Cover story: Handel’s Messiah
It wasn’t intended to be a Yuletide work, but in 280 years since its premiere, Messiah has become an essential musical accompaniment to the festive season. Paul Riley explores how
How did a great oratorio originally written for Easter become Christmas’s greatest hit? Paul Riley tells the tale
Can there be anything more emblematic of the countdown to Christmas than a performance of Handel’s Messiah? Handel himself might not initially have thought so. His custom was to perform the oratorio around Eastertime, a tradition dating back to Messiah’s 1741 Dublin premiere when, to cram as many as possible into the new Musick-hall in Fishamble Street, ladies were famously directed to wear dresses without hoops, the men to leave their swords at home.
Dublin was instantly smitten, but Messiah would enjoy a rockier reception when London got the chance to become acquainted with it the following year. Part of the problem were Londoners’ objections to performing a sacred work in a public theatre – besides, Handel’s stock in the city had taken a hit in the months leading up to his Dublin sojourn. And then there were individuals with an axe to grind, not least among them Messiah’s librettist Charles Jennens, who sniffily conceded it to be ‘in the main a fine composition, notwithstanding some weak parts which he (Handel) was too idle and obstinate to retouch’. And the Earl of Shaftesbury fretted that for whatever reason ‘this capital composition was indifferently relish’d’.
Things began to change thanks to a happy accident.
In 1749 Handel provided an anthem for a charity concert in the yet-unglazed chapel of the Foundling Hospital, a foundation close to his heart created for ‘the Maintenance and Education of Exposed and Deserted Children’ (see right). The following year he returned to give Messiah twice over and such was the throng that people were turned away at the door. To London eyes the piece was rehabilitated, and if a Christmas tradition was yet to evolve, the oratorio’s popularity was secure. It was performed in Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre as part of celebrations to mark the opening of the Radcliffe Camera; it was taken up by the Three
Choirs Festival in 1757; and pushed northwards through Birmingham and Liverpool, reaching Newcastle in 1778. What really signalled ‘arrival’, however, was
Choral societies in the 19th century afforded Messiah new possibilities
its starring role in the first great Handel Commemoration of 1784. Under the patronage of the King, and centred on Westminster Abbey, it corralled some
500 performers in what at the time must have felt like ‘peak Messiah’. ‘The Fund for Decay’d Musicians’ benefited to the tune of £6,000; and here, perhaps, was sown the seeds of the 19th century’s Handel festivals with their casts of thousands.
By now Messiah was taking on a life of its own. Haydn attended a performance as part of the Handel Commemoration of 1791. Sitting near to the Royal party he watched as the King, Queen and congregation rose for the Hallelujah Chorus; and the whole experience brought a lump to his throat that was creatively disgorged six years later as he worked on his own oratorio response: The Creation.
As a boy, Mozart too had heard Messiah in London, and, at the behest of Baron van Swieten, in 1789 turned his hand to giving the piece an up-to-the-minute Viennese makeover, adding flutes, clarinets, horns and trombones. Again, the first performances were around Easter, but he subsequently conducted two Christmas airings at the Duke of Schwarzenberg’s Palace. Nor did the Viennese incursion end there. Beethoven ransacked Messiah, praising ‘a simplicity that could achieve great ends’, and it left its impress on his own Missa solemnis.
During Handel’s lifetime and beyond, Messiah had largely – though not exclusively – been the province of professional musicians. But as the 19th century unfolded, the rise of choral societies, especially in expanding cities, afforded new possibilities, and the stage was set for a democratisation that would firmly cement the piece into the national psyche. Given that Christmas was the time of year when many choral societies staged their biggest and brashest concerts, it’s hardly surprising that the consummation of Messiah’s place as an enduring festive fixture should begin among the musical excesses of Victorian Britain.
In the great northern cities, wealth created by the Industrial Revolution cascaded down into the building of opulent town halls, each vying competitively to secure ever more ambitious organs to keep municipal music-making ahead of the pack. A firstrank local choir would be as prized as a cup-winning football team; and for such temples Mendelssohn composed Elijah or, later, Elgar The Dream of Gerontius. It was but a short step to that most gargantuan of 19th-century Handelian supersizings: the Handel Festivals given triennially at London’s Crystal Palace, each launched by Messiah and running to a choir of thousands with orchestra to match.
Not everyone succumbed to the supersized grandeur. Writing under his nom de plume ‘Corno di Bassetto’, music critic, polemicist and playwright George Bernard Shaw didn’t hold back. Writing ten years before Queen Victoria’s death, he wondered, ‘why instead of wasting huge sums on the multitudinous dullness of a Handel Festival does someone not set up a thoroughly rehearsed performance… with a chorus of 20 capable artists? Most of us would be glad to hear the work seriously
Messiah’s capital gains
The oratorio’s charitable role
In 1750 Handel was elected a governor of Captain Thomas Coram’s (left) Foundling Hospital in Bloomsbury, Britain’s first haven for abandoned and illegitimate infants. It was, in effect, a way of thanking the composer for the incredible amounts of money raised for the hospital from his benefit concerts. The first, in 1749, featured the ‘specially written’ Foundling Hospital Anthem (which included a version of the Hallelujah Chorus), and was held in the chapel for which Handel afterwards donated an organ. The composer relished his connection with the charity and approached the hospital the next year, this time for a performance of
Messiah. The idea of performing his oratorio in a church as opposed to a Dublin music hall must have appealed – changing musical fashions had meant that opera had been supplanted by oratorio, performed in liturgical buildings. Again, the concert was a sell-out and vast amounts were raised for the children by the 70 or so performers that Handel had at his disposal. Unsurprisingly Messiah swiftly became an annual fixture, with Handel conducting or attending every performance up until his death in 1759. The tradition lasted well into the 1770s, eventually raising over £7,000 – helped by Handel’s generous posthumous gift to the governors of a fair copy of a full score of Messiah.
The exhibition Two Last Nights! Show Business in Georgian Britain is at the Foundling Museum until 5 January
‘Messiah lends itself to many different styles of performance’
performed once before we die’. At a stroke he anticipated the historically informed stirrings that would come to fruition half-a-century or so later. But perhaps he should have visited the Yorkshire Dales, where two miners were much in demand accompanying seasonal performances with their singular reduction of the score for clarinet and trombone.
It might have ‘Hallelujah-ed’ out of marbled halls up and down the land, but ‘doing Messiah’, however humbly, was now a Christmas institution, fuelled in part by the availability of cheap vocal editions and a Victorian penchant for moral edification. (Like so many elements, our current notion of Christmas is essentially a Victorian construct). Not that Handel would have quibbled. When a member of the aristocracy praised Messiah as a ‘noble entertainment’, apocryphally or not, Handel is supposed to have retorted ‘I should be sorry if I only entertained them. I wish to make them better’.
That discerning chronicler of workingclass life Richard Hoggart observes how, in a single town, different strands of Methodism would compete to mount a Christmas Messiah that put rivals to shame. In his own Primitive Methodist Chapel, the Hallelujah Chorus, he recalled, was invariably a mighty roar, ‘enormousbosomed women and fierce old men leading the charge’. Indeed, even as the swinging sixties beckoned, he reckoned that it should still have been possible to go into an inner-city district of Leeds and, from ‘any moderate-sized working-class crowd’ find ‘50 people who could take up the chorus with you’. It wasn’t just a northern phenomenon. In the late 19th century, many of those worshipping at the Congregational Union Chapel in Islington regularly invested a portion of their hardearned wages in singing lessons so that up to 300 of them might sing sections of Messiah during the Christmas Day service.
One conductor who knows a thing or two about Messiah at Christmas is Stephen Layton. He should do. He’s conducted the work annually at St John’s Smith Square for approaching 30 years as part of the Christmas Festival of which he’s artistic director. He’s also mindful of how it’s become woven into the fabric of musical life. ‘I first heard Messiah aged three,’ he recalls. ‘The Sheffield Philharmonic Chorus used to give it on the two Saturdays before Christmas and I can remember my father putting me up on the chair for the Hallelujah Chorus so I could still see. Over the next few years the likes of Isobel Baillie, Dame Janet Baker, Sir John Barbirolli and the Hallé came… on those nights there was magic in the air. Later, of course, there were the first period instrument recordings with leaner sounds and faster tempos. What’s fascinating is that Messiah lends itself to many different styles of performance. If history shows us anything, it’s that music is an evolving canvas.’
Messiah’s canvas has certainly evolved. What would those early London detractors outraged by the choice of a theatrical venue have made of the 21st century’s swerve into staged presentations such as Claus
Guth’s for Vienna or Deborah Warner’s English National Opera production?
And if the Yorkshire miners’ clarinet and trombone support was a matter of expediency, Mozart isn’t alone in giving the oratorio’s soundworld a hefty tweak. Handel himself reacted to circumstances by adding oboes and bassoons; and in the 1780s Johann Adam Hiller was adapting it to Berlin tastes.
Decidedly more radical, however, was Sir Thomas Beecham’s orchestration
(in fact the work of Eugene Goossens) which revels in the full bells and whistles of the modern symphony orchestra – the Hallelujah Chorus a technicolor cymbals-fest. And, popularising showman that he was, even Beecham couldn’t have envisaged Chicago’s now firmly entrenched tradition of Too Hot to Handel – The Gospel Messiah; or the runaway success of the 1992 Grammy award-winning Handel’s Messiah: A Soulful Celebration, an album putting the rock into Baroque with a liberal sprinkling of blues, jazz-fusion, R&B and hip hop. Even Layton’s fondly remembered Sheffield Philharmonic Chorus has a twist up its sleeve for this year’s seasonal offering: the instrumental horsepower is supplied by the resplendent brass of Black Dyke Band.
For Layton it would be unthinkable not to ‘do’ Messiah at Christmas. ‘It’s central to Jennens’s libretto and to sing it as part of the Christmas celebrations is to give the work real context. It’s one of the greatest pieces of music the human race has yet produced so I couldn’t ever imagine omitting it from the festival. Handel has set an English text for Englishspeaking people that gives it an immediacy for us. When I reach the penultimate chorus “Worthy is the Lamb”, it’s like an extraordinary moment of arrival. It’s as if I’m mentally buckling on my seatbelt
‘Messiah is one of the greatest pieces of music the human race has produced’
because I know that having launched the chord on the second beat, I’m going to have the most amazing ride to the end.’
Might performing Messiah every year run the risk of falling into routine? ‘Oh, no,’ he responds, shocked at the very idea. ‘I always have the most wonderful musicians and it’s they that make it. I’m responding to them, and as musicians we have to be open to all possibilities. It’s a bit like putting directions into Google Maps. It can give you various suggestions. The fastest route, the most scenic, the most direct… Performance, however, is interactive – we’re reacting to the words and to each other and the options unfold in the moment.’
It’s an insight with which Harry Christophers would surely agree. For the founder-conductor of The Sixteen, addressing a new set of faces for each performance is something that keeps him perennially on his toes. ‘Even with your own choir you’ve probably got a group of four different soloists each time and you’re trying to bring out their strengths,’ he explains. ‘It’s the same, too, with different choirs. Every major symphony orchestra and chorus in the US has Messiah in its sights at Christmas and I’ve done it in St Louis and San Francisco. Each time, I take it apart, adapting according to the size of the forces, re-examining the way the recitatives flow into arias and so on. You can’t do Messiah on auto-pilot – there’s just no room for complacency.’
That need continually to interrogate stood Christophers in good stead when, back in 2009, he arrived in Boston as director of the city’s Handel and Haydn Society – which, with a venerable heritage stretching back to 1811, notched up its 400th performance of Messiah in 2014. ‘We give three performances each Christmas in Symphony Hall,’ he says,
‘so that’s about 7,500 people soaking up the piece. When I first arrived I asked why they came. Some said it was family tradition, like going to Midnight Mass or Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker. But I wanted to go beyond that. Jennens knew his Bible and Shakespeare inside out; the verses are all carefully chosen. Now I think people really listen and engage; whereas some used to say “it’s very long, can’t you cut it?”, now they insist that those three hours just fly by. It’s got to be a rollercoaster.’
Of course, for a soloist the annual Messiah is a diary staple. As it happens, the mezzo Sarah Connolly cut her Messiah teeth as a chorister with The Sixteen.
‘The audience reception was tremendous wherever we went and with the choir, eliciting the best applause. That made me very happy, even now looking back as a soloist! Sitting at the front of the stage these days I’m aware that the audience knows each aria pretty well; there’s an expectation of story-telling and drama. Minutes before I sing each aria I try to imagine what Handel was trying to achieve. He always matches the words to the music so perfectly that he doesn’t make the guessing game too hard for us.’
Like both Layton and Christophers, Sarah Connolly is convinced that there’s a special frisson to bringing the work to life at Christmas. ‘This is the People’s Oratorio,’ she insists. ‘It was written for the people, and performed and beloved by everyone. Part of Handel’s genius was recognising the occasion and supplying the right flavour and energy. He couldn’t have created a more perfect Christmas piece; a familiar story described in vivid musical pictures that has endured for nearly 300 years and will do so “for ever and ever”. Hallelujah!’
‘Handel couldn’t have created a more perfect Christmas piece’