If you know anything or nothing about Handel, chances are you will still know a certain chorus. It has a catchy tune and the words are easy: “Hallelujah Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!” (Repeat). Long before the Leonard Cohen ditty, there was this Hanoverian hit, which if they were making Now That’s What I Call Musicke! would have made the cut every year from the 1750s to the 1950s.
The Hallelujah Chorus comes from Messiah, George Frideric Handel’s 1742 oratorio. After Handel’s death it was the piece that kept its composer clutched in the bosom of British musical life while the majority of his work was forgotten. On the scrapheap went all his operas — now reclaimed as masterpieces that were wasted first time round on the easily distracted, scrofulous and syphilitic Georgians.
Messiah marched on, however. The Victorians gave the oratorio performances that were plus-size in every way. It’s believed that the Crystal Palace rendition of 1885, which celebrated the bicentenary of Handel’s birth, broke records for number of bodies, with a choir of 4,000, an orchestra of 500 and almost 90,000 audience members; up to the levels of a stadium performance by Rihanna. These Crystal Palace spectaculars also deployed what George Grove (of Grove Dictionary fame) believed was the biggest drum ever made. He thought it was a bit naff.
As Jonathan Keates argues in this slim book, Messiah, these displays of Protestant pomp almost suffocated the piece. Keates contends that these mammoth Messiahs became vehicles for “moral smugness and self-satisfaction”. He quotes a withering George Bernard Shaw — not immune to a bit of self-satisfaction himself — on how little Britain’s music audiences knew about the real Handel even while they lined up to bawl Messiah. “We know rather less about him than they do in the Andaman Islands,” he sniffed. “Since the Andamans are only unconscious of him, whereas we are misconscious.”
In fact, the more we know about Handel, the more reassured we ought to be that he would have been unfazed by the changing fashions of Messiah interpretations. The German-born composer knew that his target audience sometimes tended to cruder tastes. “What the English like is something they can beat time to, something that hits them straight on the drum of the ear,” he said, not a million miles away from Thomas Beecham’s quip that “the English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes”. (Beecham fell into the camp who reckoned that Messiah needed to be tarted up, arguing that fidelity to the score would satisfy only “drowsy armchair purists”.)
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However you like to hear your Messiah, you should enjoy it more for reading Keates’s lucid guide, guaranteed to turn the misconscious to conscious with a minimum of fuss. Keates guides us through the Messiah’s gestation (a three-week sprint while Handel convalesced in Derbyshire), its first performances in Dublin, the work’s tentative landing in London and finally its rise to British cultural icon. His analysis is taut and his narrative skilfully concise.
“The performance had a choir of 4,000. George Grove thought it a bit naff
His story contains no blinding revelations, but what it reaffirms most strongly is Handel’s daring. Familiarity, Keates argues, shouldn’t blind us to Messiah as “an audacious experiment”, a work with no real precedent. While there was a (largely Catholic) tradition of biblical oratorio, nothing like Messiah, which offered a commentary on the Nativity and the Passion without named characters and based on texts from the Old and New Testament, existed for Handel to draw on. Most of all it gave the chorus the starring role, embodying, as Keates wrote, “how a community stands in relation to God and what it deserves at his hands”.
The piece brought together Handel’s craft and magpie-like skills of collage with a remarkable co-creator, Charles Jennens, who assembled the libretto (it’s included in the appendix). Jennens was a committed “non-juror”; in other words, someone who refused to accept the legitimacy of the Hanoverian succession over the Stuart line and was therefore denied a full role in public life. His influence on Handel had already been brought to bear in the biblical oratorios Belshazzar and Saul, which warn against the usurping of a rightful heir.
Keates reveals his spiritual influence on Messiah by examining how Jennens, an ardent Protestant, focused his texts through the filter of “a belief system based on the concept of mystery and revelation” — a counterblast to the prevailing trend for reason in an age of scientific discovery. Sometimes Jennens felt let down by Handel’s response to his lofty ideals. He wanted the composer to “retouch” the piece after its Dublin premiere — which is a bit like asking Michelangelo to repaint some of the Sistine Chapel — and when Handel had a stroke midway through a poorly received London run of Messiah, Jennens’s response was not exactly Christian: “At least he shall suffer for his negligence.” Jennens would later, reluctantly, conclude of his colleague: “I must take him as I find him.”
Perhaps here something had finally rubbed off on Jennens of Handel’s own attitude: pragmatic rather than idealistic. Messiah was drafted and redrafted according to the tools at hand. In Dublin that included a disgraced theatre star, Susannah Cibber, who had fled London after a scandalous court case (her impresario husband was suing one of her lovers). She was about as far from the world of Handel’s usual vocal stars as Amanda Holden is from Kiri te Kanawa, or, as one commentator put it, “her voice was a thread and her knowledge of music very inconsiderable”. Yet Handel admired her expressive abilities and carefully adjusted the vocal lines for her part. Later he would add virtuosic flights of operatic fancy for a London revival with the castrato Gaetano Guadagni.
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As London got the Messiah bug and the piece took off, Handel took the oratorio in another direction; he made it a charitable fundraiser. In 1750 he laid on a performance at the Foundling Hospital and would stage the piece annually there until his death in 1759. These performances raised more than a million pounds in today’s money. Handel, who didn’t have children, also left the hospital a score and parts to Messiah in his will. History doesn’t relate how the hospital staff reacted, but with a million in the bank and a masterpiece in the vault it was probably not far from “Hallelujah”.
Messiah: The Composition and Afterlife of Handel’s Masterpiece by Jonathan Keates, Head of Zeus, 224pp; £16.99
