Emmanuelle Haïm conducts Handel’s Messiah at the Salzburg Easter Festival

About the Work

Messiah is an oratorio in English for four solo singers, chorus and orchestra, and it is unlike almost everything else George Frideric Handel wrote for the theatre. It tells no story in the ordinary sense. Nobody on stage plays a character and there is hardly any quoted speech. The text is a sequence of short passages from scripture, and the piece asks its audience to think about them.

The words came first. Charles Jennens, a wealthy landowner, a man of letters and a devout Anglican, had already supplied Handel with librettos. In 1741 he put together a new one from the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, setting Old Testament prophecy beside New Testament fulfilment: the promise of a Messiah, the birth, the suffering and death, the resurrection, and the hope of a life to come. He meant it as an answer to the Deists of his day, who doubted that God intervened in human affairs.

Handel needed something new. He had made his name in London with Italian opera, and by the early 1740s the public’s taste for it had gone. His English oratorios had found a better welcome, and Jennens hoped to steer him further that way. Then came an invitation to give a season of concerts in Dublin. With that in prospect Handel began the score on 22 August 1741 and finished it on 14 September, 24 days later. The speed has fed a good many pious legends, but it was his normal working pace, and part of it came from his habit of reusing his own music. Several of the best-known choruses, “For unto us a child is born” and “All we like sheep” among them, started life a few weeks earlier as Italian love duets for two voices and continuo.

Jennens was not grateful. Handel, he wrote to a friend, “has made a fine Entertainment of it, tho’ not near so good as he might & ought to have done.” He thought the composer had been careless and pressed him for years to make changes.

The first performance was given in Dublin on 13 April 1742, for the benefit of local charities. To fit in as many people as possible, ladies were asked to come without hoops in their skirts. It was a triumph. London was another matter. Handel introduced the oratorio there at the Covent Garden theatre in 1743 and it was coolly received, partly because some people objected to hearing scripture sung in a playhouse. Its fortunes changed only when he began to give it every year for charity at the Foundling Hospital, from 1750. By his death in 1759 it had become what it still is in the English-speaking world, a fixed point of the musical year.

There is no single authentic Messiah. Handel altered it for almost every revival, rewriting arias and moving them from one voice to another to suit the singers he had. Every conductor has to choose among the versions, and has to decide who sings the alto solos, which in this performance go to a countertenor.

Many listeners now associate Messiah with Christmas, but it was not written as Christmas music. Only the first of its three parts deals with the Nativity, the other two concern the Passion, the Resurrection and what follows from them, and the first performance took place in April. Hearing it on Palm Sunday and on Easter Sunday, as here, suits it well.

What to Listen For

Part I deals with prophecy and the Nativity. After a grave overture in the minor, the tenor enters gently with “Comfort ye, my people” and the music turns to the major. The first sequence builds to the chorus “For unto us a child is born”, and its origin as a duet is easy to hear: for long stretches only two voice parts sing at a time, and the whole choir comes together for the shouts of “Wonderful, Counsellor”. Then comes the only real scene of narrative in the work. A short pastoral for strings, the Pifa, evokes shepherds’ pipes, the soprano tells of the angel appearing to the shepherds, and the chorus answers with “Glory to God”.

Part II is the heart of the work at Easter. It opens with the chorus “Behold the Lamb of God” and the alto aria “He was despised”, slow and bare, with the voice sometimes left alone. In its middle section the strings break into sharp dotted rhythms for the scourging, a figure that returns in the choruses that follow. The music then moves through death and resurrection to the spreading of the gospel. A run of violent numbers, the bass’s “Why do the nations so furiously rage together” and the tenor’s “Thou shalt break them”, leads straight into the “Hallelujah” chorus, which in this setting sounds as much like a cry of victory as a hymn of praise.

Part III is a meditation on the resurrection of the dead and the life to come. It begins with the soprano’s serene “I know that my Redeemer liveth”. The bass aria “The trumpet shall sound” brings a long solo for the trumpet. The oratorio closes with the chorus “Worthy is the Lamb” and a great fugue on a single word, “Amen”.

Listen throughout for how the chorus moves between two manners: quick, speech-like declamation that follows the rhythm of the English words, and long, sung lines.