But who may abide?
If God be for us, who shall be against us?
O death, where is thy sting?
A statement, I know that my Redeemer liveth.
Ask in the audience to do something.
Arise, get thee up into the high mountains.
Lift up thy voice.
The trumpet shall sound.
Predicting, the trumpet shall sound.
Behold, a virgin shall conceive.
So it's very active engagement with the audience that almost demands a response from them.
But I'm interested, you're also talking about the text.
I'm really interested in why the music speaks to us as well.
Is it because of the fusion between the text and the music?
I mean, is this one of his best works musically or is it?
Maybe it's one of his richest musically.
Don would be able to correct me on this.
But unlike the operas and unlike a lot of the other oratorios, there's very little recitative plain, simple music.
So it's very rich in arias and even richer in choruses.
And also, it's quite concise, I think, in the individual numbers.
So we're getting huge variety all the time.
And one thing that Jennings understood.
Sorry, this is back to the words, but it's back to the structure that Handel is actually dealing with.
Jennings understood that one of Handel's main compositional methods was progression by contrast.
And that is all the way through Messiah.
It may be a micro-contrast, as in a single number, as in, for example, he was despised where the outer sections as is normal in a Baroque aria are based on the same music and the inner section is contrasting.
It is a big contrast.
So deep pathos followed by outrage and anger at what has happened to Christ.
Or it could be a really major transition contrast, as in, for example, the end of part two, the beginning of part three.
We go from the grandeur of Christ's dominance and triumph over the whole created universe.
In the Hallelujah Chorus drums, trumpets and so on, the whole chorus.
And then we come down to, I know that my Redeemer liveth, the voice of the single individual.
And not only the single individual, but the worms in the body of the individual also.
So, Jennings absolutely understood this gift of Handel's for making contrasts.
And yes, it is the words as well as the music.
One almost has the sense the whole universe is there in this piece somehow, without being…
It has everything.
It has the beginning, the end, the suffering individual, the community.
It's uplifting.
You go through a whole range of emotions, as I certainly do as a performer and as a listener.
There is something about the choruses, which are so—every single line in the choruses— are very, very singable, almost in a soloistic sense.
And there's something about it which makes people want to get up on their feet.
There's something about it which leads to these huge scratch messiahs, which is the Royal Albert Hall being filled with people with their dog-eared scores, singing along to the choruses.
I think the choruses are so incredibly strong.
It's a very communal work and it's a very generous work.
I'm sorry, this is again the text, but the music bears it out.
Larry, my favourite bit, and really not the bits I sing, but it is All.
We Like Sheep Have Gone Astray.
And it's an example to me of how Handel is thinking dramatically, but in a different way, not in the sense of an opera or in the sense of a story.
So all we like sheep have gone astray.
And there's these lines that kind of go nowhere.
We have to...
And I just smile when I hear it.
And you hear this frail humanity.
But then, right when you least expect it, boom, F minor.
And all of a sudden...
It crashes in in the middle of these people.
These stray sheep.
And it's so human and so sublime at the same time.
And this is what I think is the most wonderful thing about Messiah and Handel in general.
The very human and the very sublime right next to each other.
Ruth, you wanted to come in there, but you've already mentioned Jennings' spiritual dilemma and his depression.
What are the sort of political and religious sensibilities in London around the time of the Messiah?
I think Messiah can be understood, certainly from Jennings' point of view, as a response to, as the poet John Donne put it, the new philosophy puts all in doubt.
Religious certainties, religious beliefs had been torpedoed from at least three directions.
One is that God had been depersonalized.
Isaac Newton had shown that the universe was not presided over by a god who notices everything we do, but a clockmaker who, operating by the laws of mathematics, who had wound it up remote, transcendental.
So how could such a big God be interested in me or you individuals, or in how we lead our lives and therefore how we get saved after death?
Then there was, I suppose one could call it, a new respect for humanitarian morality.
Measured against which?
How did we think of the God of the Old Testament who, after all, was also the God of the New Testament, this partial, unjust God who encouraged a rabble tribe coming out of Egypt, probably with pagan views in their spiritual makeup, wandering around in the desert?
This was not a good father figure.
And then there was actual biblical scholarship which was showing that the Bible was not, after all, directly dictated by God to one person to write down.
It was the work of many different hands.
It had inconsistencies.
If it was actually human work, why believe it?
What status did it have?
So it was very easy to find grounds for scepticism.
Religion was the main subject of publishing.
Most people went to church.
The sermon was the main public address system.
So balancing these views was quite difficult for people.
And there was great concern.
I mean, if you look at what's actually published at the time.
Religious doubt is as worrying to the writers as say, climate change or terrorism now, and it got at least as many column inches.
Well Larry, that brings me on to something else, which is that the Messiah was almost seen as too sacred by some and not sacred enough by others.
Absolutely.
How did Handel manage that balancing act?
Absolutely.
I think it's always been viewed that way and still is to some extent.
Really interesting.
One of the original reviews.
Someone kind of wrote into the newspaper and said what a profanation of God's name and word is this?
David said, how can we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?
But sure he would have thought it much stranger to have heard it sung in a playhouse.
So the context where it was performed really incensed people of Christian faith.
I'm going to fast forward and I'm going to talk a little bit maybe, about the soulful celebration, the Quincy Jones, Mervyn Warren version.
You better contextualize.
I will contextualize it in that.
Mervyn Warren had said that they were going to do a version of The Trumpets Shall Sound with Dizzy Gillespie and Wynton Marsalis.
One of the great what-ifs of history would have been if that happened.
And Wynton Marsalis said, I don't want to do this because I don't want to desecrate the Messiah.
So it was very interesting, even from someone from a jazz tradition.
The Messiah is seen in so many ways as this great, sacred cow.
It is unique in Handel's oeuvre in the sense that it is all sacred words, right?
It is not just an opera manquet.
It's not just a Bible story.
Ruth Stone.
Well, no, actually, just to modify that a bit.
Yes, of course Messiah is unique in all sorts of ways, but it did have a predecessor in Handel's output.
When Jennings is writing about sending Handel the libretto of Messiah and Handel decides he won't do it for the time being because he wants something of a gayer turn.
Jennings describes it as another scripture collection.
And one reason that Handel didn't pick it up maybe was that their previous scripture collection had actually bombed.
And that was Israel in Egypt, which Handel had done two years previously and had only managed three performances.
That's all biblical text.
But Messiah includes New Testament text.
And I think that made a great difference in 18th century England.
New Testament text was more sacred than Old Testament text.
And I think that's the wonderful quotation that Larry just read us about desecrating God's word.
Jennings was very careful to minimize actual words of Christ and actual words naming of christ, but it is in there and of course people would have recognized it.
So donald, is there a particular event where the church appears to approve of messiah, having been a little skeptical before about it appearing in theaters?
I think that there are various aspects to this.
One is, of course, the big criticism of Messiah, which is always quoted was one newspaper article.
We don't know how representative that was.
It could have just been one reader.
It could just have been one.
I mean, it's a very eloquent statement of the theatre is not the right place to do this.
And actually, Handel had made it worse, or someone.
At the top of the score, he writes Messiah and Oratorio.
Unlike some other ones in the predecessors, you often have an Oratorio or sacred drama.
He doesn't do that.
It's just Messiah and Oratorio. leaving certain things a little bit vague.
And what's worse is that in the newspaper they thought well, or whoever put the advert in the newspaper, the very first London performances.
They thought Messiah, that's a bit dodgy.
So there will be performed a new sacred oratorio.
But that was worse.
Right.
And that's what got the attacks on it, really.
But we don't know really how representative the attacks were.
First of all, because Handel then did two more performances.
He didn't cancel Messiah after the first one.
He finished the season giving two more performances.
That's sort of one aspect to that.
And then the other was that there was this question about the bishops.
There's a little hint in there about it was not approved by the bishops or whatever.
It may be that it had gone to the inspector of stage plays.
The censor, effectively.
The censor.
And something had happened there.
But when we get to later on and it's performed at the founding hospital, someone writes in his diary oh, and there were bishops there.
So the hearing of oratorio may sometime be thought of as orthodox.
So the whole question of the church's attitude.
This seems to be a few clergy, one sector of the London audience.
But it didn't stop Handel doing it.
He treated it in his programmes just like any other work.
He didn't actually do the same work every year.
But if you look at what happens, he didn't stay away from it as if it was something that was too much trouble.
Ruth, you mentioned that initially when Jennings sent his libretto that Handel wanted to do something gayer, I think was how he described it.
Was he then convinced by the libretto when he started studying it?
Did he realise that this was the basis of something great?
I think the proof of the pudding, you know, since it became his most famous work.
Yes.
I mean, do we think he did it justice?
Yes, we do.
Not everybody did.
In fact, Jennings was a bit cross about some of it.
We don't know precisely what.
He did say that he objected to the overture.
We don't know why.
And in fact, the overture is a stroke of genius. in the whole scheme, harmonic scheme.
But Handel came back to it again and again, and I don't think that was just a financial thing.
It was an artistic issue that he came back at it again and again, presumably.
Artistic and pragmatic nearly always go together.
I mean you could say that with works that actually failed when he first did them and he came back to as is said about one of his late operas that he kept working at having to put on one side, coming back to why, in the end especially as it's not very popular now did he come back to it?
We might work out that he really had a fondness for some of it.
But, I mean, Don can tell us about how many different versions handled it.
He must have been interested in this work to keep redoing it in different forms.
We've spoken about the singers, but what about the orchestra?
What about the orchestration of this piece, which he kept revising?
I think there's a little prelude to that.
I mean, I think that the situation was once Messiah was established it got a regular slot in Handel's program.
He performed oratorios during the Lenten period.
And Messiah was always the last one before Easter.
It had a particular place in the programme.
Which was what Jennings intended, if I may interrupt.
I mean Jennings specifically said this was for Handel to perform in Passion Tide and he always did.
Larry, nowadays we associate... handles Messiah more with Christmas.
In fact, I think it vies with Maria Carey for being the most played piece over the Christmas period.
What's the connection with Christmas?
I'm trying to remember, Donald, can you tell us when it started to become associated with Christmas?
Dublin.
Oh, Dublin.
Dublin.
Are you from the beginning?
Not quite.
After Handel had gone back to London, the person we referred to earlier, Matthew Duborg the violinist.
He lived sort of half the year in London and half the year in Dublin.
And he was taking over charity performances.
There were three...
And in fact, what happened was that for the relief of debtors, that charity, they regularly performed Messiah in December.
That is how it became associated first with that season.
But obviously there were things in it that elsewhere people also, yeah, good idea.
You know, it was taken up elsewhere.
And I think certainly the first part of Messiah is kind of the Christmassy part, which is why it's become you know, it's the shepherds.
There's very comforting pastoral music, and that's the kind of favorite first part.
So for many people it's become a Christmas piece and kind of a bit of pablum that you can kind of just enjoy and joy and Christmas.
But in fact, as we know, parts two and three, there's an apocalyptic bit at the end.
And there's a message in the Messiah, which is potentially very unsettling and very provocative.
It is the crooked being made straight.
You're comforting people who are in pain, your communities.
And this can become a message to certain communities of liberation and of comfort and peace.
Comforting my people.
And you go out and do the comforting, not not feel comfortable right, comfort you, my people Isaiah, you comfort my people.
Don't feel comfortable.
So it's not a comfortable piece, it is a call to bring comfort to others.
Ruth, this is such a generous work and it doesn't exclude people by being very focused on doctrine.
You know, the difficult issue of the Trinity isn't there.
Hell isn't there.
The threatening parts of Christianity aren't there.
There's no villain, is there, really?
There's no villain.
There's no Satan.
I was going to say, does the devil pop up?
He doesn't really, does he?
No, he popped up in Handel's first oratorio about salvation by Christ, which was La Resurrezione in Italy.
And this is a point perhaps to mention that, whereas most people would have found Messiah unique and unprecedented, it wouldn't have been for Jennings, because he knew that Handel had composed an oratorio about salvation through Christ for the Catholic community of Italy, that he had composed a passion oratorio for his own home Lutheran community in Germany.
And now Jennings would have thought surely it's time that the greatest composer on earth composed an oratorio about salvation for us all, for the Anglican community of England.
And Ruth.
To finish up, can you tell me, do you think it's ultimately redemptive A and B?
What is its lasting appeal?
Because it's a remarkable piece of work.
I think if you're Christian, it's redemptive.
But it's interesting that people who aren't Christian find it uplifting and Warming encouraging joyful, which maybe answers.
Well, but why?
I mean, the interesting part of that question.
Yes.
I mean it continues to be welcomed by people all over the world, people in countries which are not Christian at all.
Far flung.
Jennings would be so pleased that their word has gone forth unto the ends of the world.
The propagation of the gospel is one of the quote evidences of Christianity which Jennings is careful to include.
And look, it's happened with Messiah.
It all fits so neatly.
The question, I suppose, can be put in terms of.
How was Jennings composing his libretto?
To match Handel's strengths as a composer, to make Handel right at the top of his game?
And, you know, we could talk for an hour at least just about that.
But I think one way in which it succeeds is that it's not a narrative.
It's not a story.
It's not the life of Christ.
It's a statement of faith.
And it's very elusive because it uses the Old Testament a lot rather than the gospel narrative.
So the suffering servant prophet in the Old Testament is used for the elusive account of Christ's career.
But this leaves it so open for Handel to write emotive music for all the strong emotional directives in the work you know.
Rejoice, he was despised.
These are as much emotional statements or directives as they are statements of faith.
Larry?
And I think finally, I just wanted to say, Right as we're recording this, these messages of your warfare is accomplished.
Why do the nations so furiously rage together?
There's always something in the Messiah which you can connect to contemporary events.
My thanks to Ruth Smith, Donald Burrows and Larry Zazzo.
Next week, mathematics and the impossible perspectives of M.C.
Escher.
Thank you for listening.
And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now, with a few minutes of bonus material from Misha and his guests.
Now we're talking on our podcast bit now, where we can all start complaining about the bits we missed out.
Donald?
Well, no, just to pick that up.
I mean, there is a tease about this.
There's no certainty that anything in Messiah was written for Mrs. Stibber.
Absolutely.
If you go back to the time it's written, we don't know what Handel was thinking about his future.
But I think we know he was writing for a less skilled singer.
No, I don't think so.
Because he didn't know what he was going to get.
I don't think so.
It sort of doesn't make sense. because here's him probably saying, hmm, not opera, perhaps.
I'm going somewhere else.
But he writes Messiah first, which is...
For four voices, it looks as if he's not thinking of any particular singer.
And what's really odd about it is it's a very mobile work because it's just strings, trumpets and drums.
The normal cues for oboes to take part...
The larger thing, you don't need a separate slave for oboes.
The normal thing that he does in operas and oratorios is in some places he writes senza oboe and then tutti forte.
There's none of that in Messiah.
He doesn't register anything apart from the strings.
And this looks like this is a, as it were, mobile work that you can take anywhere.
But then the whole argument is then screwed up because after it he writes Samson.
Now Samson is a London work writer that needs London-type soloists and heaven help us, it's got trombones in the orchestra.
You know, you won't find them in Dublin.
And he wrote that second, you know, so what on earth was he thinking during that summer period?
But when he was writing these works, is he thinking Dublin, London?
Well, I've got something for both.
Because in the seasons after this, when he's regularly in London, we have a pattern which is what we get in 1941 is that he uses the summer-autumn to write two new works for the next season.
That's what he's done.
They're just very different from each other.
I mean what obviously made sense in the 1740s.
You talk about August-September.
You're living in Brook Street.
The streets are quiet because everyone's off at their country houses.
You know, you can have a quiet time.
You can concentrate on writing the music.
That pattern is there with 1741, but it doesn't quite make sense because half of it looks like.
This is something I might take.
Had he had the invitation to Dublin at that stage...
This is where I think Matthew Duporg, the violinist... He's the violinist in Dublin.
..who lives half the time in London and half the time in Dublin.
He has to go to Dublin because he's master of the state music, so he has to write the ode for the king's birthday.
That's done at Dublin Castle.
So he's there basically during late autumn, winter, but he's in London for other times of the year.
And it almost certainly seems to me that he must have had these conversations with Handel about Dublin.
And it's a different set-up, because what does Handel say about the venue?
The music sounds great in this charming room.
It isn't a theatre.
You know, it's a completely different sort of ambience of a concert hall.
That's what he finds when he gets there.
How much did he know about it in the first place?
You know, what was he thinking?
When he was writing Messiah, it's very difficult.
It may be worth saying that we are stymied in some of our conjectures about Handel and that we have hardly any letters from him compared with say, Mozart.
I think we have fewer than 50 letters.
Do we know why that is?
Is that because he just didn't write that many?
Perhaps they weren't kept or whatever.
Better things to do.
As it happens, what we have is two excellent letters to Jones.
Yes, once he's there.
But we don't have anything saying I've decided to go to Dublin on the X of X because I've got these two works.
It's worth saying that, following on from what Don's saying about him having two completely different works on the stocks and then he takes Messiah to Dublin, we should remember that, As we've already said, he does two complete concert seasons, two times six works, before he does Messiah.
And Messiah could have been a speculative thing.
I know I've tried and tested these other works.
Let's see how they go down in the concert series.
If they go really well, I'll do Messiah as a standalone thing, which is what happens.
But you know, had there been trouble about getting sufficient choir and so on, he would already have done these other works and could then go home much richer than when he came to Ireland.
And I think it's worth saying, going back to this question, why is Messiah so popular?
There's a practical reason.
Handel had at least 10 versions of Messiah.
I was going to say, when did that happen?
Almost immediately he was out.
Well, I suppose year on year, right?
Well, no, I mean, he has to first of all adapt to this business of having Cathedral Choir singers.
Of different spaces and different, So that therefore, Thou Shalt Break Them turns into a recitative, because he doesn't have a good enough singer to do that.
So some of them are practical.
Some of them are stimulated by a new singer.
You can't go too far with this because the overall shape of the work doesn't change.
You know, what he's doing is slotting in different things in different places.
There's one area which does go different, how beautiful are the feet, which is very complicated because as done by... jennings in the libretto it's how beautiful are the feet of them referring back to the chorus because it's referring to the company of the preachers you know going out how beautiful are the feet of them and i think in dublin someone said to him you know that bit of isaiah you could use how beautiful are the feet of him to refer to Messiah.
And so what he does in Dublin is to set a subtly different text, how beautiful are the feet of him.
And I think that's one of the things that Jennings doesn't like.
He said, that's not what I meant.
I mean, Handel, I think, was a very practical composer.
He was always responding to the singers he had, to the forces he had.
I've done Messiah at least over 100 performances, and I don't think I've ever done it in exactly the same version.
Every conductor... especially in part three, how long or not to make it.
You can make it shorter, you can make it longer, depending on the singers you have and what you like about certain movements.
There's certain movements that were written for soprano, but also were performed for alto.
I've done a two-alto version of He Shall Feed His Flock, which is very, very beautiful but very rare.
And that adaptability also in terms of forces, and we didn't really talk about the 19th century where you had these mega messiahs, messiahs on steroids. with hundreds in the choir.
And they got bigger and bigger and bigger.
And then with the historical performance movement, we've done it with very small forces.
I've done it both ways, and it's exciting in both ways.
It's sublime in both cases.
You also mentioned...
The winter Marsalis saying that he didn't want to desecrate the work.
And you briefly referred to the Quincy Jones soulful celebration.
I listened to that in preparation for the promo.
I have to say.
It's a spectacular piece of work because there seems to be a communality between what Handel was trying to do and the tradition of gospel in particular, but also preaching.
I think let's go back to comfort, right?
This is a message of comfort to a community, a formerly enslaved community.
We're talking about the Israelites here.
And this is a very powerful message to communities of color, especially formerly enslaved communities.
And interesting thing, Mervyn Warren said who was one of the main arrangements.
He said we hear Messiah and it's lofty and regal and elegant, but Handel was scorned in his day.
That's really interesting.
And we think of Handel as being this absolute rock star, but he did have some pretty rocky stages in his career and right when he was composing messiah was potentially one of his very low points, and that's, and certainly in the mythology about handle, it becomes absolutely, as you say, rock bottom for handle and you know he's, he's ill Wrong.
He's broke.
And, you know, he goes without food for the three weeks that he's composing it.
You know, that's the myth.
And it's very attractive.
Because I read the Stefan Zweig.
There you go.
That's exactly the source.
Yeah.
And that was, he was ill, he was broke, the people were chasing him at the door for his debts.
But that narrative is very powerful for people, isn't it?
Yeah, it is.
But also I think that if people don't know the work, you get this myth that it might end with the Hallelujah Chorus.
It's true.
It doesn't.
And in many ways, in terms of composition, the best arias are in part three.
Well, certainly I know that my redeemer live if you're missing out on something.
And also if God be for us, which often is if you look at the actual musical composition.
What he's writing is an extremely good piece.
He actually takes, as it were.
Well actually, both of those are interesting because, whereas the operatic Da Carpo Aria A B, you know, as he's working from biblical texts
The two big arias there are three-verse texts.
They're in three sections.
And everyone moves on from the previous verse.
You know, that's something I think that doesn't happen in any of the other arias.
There's something...
Something different.
But on the Hallelujah Chorus.
Presumably the reason why that has become so popular is it's a big old sing-along.
And, you know, people do feel uplifted by that communal experience.
Perhaps it's worth going in here that the flash mob Hallelujah Choruses.
Do we know what flash mob choruses are?
Flash mobs are choruses that appear apparently spontaneously in big squares.
But there are hundreds of iPhones filming the whole thing.
So if you look on YouTube at flash mob hallelujah choruses and count up the number of views that the main ones have had, it comes to over 70 million, which is more than the population of Britain.
Time for a cup of tea.
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