San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Doityourself ‘ Messiah’ is better than it sounds
Because it’s December, and because some seasonal habits struggle on even during the age of COVID, there was a little performance of Handel’s “Messiah” at my house last week. It didn’t go very well.
The tempos were ragged. There was no dynamic nuance at all. Some of the best movements of the oratorio were simply omitted. The singing, to be blunt, was perfectly horrendous.
But I had a wonderful time. Of course, I was the only performer in sight.
Yes, it was karaoke Christmas at the homestead, except with Handel on the box instead of Mariah Carey. No one was available to do “Messiah” for my benefit, and although I could have thrown on a CD — you can throw on a CD — I decided to investigate the possibilities of DIY holiday music instead.
So, with a little help from Google, I located a webpage full of MP3s that needed only my raspy, tenuous contributions to make them complete. Then I leaped right in with “And the glory, the glory of the Lord” ( the first choral movement of “Messiah,” because not even I could stand to hear myself butcher the solo arias).
What unfolded over the rest of the afternoon was an unusual, and often educational, view of familiar material. I have heard “Messiah” countless dozens of times over the years, in all sorts of versions: grandiose, slimmeddown, historically fussy, downright amateurish.
Singing it yourself, though, is another matter. Being inside the workings of Handel’s marvelously intricate choral writing is like trying to operate a single cog within a large, whirring machine. You become less concerned with the overall outcome and more caught up with matters of detail.
That in turn has the potential to put a brisk new spin on things. In “Messiah,” passages I’d always thought were fairly straightforward turned out to be surprisingly challenging to get right; others moved along without a hitch, only to help create musical effects that I knew as an audience member were dazzling.
This wasn’t new information, exactly, but it also wasn’t anything I’d experienced quite so directly before. Singing of any kind, choral or otherwise, has always been offlimits for me — at least in the presence of other humans — because I’m so utterly terrible at it.
The hopelessness of the situation was brought home to me many years ago, when I wrote a story for The Chronicle about the tradition of the “Singalong Messiah.” For ordinary music lovers, this is a delightful way to roll up your sleeves and get into the nuts and bolts of the score, with the amateurs doing the choral parts and professionals taking care of the solos. I had hoped that in that situation even a duffer like myself could partake, especially with journalism as a cover.
Unfortunately, it turned out that my fellow amateurs had certain minimal standards, and no one wanted to be within earshot of my toneless yowling. I caught a few dirty looks during the first half; after intermission, a notable number of the other basses had maneuvered their way to the opposite end of the row, as if I’d neglected to shower.
I couldn’t really blame them. But when it’s just me ( and the door is closed), I can afford to be a little more indulgent. I’m sure the sounds I made while blasting out “All we like sheep” or the “Hallelujah” Chorus must have been awful, but I was enjoying myself too much to listen.
There’s a moral in all this, or at least a seasonal homily. We love music because it sounds beautiful, or exciting, or dramatic or serene — and we experience those qualities all the more keenly when music is rendered with eloquence and skill.
But there are active rewards in it, too, even for those of us civilians without the expertise to sing or play music well. However crudely we may bang on a piano, however haplessly we may croon, the muse still lives within us all — and it comes out eagerly as soon as the censorious, judging inner voice is cast aside.