The story of Handel’s “Messiah”

It’s probably the most-heard piece of classical music on Earth, the most sung, and the most recorded. It’s “Messiah,” by German-British opera composer George Frideric Handel.

“It has been in near continuous performance from 1742, when it premiered, all the way up to the present,” said author Charles King. “It’s absolutely everywhere. And you can’t say that about really any other piece of serious music.”

King’s new book, “Every Valley” (Doubleday), gives us the backstory of “Messiah” and its “Hallelujah Chorus,” which comes about two-thirds of the way through Handel’s oratorio. “It’s not the finale!” King said. “People start getting ready to leave, you know, grabbing their keys and their parking validation, and then it’s like, ‘Nope, sit down. There’s a third more of this thing left to go!'”

“Messiah” wasn’t actually Handel’s idea. The words came from a friend named Charles Jennens. King suggests it should really be called Handel’s and Jennens’ “Messiah.”

“Charles Jennens was a wealthy landowner, but he also suffered from this kind of encasing sense of doom and despair – we might now call it chronic depression or even bipolar disorder,” King said. “He starts to pull down books from the shelves, and he starts to copy down bits of scripture. He was also working out, I think, a kind of philosophy of living.”

Conductor and writer Jane Glover has conducted “Messiah” more than 100 times (most recently, this month at Trinity Church in New York City). “I never fail to doff my hat, actually, at Charles Jennens for putting that together,” she said. “‘Messiah'” is in three parts. The first part is the Christmas story, which is why everybody does it at Christmas. The second part is the crucifixion, but then also the resurrection; and then Part III is about redemption. So, there’s a tremendous shape to this three-part oratorio.”

In the 1720s and ’30s, Handel’s popular Italian-style operas had made him a musical megastar. But in his 50s, his popularity was waning. So, when he was invited to stage a series of concerts in Dublin, King said, Handel thought he could restart his career: “And so, he sits down with this text that he’s received from Charles Jennens and decides to try to make something of it. You can imagine him thinking, ‘Hmpf, what am I gonna do with these? I got a bunch of Bible verses in the wrong order that I’m supposed to set to Italian opera music?’ But he does it.”

In his book, King describes the final product as “weird.” “It is weird,” he laughed. “It’s the strangest thing that Handel ever composed.”

Handel wrote the three-hour piece (for chorus, soloists, and nine-piece orchestra) in 24 days … 260 pages of music!

At the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, music curator Robin McClellan showed me a replica of Handel’s original score. “It shows the speed that he wrote. It’s so messy!” McClellan laughed. “He really was concerned with getting his ideas onto paper as fast as possible.”

For the “Hallelujah Chorus,” Handel wrote the word “Hallelujah” once … and then used the standard jazz repeat sign that we still use today! “He’s writing down the musical equivalent of ‘et cetera, et cetera, et cetera,'” said King. “In that era, there was really no assumption that anything would ever be performed again.”

“Messiah” was a huge hit in Dublin, and, eventually, in London. It seems to offer a sense of hope and light at a time when they were in short supply.

King said, “‘Messiah’ was born in the kind of dark shadows of the Enlightenment. Britain was at war. The infant mortality rate in London at the time was 75%. And so, ‘Messiah’ is a kind of piece of art that is grappling with what basis, what possible basis for hope could there be when you have all of this evidence around you to suggest otherwise?”

Just about everyone loved it – except Charles Jennens! “He was worried that Handel had done a kind of cheap job,” said King. “He says, ‘I am never going to 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 of his that he thought it was ‘in the main, a fine composition,'” King said.

“Messiah” came to the American colonies in 1770, six years before this was even a country. It was performed in Trinity Church in New York City, sounding much as it did this month in exactly the same hall.

Over time, “Messiah” has changed in all kinds of different ways. Handel’s nine-piece orchestra gave way to thunderous musical forces; various trims were implemented. Glover said, “People sitting in a church on hard pews don’t want to sit here for three-and-a-half hours.”

And whole sections were dropped. “Some people just do Part I at Christmas; that’s a very good way of doing it,” Glover said.

Still, in all its versions, Handel and Jennens’s masterpiece has offered the same message for nearly 300 years: That there is always hope.

“Every single generation that has heard this thing, has felt that this music is kind of a message in a bottle for them,” said King. “It’s a piece of music that does stuff to us.”

Its message? “Have the possibility of hope; problems are solvable; the world is gonna be okay. And then, take that and put it into action.”

       
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Story produced by Sara Kugel. Editor: Carol Ross.