Messiah

As we prepare for our annual celebration of God’s great and astonishing act of reconciliation with humankind, we might take a few moments to consider a most astonishing event that occurred in the summer of 1741, in London, when an unremarkable son of wealth, Charles Jennens, wrote to a friend, saying, “Handel says he will do nothing next Winter, but I hope I shall perswade him to set another Scripture Collection I have made for him, & perform it for his own Benefit in Passion week. I hope he will lay out his whole Genius & Skill upon it, that the Composition may excell all his former Compositions, as the Subject excells every other Subject. The Subject is Messiah…”. ¹ Highly unlikely, at best.

George Frideric Handel composed opera to Italian and German librettos. He was uncomfortable with the English language. He was a man well past his prime and out of step with the changing tastes of London theater goers. He had never written a sacred oratorio; for he was a man of the theatre, and in Puritan England of the mid-eighteenth century before the Great Awakening, singing Scripture as public entertainment would risk the serious charge of blasphemy. Though he was not bankrupt, his financial health had waned. He had recently recovered from a serious illness. Handel found himself bereft of opportunity, and he never composed without a performance in mind.

Then, over the transom, so to speak, utterly unexpected, came an invitation from the English Lord Lieutenant of Dublin to participate in a series of oratorio concerts to benefit local charities. Dublin was the second largest city in the British Isles with 60,000 inhabitants. Handel realized that he could use several recent secular works, and for the sacred component, he took up Jennens libretto. But the libretto had no familiar drama in the theatrical sense, no warring factions, no named protagonist or villain, nor a coherent narrative. Jennens had delivered Handel 57 passages of Scripture loosely telescoping a thousand years of history, written in English.

However, from the moment Handel took up the pen on August 22, 1741, he completed the entire score in an astonishing 22 days. Handel’s manuscript comprised 259 pages and nearly 200,000 notes, a pace of about 15 notes per minute for three weeks of 10 hour days, replete with erasures, blots and emendations. Handel borrowed from no one else but himself, and then in only four of his twenty choruses. There is no historical evidence that he was divinely inspired, but it strains all credulity to believe otherwise. ² Indeed there is ample evidence that he was captured and inspired by the sacred nature of the subject matter he had undertaken to score. From his devout Lutheran tradition he challenged both the popular deist theology of the day and the puritanical condemnation of praising God in the public square.

Handel’s Messiah is not just about the birth of Jesus or the resurrection of Christ, but rather the grand scope of God’s presence in the world and plan for God’s people as spoken by the prophets Isaiah, Malachi, Haggai, Zechariah and the psalmists; as reported by the gospel writers; as witnessed by Paul, and as revealed by John. Jennens’ libretto covers the gamut, and Handel’s score warms the heart, lifts the soul, crushes in judgment, weeps in sorrow, celebrates victory and ends in joy, filling one’s spirit with God’s Peace. Messiah is a two hour tour de force, a spiritual masterpiece of music and Scripture of which there is no equal, the crowning achievement of perhaps history’s greatest composer.³ It remains an enduring gift of revealed biblical truth in the postmodern age.

Thanks be to God.

Merry Christmas!

1. Letter from Jennens to his friend Edward Holdsworth on July 10, 1741,
   quoted in Christopher Hogwood’s biography, Handel: New York, Thames & Hudson, 2007, 167 (words spelled as written)
2. No serious biographer will assert that God’s hand was on Handel’s pen, but my own research leads me to the conclusion that the circumstantial evidence would suggest otherwise.
3. Though both Mozart and Haydn paid Handel the compliment of imitation, it was Beethoven who asserted more than once, “Handel was the greatest composer that every lived.” See Hogwood, Handel, 248.

Author’s Note: Annually, on a mid-December Sunday afternoon my wife and I can be found at Harris Theatre in Chicago’s Millennium Park, center orchestra, about 10 rows back on the aisle, to once again experience the majesty and mystery of Messiah performed by the Apollo Chorus of Chicago, an institution celebrating its 150th year, formed following the great fire of 1871, and performing Messiah every Advent since 1879.