The Messiah man
Messiah-mania is not new. In 1784 Westminster Abbey staged a series of concerts marking the 25th anniversary of Handel’s death. Messiah was the centrepiece, with more than 500 performers and an audience of 4,500. “So extraordinary a spectacle, we believe, never before solicited the public notice,” reported one awestruck magazine.
The work has always been the staple diet of choral societies, and is revered all the way from Huddersfield Choral Society to the Bach Choir. It’s everywhere at this time of year, and is a wonderful “sing” for choral societies. Great for audiences, too, if it is well done, though at more than two and a half hours it can be demanding. To stop it sagging, you have to concentrate on telling the story rather than ornamenting the music.
In some ways it’s odd that it has become synonymous with Christmas because of course Charles Jennens’ libretto, which adroitly stitches together biblical texts, spans Christ’s birth, death and resurrection. Messiah was first performed just after Easter in 1742 and the real drama resides in the work’s second half, which tells the Easter story. We do it in the UK at Easter, too, but in the US it is seen almost exclusively as a Christmas fixture. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas it is performed not once but three or four times in succession by almost every orchestra in every state. But, as I found recently when trying to set up a US tour to coincide with the 250th anniversary of Handel’s death in 2009, there is no interest at all in the piece at Easter.
There is a danger that the tradition of performing it at Christmas, almost as a ritual, can turn it into a warhorse, something you do by rote, the concertgoing equivalent of attending midnight mass. The piece deserves better than that. I have conducted Messiah more than 150 times and never tire if it, always finding something new and unexpected. It changes according to venue, audience, mood and singers. I adapt to my soloists just as Handel would have. It’s a very well-known work, but can I ever say that I really know it and fully understand what it is capable of? No. As with all great works of art, you never quite have their measure.
One factor that makes it special and lasting for me is that right from the first performance in Dublin (where it was performed “For relief of the Prisoners in the several Gaols, and for the Support of Mercer’s Hospital in Stephen’s Street and of the Charitable infirmary on the Inns Quay”), it has had the role of fundraiser. From 1750 until his death in 1759, he performed it annually for Thomas Coram’s Foundling Hospital, and he endowed a score of Messiah to the hospital to enable them to carry on the annual fundraiser. Today Voices of Hospice carries on the fundraising tradition with regular performances.
In Europe it is performed less regularly than in the UK and US. The tradition in Germany and Holland is to programme Bach’s Passions at Easter, and it is really only in Spain that we are beginning to see a plethora of Messiahs, mostly performed by UK-based period ensembles. I will be in Madrid and Pamplona with The Sixteen just before Christmas, and there will be “community Messiahs” in Barcelona and other Spanish cities.
The latter are Messiahs with a difference, aiming to introduce singing to a new public and help to develop a choral tradition. In the spring, in a sort of Messiah X-Factor, thousands of would-be singers are auditioned; close on 400 are chosen – of all ages but including a lot of young people – and they rehearse devotedly every weekend until the performances in December when a professional orchestra and choir join them. The results are staggering and the performances, as I found when I twice conducted community Messiahs, very rewarding. Handel, a great innovator and entrepreneur, would have loved the idea.
Strangely enough, since I have come to be identified with the work, I didn’t really know Messiah when I was young. As a family we didn’t go to concerts. As a chorister at Canterbury Cathedral, I sang the occasional chorus, but it wasn’t until I got to Oxford that I sang part one of Messiah, and only as a rather indifferent professional tenor singing in Westminster Abbey that I sang it complete for the first time.
My relative lack of knowledge of the work was helpful when I came to conduct it because I had no preconceived notions of how it should be. When I first did it in 1985, I wanted to brush the cobwebs off and go back to exactly what Handel wrote. I had become aware of a tendency even in so-called period performances to dwell on style and lose the sense of the complete work. Messiah is fascinating because it represents Handel’s direct, personal response to the Bible, but the pacing remains essentially operatic. He was always an opera man, anxious to tell his story dramatically.
The overture brilliantly sets the moods for the rest of the parts. It fills us with a sense of hope and lightness, and then Handel launches into the sublime “Comfort Ye”, which calms everyone down. It’s Handel saying, “I’m going to make you listen because this is a long story.” He takes you into another world and has this ability to uplift people, then calm those senses, before taking them up again. Messiah never fails – unless you have a crap tenor.
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