Handel's Messiah

Misha Glenny and his guests discuss the most famous oratorio of George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) and his librettist Charles Jennens (1700-1773). For his libretto, Jennens drew from Old and New Testament texts: prophecies about the coming of Jesus, the Messiah, the nativity, the suffering of Christ and his death and the Day of Judgement and redemption for all. Handel's Messiah had its premiere in 1742 in a secular Dublin music hall to great acclaim with a packed audience and Handel continued to adapt his Messiah for later performances, often shaping the work to the choirs or individual singers available. Messiah proved to be one of his most popular works, becoming a favourite of massed choirs around the world far beyond the scale of Handel’s original. With Donald Burrows Emeritus Professor of Music at the Open University Ruth Smith Trustee and Council Member of the Handel Institute And Larry Zazzo Countertenor, and Senior Lecturer in Music at Newcastle University Producer: Simon Tillotson Reading list: Donald Burrows, Messiah (full score, 2 vols, Hallische Händel Ausgabe, forthcoming) Donald Burrows, Messiah (Edition Peters, 1987) Donald Burrows, Messiah, Cambridge Music Handbooks (Cambridge University Press, 1991) Donald Burrows, Handel: Master Musicians series, 2nd edition (Oxford University Press, 2012) George Frideric Handel (ed. Donald Burrows et al.), Collected Documents vol. 3 (1734-42), vol 4 (1742-50), (Cambridge University Press, 2019, 2020) G. F. Handel, facsimile ‘Messiah’: the composer’s autograph manuscript (British Library, 2009) G. F. Handel, facsimile the composer’s Conducting Score of Messiah (Scolar Press, 1974) Arthur Holroyd, Reassuring 18th-Century Protestants: The Librettist’s Intended Message for Handel’s ‘Messiah’ (Quacks Books, 2018) Charles King, Every Valley: The Story of Handel’s Messiah (Doubleday/Bodley Head, 2024) Jens Peter Larsen, Handel’s Messiah: Origins, Composition, Sources (Adam and Charles Black, 1957) Richard Luckett, Handel’s Messiah: A Celebration (Victor Gollancz, 1992) Watkins Shaw, A Textual and Historical Companion to Handel’s ‘Messiah’ (Novello and Co, 1965) Ruth Smith, ‘The Achievements of Charles Jennens (1700–1773)’ (Music & Letters, 70, 1989) Ruth Smith, Charles Jennens: The Man behind Handel’s ‘Messiah’ (Handel House Trust/The Gerald Coke Handel Foundation, 2012) Ruth Smith, Handel’s Oratorios and Eighteenth-Century Thought (Cambridge University Press, 1995) Calvin R. Stapert, Handel’s Messiah: Comfort for God’s People (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2010) Judy Tarling, Handel’s Messiah: A Rhetorical Guide (first published 2014; Punnett Press, 2025) In Our Time is a BBC Studios production Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

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  This is In Our Time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find in the In Our Time archive. A reading list for this edition can be found in the episode description wherever you're listening. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello. In 1742, in a secular Dublin music hall, the first audience heard Handel's Messiah, a sacred oratorio, from its first word comfort, to the chorus of hallelujahs to the last word amen. The librettist Charles Jennings had drawn from biblical texts, prophecies about the coming of Jesus, the Messiah, the nativity, the suffering of Christ and his death,

• 3:32Speaker 03

  and the day of judgment and redemption for all. Handel continued to adapt his Messiah for later performances, and it proved to be one of his most popular works, becoming a favourite of massed choirs around the world, far beyond the scale of Handel's original. Well, with me to discuss Handel's Messiah are Ruth Smith, trustee and council member of the Handel Institute, Larry Zazzo, counter tenor and senior lecturer in music at Newcastle University, and Donald Burrows, emeritus professor of music at the Open University. Donald, I'd like to start with you. Handel was born in Haller in Brandenburg in 1685,

• 4:14Speaker 03

  but he'd been based in London since around 1714. What should we know about his life and reputation in London?

• 4:23Speaker 04

  His reputation in London in the first place was as an opera composer. He also carried with him experience from the previous years. Trained as an organist in Haller, he signed up for the University of Haller. That only lasted a year. He was off to Hamburg, to the Opera House. He's then composing operas, playing from the harpsichord, leading the performances in Hamburg. That's while the leading composer is away. As soon as the composer comes back again, he's off to Italy. There's no opera in Rome, but he does other things. He does church music, and it's there he writes his first oratorios.

• 5:05Speaker 04

  And he goes to Hannover, where he is appointed master of the music at the court, but on the condition he makes that he can go elsewhere because he wants to carry on writing operas. There's no opera in Hannover. And it's at that point that he then comes to London. He has to go back to his job in Hannover, but then he comes back to London again, and the elector of Hannover is in the next in line to the British throne.

• 5:33Speaker 03

  Which presumably was to Handel's advantage.

• 5:36Speaker 04

  He foresaw this, to put it mildly there.

• 5:40Speaker 03

  Apparently Handel wrote this very quickly, within the space of about three weeks or so. Was that usual for him?

• 5:46Speaker 04

  He was a fast, intense worker. What we have with the autograph is a finished setting of the complete text. He started that on the 22nd of August, finished it on the 13th of September or whatever. It so happens that the 22nd of August is also a Saturday this year. If you wanted to try it out, get a few quill pens, a couple of pints of black ink, and 250 pages of music paper, and see if you can write it out in that time.

• 6:18Speaker 03

  So it is very quick.

• 6:19Speaker 04

  It is very quick, but it's the end of the process. Composition has happened up to that point. You don't just write the notes on paper. A lot of thinking has gone into that.

• 6:30Speaker 03

  And a lot of it's going on in his head.

• 6:32Speaker 04

  A lot of it's going on in his head. The business of composition from the first stage, which is reading Genesis' words, and thinking, now how's this going to go? You have to think of the total structure of arias, what singers, who's going to sing this one, how's that going to go, what's the mood, is it major or minor key? Is it? Fast, is it slow? And then, of course, the business of actual musical themes, ideas that sometimes the words stimulate a particular melodic line. And quite often, because Handel's got a head full of tunes, he reads some words and thinks, hmm, I've got something for that.

• 7:13Speaker 04

  And he riffles through his stuff and finds there's an old thing there somewhere that was just perfect. Larry.

• 7:19Speaker 05

  Donald, I think it's really important to mention that it's an issue of borrowing. I mean, what we think of as being such genius and such unique, these great melodic hooks that we think are so original. Messiah, in fact, Handel borrowed from Italian duets. So that one of the famous choruses is, "For unto us a child is born", and everybody has that in their head. The original was an Italian duet which begins, "No, di voi non vo fidarmi", and that's why it begins with "for", which is a little bit odd from an English standpoint, right? Handel's a German, but it's so, because it comes from another duet, somehow that makes it more memorable to us, I think.

• 7:57Speaker 03

  Donald, can you tell us exactly what an oratorio is?

• 8:01Speaker 04

  Well, in simple terms, it's something you perform in an oratory. That is to say, a separate building, not for the mass, not for church services, but for presentation of religious topics, which may be from scripture, it may be symbols of characters operating on humans, selfishness or time or that sort of thing. Or it may be lives of the saints or something like that. Opera and then oratorio came along together, and they used the same musical forms.

• 8:36Speaker 03

  So the transition from opera to oratorio, in that case, wasn't quite so difficult. But of course, you need a librettist. And Ruth Smith, I'd like to ask you about the librettist for Messiah, Charles Jennings. What was his relationship with Handel like, both personally and professionally?

• 8:57Speaker 06

  Jennings started writing librettos for Handel partly because he was a Handel addict. Any words united with his music? It becomes sacred for me, he said, which is extraordinary, given that Jennings was a devout Anglican. He wrote librettos for nobody else, and he certainly wasn't looking for fame, because he didn't sign any of them. They were anonymous, which is why, right into the 19th and 20th centuries, there was some doubt whether this obscure country squire could actually have put the text of Messiah together. Or conversely, well, that was an easy job, it's just scripture verses. But Jennings wanted to foster Handel's career in every possible way. He was very generous to Handel in all sorts of ways.

• 9:38Speaker 06

  By the time he comes to do the libretto for Messiah, he's got a permanent subscription with Handel for copies of all Handel's music. He's already acquired all Handel's published music with generous subscriptions. Now he wants every note, and he built up an unrivaled Handel collection. I mean, it's still unrivaled, though now dispersed, but at the time, it was unique.

• 9:59Speaker 03

  So he was wealthy, committed to Handel, but the Messiah as a libretto, it begins with the word comfort. Why would that have a particular resonance for Jennings?

• 10:10Speaker 06

  Jennings was depressive, lonely. The Times were out of joint for him. He was concerned, as many were, many devout Anglicans were, about the decline of religious faith in Britain. He was politically out of joint with the Times. Jennings believed in the divine right of kings. The head of Charles I, the executed monarch, Stuart Monarch, was on his seal ring. He was in a form of internal exile, because you couldn't have any kind of public position, and any kind of public profession, whether in the military, parliament, the church, the university, unless you foreswore loyalty to the Stuarts, which he wasn't prepared to do.

• 10:52Speaker 06

  So he was lonely politically, he was lonely socially, for that reason partly. And then, there was perhaps the worst thing of all, and very much the background emotionally to Messiah, which was the way one of his brothers died, his sole surviving brother. When Jennings was 28, and his brother, Robert, was studying for the bar at the Middle Temple, cut his throat and threw himself Out of the window. Now, of course, the suicide of one's brother would be a terrible thing for anybody, but it was particularly, I think, terrible for Jennings, because by taking his own life, Robert was cutting himself off from salvation after death. And ask the majority of the population in Britain at that time, were they Christian? They would

• 11:33Speaker 06

  say yes. If you were Christian, you believed that there was judgment at death, and then there was hell or heaven. If you had taken your own life, there was hell. So Jennings was saddled with this terrible recognition that probably his brother would be rotting in hell forever. So it's no surprise that Messiah begins with the word comfort. The second part of Messiah, behold, the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world, the whole world. And finally, I know that my Redeemer liveth is how the final part ends. And all through, we are being told that all shall be saved. And Handel, in a crucial chorus, repeats that, shall all, shall all be saved. So there's a very personal reason, I think, underlying his libretto.

• 12:18Speaker 03

  Larry Zazzo, Handel composes Messiah in seventeen forty-one, and we'll discuss the first performances in a minute. But can you tell us about the singers available to Handel, the singers that Handel liked, and why that mattered to him so much?

• 12:33Speaker 05

  He was mainly a composer of operas. He wrote forty-two, depending on how you count, forty-two operas, basically two a year between the twenties and seventeen forty-one, which is when he wrote his last opera. And right when he was composing Messiah, he was at a bit of a crisis where he was writing something for Dublin. He did not have access to his usual cohort of extremely versatile opera singers trained in Italy. Some of them were castrati. He did have one Italian singer, Avolio, but he didn't really know who his other singers were.

• 13:08Speaker 03

  Why didn't he have access to them at that time?

• 13:10Speaker 05

  Well, the opera company closed down, and they were terribly expensive. And he couldn't afford to bring them over, even if he had them, Ruth.

• 13:18Speaker 06

  And also, there was a war on.

• 13:20Speaker 05

  And there was a war on, right.

• 13:21Speaker 06

  Italian singers weren't that easy to get. They weren't very Clean to travel and so fees were even greater.

• 13:27Speaker 05

  So they put their fees up even more. There is some singer inflation even more than there is nowadays. I suppose, or I wish there was more inflation. So he was, he was in a situation where he has started to write some oratorios. And it was remarked on a very famous quote, which is worth just quoting for very quickly. Horace Walpole writes to Horace Mann. Handel has set up an oratorio against the operas and succeeds. He's hired all the goddesses from farces and singers of roast beef. And that's such wonderful. So who were these singers of roast beef? Well, it's a different type of singer. These aren't singers of Italian opera. These are singers of ballad opera. So think beggars opera, think of the precursors of musicals, a different type of musical style.

• 14:10Speaker 05

  Shorter musical phrases, less virtuosity, more limited vocal range. And so I think Handel is writing for he doesn't know whom. But perhaps a singer who's a slightly less trained, a singer of English. And a classic example of that, who he didn't know he was going to have was Susanna Kibber. Are we, some of your listeners might be surprised. I always thought it was Susanna Zibber. But are we saying Susanna Kibber now? So Susanna, born Susanna Arn to Thomas Arn. So born into a theatrical family, an acting impresario family. She married the son of Kali Kibber, Theophilus Kibber. So she was the daughter-in-law of Kali.

• 14:51Speaker 05

  Also a famous actor impresario. Thomas Arn had this rival, Drury Lane Company. She turns up in Ireland, she's doing, she's an actress, she's a tragedian. She had a terrible, terrible background, a really terrible husband. Theophilus was a gambler. He was a spendthrift. He was abusive. He basically pimped her out to an aristocrat called William Sloper. There was a terrible trial in which all of the dirty laundry was aired.

• 15:20Speaker 03

  So there was a huge scandal around that.

• 15:23Speaker 05

  A huge scandal and she was terribly, she was terribly embarrassed and.

• 15:27Speaker 03

  But a good singer.

• 15:28Speaker 05

  But well, Bernie said that she had a voice like a thread. So think of someone who could sing in a very declamatory style, very simply, but with incredible pathos and incredible emotion.

• 15:41Speaker 03

  Can we confirm or otherwise that you sang the same part as Susanna Kibber?

• 15:46Speaker 05

  I did indeed, yes. And I also sang the same part as Gaetano Guadagni, who was the castrato who sang in 1750. So you have that virtuosity of the Italian castrato and this wonderful simplicity of Susanna Kibber. It is done by countertenders, but it's there. All of those, that music is equally done beautifully by mezzo-sopranos, I must say.

• 16:10Speaker 03

  Donald, before we get into the work itself, as far as I understand, before he wrote Messiah, he was laid low by some serious health problems, including a very serious stroke.

• 16:22Speaker 04

  I don't think at this stage that was a really serious question. He seems to have recovered very quickly from the 1737 stroke, or whatever it was. He goes abroad for a time, he comes back. He writes the funeral anthem for the Queen in no time at all. He's back in business. When you get to his later years, he then starts to have health problems that interfere with his work more. And of course, his eyesight also goes a little. But I think really, he's back springing to life in the Messiah period.

• 16:56Speaker 03

  And before he wrote Messiah, what are the works which lead up to Messiah, as it were?

• 17:02Speaker 04

  Earlier in 1741, he'd done his last Italian opera in London. After that, there were no more Italian operas. So, leading up to 1741, he had been doing opera and oratorio within the theatre seasons. There comes a time, early in 1741, he didn't really get on with the management at the King's Theatre, which was the Grand Opera House. He'd gone to Covent Garden, the New Theatre. And for a number of years, John Rich thought, aha, we will do plays and Handel can do some oratorios and operas. After a few years, he found he couldn't really quite afford it. He didn't have the same resources as the King's Theatre. So what had happened was, he said to Handel,

• 17:48Speaker 04

  "You can have my secondary theatre at Lincoln's in Fields, it's cheaper." But I think he thought by the end of that, "I'm not going to be going back to..." The King's Theatre. Castrati are so difficult to find these days. It was the perfect moment when he had this invitation to go to Dublin, to get out.

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• 20:53Speaker 03

  Well, Ruth, let me ask you about Dublin, first of all. Was everyone surprised that Messiah was premiered there?

• 21:00Speaker 06

  No, because Handel's music was already known and liked, and that was a very good reason for going there. Handel had a very good friend in the form of the first violinist at the Lord Lieutenant's Orchestra. And the fact that his music was known there was one reason why he might feel confident that he could premiere an oratorio there. There were two cathedrals with professional choirs. And as anybody who's sung in the choruses of Messiah knows, the choruses are not easy. So certainly having professional choirs would be useful. Dublin had built a new concert hall, neutral ground, neither a theatre where the sacred word might, as turned out to be the case, be objected to. It was a good concert hall. It had a good capacity.

• 21:43Speaker 06

  There was nothing like that in London. And also Dublin, like London, in fact, had a very strong ethos of philanthropy, which was very much needed because there had been a terrible famine, one of the many Irish famines in Dublin. And it was said that the Lord Lieutenant felt that it was time that there should be some uplifting public entertainment. Well, what better than Messiah? And a very good opportunity to raise money for charitable causes, which it successfully did. And I think if Handel had been really canny, he would have realized this was the way forward for Messiah, not to do it for profit. Though Jennings himself had said that he hoped that Handel would perform it as a one-off. For his own benefit, for his own profit.

• 22:24Speaker 06

  But this performance in Dublin for charity absolutely won everybody over, as well, of course, as the quality of the music and the pathos of Mrs. Kibber's singing.

• 22:33Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 22:34Speaker 06

  The dress rehearsal was so crowded that the newspaper advertisements for the actual premiere asked the ladies to come without hoops in their dresses and the gentlemen without swords so that there would be more space for the charitably inclined. Well, there were rave reviews, one of which said, "Words are wanting to express the exquisite delight it afforded to the admiring crowded audience. The sublime, the grand, and the tender adapted to the most elevated and moving words conspired to transport and charm the ravished heart and ear."

• 23:08Speaker 03

  Quite a review. Larry, have you had reviews like that? I should point out that you've performed in Messiah many, many occasions.

• 23:19Speaker 05

  Once I was called subtle and my wife laughed. But I have performed it many times. It's such a unique piece and talking about its place in history and its place in Handel's career, I think going back to what Donald was saying and where Handel was when he was composing the Messiah. If Handel had his druthers, I think, he was a man of the stage. He was, he loved operas. And if he could have, if it could have found a way for it to be profitable, he would have continued happily, I think, writing operas.

• 23:46Speaker 03

  So he went to Oratorio not because he was having some sort of spiritual enlightenment moment?

• 23:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, he was a spiritual man. He was a devout. He went to St. George's Hanover every week, from what I understand. However, it was simply a financial issue for him. And the financial and the artistic are always very close for Handel. And it simply was the case, and if anyone's interested, Alan Harris has done some wonderful work with the Bank of England, and she discovered that by 1739, Handel had withdrawn his last £50 from his cash account and put no more money in his bank account until 1743.

• 24:24Speaker 03

  I wondered about this because I noticed that he managed to buy a house in Brook Street in Mayfair in the 1720s. So.

• 24:32Speaker 06

  With respect, he didn't buy the house in Mayfair, he rented it, he never bought it. Yeah, and as for him being broke, this is a myth about why he had to go to Dublin with creditors snapping at his heels. And yes, putting on a whole season of performances, which is the way one did it then, walk-up tickets hadn't really been invented yet, was very expensive. So between twelve and sixteen thousand pounds, that's a lot. However, Handel had an annuity from the Crown of six hundred pounds a year, which we should multiply by two hundred. So he's got a hundred and twenty thousand pounds a year coming in. However, that is not nearly enough to have in reserve for a whole opera season. So, yes.

• 25:13Speaker 05

  Yes, he was subsidizing, he was subsidizing his own opera seasons. However, by the time he retired, and largely only through oratorio, he was a multimillionaire. So his oratorio seasons were very, very profitable. But it really was an accident, I think.

• 25:31Speaker 03

  Okay, we're trying to get a sense of why it grips the audience as much as it, much as it does. Why is Messiah different from so many other oratorios?

• 25:43Speaker 06

  It's unlike anything.

• 25:45Speaker 03

  Well, that's a, why is it unlike anything?

• 25:49Speaker 04

  I think one of the things is that whereas with the operas and most oratorios, you've got settings of metrical verse, rhymed verse and such like. What's happening with this is you have the different rhythms from the prayer book and from the Psalms, which means that you've got a particular flow to the English language, which is not like other things which have been written by poets, shall we say. So there is something that people recognize about the working of the English language, about religious texts, and Handel has this knack of getting just the right way of setting it to music.

• 26:33Speaker 04

  You know, to get the music to fit the mood and the sense of the words.

• 26:38Speaker 03

  Ruth.

• 26:38Speaker 06

  Picking up on what Donald has said, over sixty percent of the verses that Jennings uses from the Bible are from the Old Testament, much richer in imagery than the New Testament. And Handel was a genius at evoking emotion through his setting of imagery. And so much of the imagery in Messiah is active, a potter's vessel being smashed, a refiner's fire. This isn't pictorial, just it's energetic imagery. And often Handel also makes us think by giving musical variety to his depiction of a single image. So at the beginning, we have the contrast of darkness and light. Those that walked in darkness have seen a great light. But we

• 27:21Speaker 06

  get it twice over, in the words, and Handel varies it. One is melodic, the other is harmonic.

• 27:26Speaker 03

  I'm interested that you and Donald both talk about the text and imagery. Larry, what about the music?

• 27:33Speaker 05

  Well, the music, and I've thought about this a lot, why is the Messiah so different? And as a performer, I could say, there is no other piece of Handel, or any other piece for that matter, in which I feel like I have such a connection with the audience. And unlike an opera where a character's feeling an emotion and the audience is passively kind of observing that, maybe sympathetically feeling what I'm feeling, in this piece, and if I just go through my own, my own bits, I'm questioning the audience. But who may abide? If God be for us, who shall be against us? Oh, death, where is thy sting? A statement, I know that my Redeemer liveth. Asking the audience to do something, arise, get thee up into the high mountains, lift up thy voice, the trumpet shall sound, predicting, the

• 28:17Speaker 05

  trumpet shall sound, behold, a virgin shall conceive. So there's, it's very active engagement with the audience that almost demands a response from them.

• 28:27Speaker 03

  But I'm interested, you're also talking about the text. I'm really interested in why the music speaks to us as well. Is it because of the fusion between the text and the music? I mean, is this one of his best works musically, or is it?

• 28:43Speaker 06

  Maybe it's one of his richest musically, Don would be able to correct me on this. But unlike the operas and unlike a lot of the other oratorios, there's very little recitative, plain, simple, plot-type text. Speaking of the text. So it's very rich in arias and even richer in choruses. And also, it's quite concise, I think, in the individual numbers. So we're getting huge variety all the time. And one thing that Jennings understood, sorry, this is back to the words, but it's back to the structure that Handel is actually dealing with. Jennings understood that one of Handel's main compositional methods was progression by contrast. And that is all the way through Messiah. It may be a micro-contrast, as in a single number, as in, for example, "He was despisered",

• 29:28Speaker 06

  where the outer sections, as is normal in a broque aria, are based on the same music and the inner section is contrasting. It is a big contrast. So deep pathos followed by outrage and anger at what has happened to Christ. Or it could be a really major transition contrast, as in, for example, the end of part two, the beginning of part three. We go from the grandeur of Christ's dominance and triumph over the whole created universe in the Hallelujah chorus. Drums, trumpets, and so on, the whole chorus. And then we come down to "I know that my Redeemer lives", the voice of the single individual. And not only the single individual, but the worms in the body of the individual.

• 30:12Speaker 06

  So Jennings absolutely understood this gift of Handel's for making contrasts. And, yes, it is the words as well as the music.

• 30:20Speaker 05

  One almost has the sense the whole universe is there in this piece somehow, without being too hyperbolic. It has everything. It has the beginning, the end, the suffering individual, the community. It's uplifting. You can go through, you go through a whole range of emotions, as I certainly do as a performer and as a listener. There is something about the choruses, which are so, every single line in the choruses are very, very singable, almost in a soloistic sense. And there's something about it which makes people want to get up, get up on their feet. There's something. About it, which leads to these huge scratch messiahs, which is the Royal Albert Hall being filled with people with their dog-eared scores, singing along to the choruses. I think the choruses are so incredibly strong.

• 31:05Speaker 06

  It's a very communal work and it's a very generous work. I'm sorry, this is again the text, but the music bears it out.

• 31:11Speaker 03

  Larry.

• 31:12Speaker 05

  My favorite bit, other than, and really not the bits I sing, but it's, it is, "All we like sheep have gone astray." And it's, and it's example to me of how Handel is thinking dramatically, but in a different way, not in the sense of an opera or in the sense of a story. So, "All we like sheep have gone astray..." And there's these lines that kind of go nowhere. We have to... And it's, I just smile when I hear it. And you hear this frail humanity, but then, right when you least expect it, boom, F minor, and, and the, and all of a sudden, it crashes in, in the middle of these, these people

• 31:52Speaker 05

  going astray, these stray sheep. And it's so human and so sublime at the same time. And this is what I think is the most wonderful thing about Messiah and Handel in general, the very human and the very sublime, right next to each other.

• 32:07Speaker 03

  Ruth, you wanted to come in there, but you've already mentioned Jenin's spiritual dilemma and his depression. What are the sort of political and religious sensibilities in London around the time of the Messiah?

• 32:23Speaker 06

  I think Messiah can be understood, certainly from Jenin's point of view, as a response to, as the poet John Donne put it, "The new philosophy puts all in doubt." Religious certainties, religious beliefs, had been torpedoed from at least three directions. One is that God had been depersonalized. Isaac Newton had shown that the universe was not presided over by a God who notices everything we do, but a clockmaker operating by the laws of mathematics, who had wound it up, remote, transcendental. So how could such a big God be interested in me or you individuals, or in how we lead our lives and therefore how we get saved after death?

• 33:07Speaker 06

  Then there was, I suppose one could call it, a new respect for humanitarian morality, measured against which, how did we think of the god of the Old Testament, who after all was also the god of the New Testament, this partial unjust god who encouraged a rabble tribe coming out of Egypt, probably with pagan views in their spiritual makeup, wandering around in the desert. This was not a good father figure. And then there was actual biblical scholarship, which was showing that the Bible was not, after all, directly dictated by God to one person to write down. It was the work of many different hands.

• 33:48Speaker 06

  It had inconsistencies. If it was actually human work, why believe it? You know, what status did it have? So it was very easy to find grounds for skepticism. Religion was the main subject of publishing. Most people went to church. The sermon was the main public address system. So balancing these views was quite difficult for people. And there was great concern. I mean, if you look at what's actually published at the time, religious doubt is as worrying to the writers as, say, climate change or terrorism now, and it got at least as many column inches.

• 34:23Speaker 03

  Well, Larry, that brings me on to something else, which is that the Messiah was almost seen as too sacred by some and not sacred enough by others. How did Handel manage that, balancing that?

• 34:37Speaker 05

  Absolutely. I think it's always been viewed that way, and still is to some extent. Really interesting, one of the original reviews, someone kind of wrote into the newspaper and said, what a profanation of God's name and word is this. David said, how can we sing the Lord's song in a strange land? But sure, he would have thought it much stranger to have heard it sung in a playhouse. So the context where it was performed really incensed people of Christian faith. I'm going to fast forward and going to talk a little bit maybe about the soulful celebration, the Quincy Jones, Mervyn Warren version.

• 35:15Speaker 03

  You better contextualize.

• 35:17Speaker 05

  I will contextualize it in that Mervyn Warren had said that they were going to do a version of the trumpet's chow sound with Dizzy Gillespie and Wynton Marsalis. One of the great what ifs of history would have been if that happened. And Wynton Marsalis said, I don't want to do this because I don't want to desecrate the Messiah. So it was very interesting, even from someone from a jazz tradition, the Messiah is seen in so many ways as this great sacred cow. It is unique in Handel's oeuvre in the sense that it is all sacred words, right? It is not just an opera manquet, it's not just a Bible story, but Ruth, you have some...

• 35:54Speaker 03

  Ruth's dying to come in there.

• 35:55Speaker 06

  Well, no, actually, just to modify that a bit, yes, of course Messiah is unique in all sorts of ways, but it did have a predecessor in Handel's output. When Jennings is writing about sending Handel the libretto of Messiah, and Handel decides he won't do it for the time being because he wants something of a gayer turn, Jennings describes it as another scripture collection. And one reason that Handel didn't pick it up maybe was that their previous scripture collection had actually bombed, and that was Israel in Egypt, which Handel had done two years previously and had only managed three performances. That's all biblical text, but Messiah includes New Testament text. And I think that made a

• 36:37Speaker 06

  great difference in 18th century England. New Testament text was more sacred than Old Testament text. And I think that's the wonderful quotation that Larry just read us about desecrating God's word. Jennings was very careful to minimize actual words of Christ and actual naming of Christ, but it is in there, and of course, people would have recognized it.

• 36:59Speaker 03

  So Donald, is there a particular event where the church appears to approve of Messiah, having been a little skeptical before about it appearing in theatres?

• 37:11Speaker 04

  I think that there are various aspects to this. One is, of course, the big criticism of Messiah, which is always quoted, was one newspaper article. We don't know how representative that was.

• 37:24Speaker 05

  Could have just been one reader.

• 37:26Speaker 04

  It could just have been, I mean, it's a very eloquent, you know, statement of the theatre is not the right place to do this. And actually, Handel made it worse, or someone. At the top of the score, he writes Messiah and Oratorio. Unlike some other ones in the predecessors, you often have an oratorio or sacred drama. He doesn't do that. It's just Messiah and Oratorio. Leaving certain things a little bit vague. And what's worse is that in the newspaper, they thought, well, or whoever put the advert in the newspaper, the very first London performances, they thought, Missire, that's a bit dodgy.

• 38:11Speaker 04

  So there will be performed a new sacred oratorio. But that was worse, right? And that's what got the attacks on it, really. But we don't know really how representative the attacks were. First of all, because Handel then did two more performances. He didn't cancel Missire after the first one. He finished the season giving two more. That's sort of one aspect to that. And then the other was that there was this question about the bishops. There's a little hint in there about it was not approved by the bishops or whatever. It may be that it had gone to the inspector of stage plays.

• 38:53Speaker 03

  The censor, effectively.

• 38:55Speaker 04

  The censor. And something had happened there. But when we get to later on, and it's performed at the Founding Hospital, someone writes in his diary, oh, and there were bishops there. So the hearing of oratorio may sometime be thought of as orthodox. So the whole question of the church's attitude, this seems to be a few clergy, one sector of the London audience, but it didn't stop Handel doing it. And he treated it in his programmes just like any other work. He didn't actually do the same work every year. But if you look at what happens, he didn't stay away from it as if it was something

• 39:39Speaker 04

  that was too much trouble.

• 39:41Speaker 03

  Ruth, you mentioned that initially when Jennings sent his libretto, that Handel wanted to do something gayer, I think was was how he described it. Was he then convinced by the libretto when he started studying it? Did he realise that this was the basis of something great?

• 40:00Speaker 06

  I think the proof of the pudding, you know, since it became his most famous work. Yes, I mean, do we think he did it justice? Yes, we do. Not everybody did. In fact, Jennings was a bit cross about some of it. We don't know precisely what. He did say that he objected to the overture. We don't know why. And in fact, the overture is a stroke of genius harmonically in the whole scheme, harmonic scheme. But, you know, Handel came back to it again and again. And I don't think that was just a financial thing. And.

• 40:33Speaker 03

  It was an artistic issue that he came back at it again and again, presumably.

• 40:38Speaker 06

  Artistic, artistic.

• 40:40Speaker 03

  Because people liked it.

• 40:41Speaker 06

  Artistic and pragmatic nearly always go together. I mean, you could say that with with works that actually failed when he first did them and he came back to, as is said about one of his late operas, that he kept working at having to put on one side, coming back to. Why in the end, especially as it's not very popular now, did he come back to it? We might work out that he really had a fondness for some of it. But, I mean, Don can tell us about how many different versions Handel did. He must have been interested in this work to keep redoing it in different forms.

• 41:13Speaker 03

  We've spoken about the singers, but what about the orchestra? What about the orchestration of this piece which he kept revising?

• 41:21Speaker 04

  I think as a little prelude to that, I mean, I think that the situation was once Messiah was established, it got a regular slot in Handel's programme. He performed oratorios during the Lenten period and Messiah was always the last one before Easter. It had a particular place in the programme.

• 41:43Speaker 06

  Which was what Jennings intended, if I'm not interrupt. I mean, Jennings specifically said this was for Handel to perform in Passion Tide. And he always did.

• 41:51Speaker 03

  Larry, nowadays, we associate Handel's Messiah more with Christmas. In fact, I think it vies with Maria Carey for being the most played piece over the Christmas period. What's the connection with Christmas?

• 42:07Speaker 05

  I'm trying to remember, Donald, can you tell us when it started to become associated with Christmas?

• 42:13Speaker 04

  Dublin.

• 42:14Speaker 03

  Oh Dublin?

• 42:15Speaker 04

  Dublin.

• 42:16Speaker 03

  I.e. from the beginning?

• 42:17Speaker 04

  Not quite. After Handel had gone back to London, the person we referred to earlier, Matthew Duborg, the violinist, he lived sort of half the year in London and half the year in Dublin. And he was taking over charity performances. There were three charities in Dublin. And in fact, what happened was that for the Relief of Debtors, that charity, they regularly performed Messiah in December. That is how it became associated first with that season. But obviously, there were things in it that elsewhere, people also, mm-hmm, yeah, good idea. You know, it was taken up elsewhere.

• 43:00Speaker 05

  And I think certainly, the first part of Messiah is kind of the Christmasy part, which is why it's become, you know, it's the shepherds, there's very comforting pastoral music, and that's the kind of favorite first part. So for many people, it's become a Christmas piece and some, a kind of a bit of pablum that you can kind of just enjoy in Christmas. But in fact, as we know, parts two and three, there's an apocalyptic bit at the end. And there's a message in the Messiah, which is potentially very unsettling and very provocative. It is the crooked being made straight. You're comforting people who are in pain, your communities, and this has become, this

• 43:40Speaker 05

  can become a message to certain communities of liberation and of comfort and comforting my people, and you go out and do the comforting, not feel comfortable, right? Comfort you, my people, Isaiah, you comfort my people, don't feel comfortable. So it's not a comfortable piece, it is a call to bring comfort to others.

• 44:03Speaker 03

  Ruth?

• 44:04Speaker 06

  This is such a generous work, and it doesn't exclude people by being very focused on doctrine. You know, the difficult issue of the Trinity isn't there. Hell isn't there, the threatening parts of Christianity aren't there.

• 44:20Speaker 05

  There's no villain, is there really?

• 44:21Speaker 06

  There's no villain, there's no Satan.

• 44:23Speaker 03

  I was going to say, does the devil pop up? He doesn't really, does he?

• 44:26Speaker 06

  No, he popped up in Handel's first oratorio about salvation by Christ, which was La Resurrezione in Italy. And this is a point perhaps to mention, that whereas most people would have found Messiah unique and unprecedented, it wouldn't have been for Jennings, because he knew that Handel had composed an oratorio about salvation through Christ for the Catholic community of Italy, that he had composed a passion oratorio for his own home Lutheran community in Germany. And now Jennings would have thought, surely it's time that the greatest composer on earth composed an oratorio about salvation for us all, for the Anglican community of England.

• 45:08Speaker 03

  And Ruth, to finish up, can you tell me, do you think it's ultimately redemptive? A, and B, what is its lasting appeal? Because it's a remarkable piece of work.

• 45:21Speaker 06

  I think if you're Christian, it's redemptive. But it's interesting that people who aren't Christian find it uplifting, warming, encouraging, joyful.

• 45:33Speaker 03

  Which maybe answers the second part of my question.

• 45:35Speaker 06

  Well, but why? I mean, the interesting part of that question, yes, I mean, it continues to be welcomed by people all over the world, people in countries which are not Christian at all. Far-flung, Jennings would be so pleased that their word has gone forth unto the ends of the world. And that the propagation of the gospel is one of the, quote, evidences of Christianity, which Jennings is careful to include. And look, it's happened with Messiah, it all fits so neatly. The question, I suppose, can be put in terms of, how was Jennings composing his libretto to match Handel's strengths as a composer, to make Handel right at the top of his game? And, you know, we could talk for an hour at least just about that.

• 46:21Speaker 06

  But I think one way in which it succeeds is that it's Not a narrative, it's not a story, it's not the life of Christ. It's a statement of faith. And it's very elusive because it uses the Old Testament a lot rather than the gospel narrative. So the the suffering servant prophet in the Old Testament is used for the elusive account of Christ's career. But this leaves it so open for Handel to write emotive music for all the strong emotional directives in the work, you know, rejoice, he was despisered. These are as much emotional statements or directives as they are statements of faith.

• 47:04Speaker 03

  Larry.

• 47:05Speaker 05

  And I think finally, I just wanted to say, right as we're recording this, these messages of your warfare is accomplished. Why do the nations so furiously rage together? There's always something in the Messiah which you can connect to contemporary events.

• 47:22Speaker 03

  My thanks to Ruth Smith, Donald Burrows and Larry Zazzo. Next week, mathematics and the impossible perspectives of M C Escher. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Misha and his guests. Now, we're talking on our, we're talking on our podcast bit now where we can all start complaining about the bits we missed out. Donald.

• 47:51Speaker 04

  Well, no, just to pick that up. I mean, there is a tease about this. There's no certainty that anything in Messiah was written for M. S. Sibber.

• 47:58Speaker 05

  Absolutely.

• 47:59Speaker 04

  If you go back to the time it's written, we don't know what Handel was thinking about his future.

• 48:05Speaker 05

  But I think we know he was writing for a less skilled singer. He, because he didn't know what he was going to get in that one.

• 48:10Speaker 04

  I don't think so. I don't, it sort of doesn't make sense. Because here's him probably saying, hmm, not opera, perhaps. I'm going somewhere else. But he writes Messiah first, which is for four voices. It looks as if he's not thinking of any particular singer. And what's really odd about it is it's a very mobile work because it's just strings, trumpets and drums. The normal cues for obos to take part, the larger thing, you don't need a separate stage for obos. The normal thing that he does in operas and oratorios is in some places he writes, sends

• 48:54Speaker 04

  an oboe and then tutti forte. There's none of that in Messiah. He doesn't register anything apart from the strings. And this looks like this is a, as it were, mobile work that you can take anywhere. But then, the whole argument is then screwed up because after it, he writes Samson. Now, Samson is a London work that needs London-type soloists and heaven help us, it's got trombones in the orchestra. You know, you won't find them in Dublin. And he wrote that second, you know, so what on earth was he thinking during that summer period?

• 49:33Speaker 04

  But when he was writing these works, is he thinking Dublin, London, well, I've got something for both? You know, because in the seasons after this, when he's regularly in London, we have a pattern, which is what we get in forty-one, is that he uses the summer autumn to write two new works for the next season. That's what he's done, they're just very different from each other. I mean, what obviously made sense in the seventeen forties, you talk about August, September, you're living in Brook Street, the streets are quiet because everyone's off at their country houses. You know, you can have a quiet time, you can concentrate on writing the music.

• 50:15Speaker 04

  And that pattern is there with seventeen forty-one, but it doesn't quite make sense because half of it looks like this is something I might take. Had he had the invitation to Dublin at that stage? This is where I think Matthew D'Urborg, the violinist-

• 50:34Speaker 03

  He's the violinist in Dublin.

• 50:35Speaker 04

  Who's, lives half the time in London and half the time in Dublin. He has to go to Dublin because he's master of the state music, so he has to write the ode for the king's birthday that's done at Dublin Castle.

• 50:50Speaker 04

  So he's there basically during late autumn, winter, but he's in London for other times of the year. And it's almost certainly seems to me that he must have had these conversations with Handel about Dublin. And it's a different setup. Because what does Handel say about the venue? The music sounds great in this charming room. It isn't a theatre. You know, it's a completely different sort of ambience of a concert hall. That's what he finds when he gets there. How much did he know about it in the first place? You know, what was he thinking when he was writing Messiah? It's very difficult.

• 51:31Speaker 06

  It may be worth saying that we are stymied in some of our conjectures about Handel in that we have hardly any letters from him compared with, say, Mozart. And I think we have fewer than 50 letters.

• 51:45Speaker 03

  Do we know where that is? Is that because he just didn't write that?

• 51:47Speaker 04

  Perhaps they weren't kept or whatever.

• 51:50Speaker 06

  Better things to do.

• 51:51Speaker 04

  But as it happens, what we have is two excellent letters to Jennings.

• 51:54Speaker 06

  Yes, once he's there, but we don't have anything saying, I've decided to go to Dublin on the X of X because I've got these two works. And yes, and I mean, it's worth saying that, following on from what Don's saying about him having two completely different works on the stocks, and then he takes Messiah to Dublin. We should remember that he, as we've already said, he does two complete concert seasons, two times six works before he does Messiah. And Messiah could have been a speculative thing. You know, I know I've tried and tested these other works. Let's see how they go down in the concert series. If they go really well, I'll do Messiah as a standalone thing, which is what happens. But, you know, had there been trouble about getting sufficient choir and so on, he would

• 52:39Speaker 06

  already have done these other works and could then go home much richer than when he came to Ireland.

• 52:44Speaker 05

  And I think it's worth saying, going back to this question, why is Messiah so popular? There's a practical reason. Handel had at least 10 versions of Messiah.

• 52:52Speaker 03

  I was going to say, when did he start? When did that happen? Almost immediately he was?

• 52:57Speaker 05

  Well, I suppose year on year. Right.

• 53:00Speaker 04

  Well, no, I mean, he has to. No, he has to, first of all, adapt to this business of having cathedral choir singers.

• 53:07Speaker 03

  Of different spaces and different.

• 53:09Speaker 04

  So that therefore Thou shalt break them turns into a resuscitative because he doesn't have a good enough singer to to do that. So some of them are practical, some of them are stimulated by a new singer. You can't go too far with this because the the overall shape of the work doesn't change. You know, what he's doing is slotting in different things in different places. There's one area which does go different, how beautiful are the feet? Which is very complicated because as done by Jennings in the libretto. It's how beautiful are the feet of them?

• 53:50Speaker 04

  Referring back to the chorus because it's referring to the company of the preachers, you know, going out. How beautiful are the feet of them? And I think in Dublin, someone said to him, you know, that bit of Isaiah, you could use. How beautiful are the feet of him to refer to Messiah? And so what he does in Dublin is to set a subtly different text. How beautiful are the are the feet of him? And I think that's one of the things that Jennings doesn't like. He said, that's not what I meant, you know.

• 54:25Speaker 05

  I mean, Handel, I think, was a very practical composer. He was always responding to the singers he had, to the forces he had. I've done Messiah at least over a hundred performances and I don't think I've ever done it in exactly the same version. Every conductor, especially in part three, how long or not to make it? You can make it shorter, you can make it longer, depending on the singers you have and. Uh, what you like about certain movements, there's certain movements that were written for soprano, but also were performed for alto. I've done a two alto version of He Shall Feed His Flock, which is very, very beautiful, but very rare. And that adaptability, also in terms of forces, and we didn't really talk about the 19th century where you had these mega messiahs, messiahs on steroids with, you know.

• 55:09Speaker 05

  Hundreds in the choir and they got bigger and bigger and bigger and then with the historical performance movement, we've done it with very small forces. I've done it both ways and it's exciting in both ways. It's sublime in both cases.

• 55:22Speaker 03

  You also mentioned the winter Marsalis saying that he didn't want to desecrate the work and you briefly referred to the Quincy Jones soulful celebration. I listened to that in preparation for the premiere. I have to say it's a spectacular piece of work because there seems to be a commonality between what Handel was trying to do and the tradition of gospel in particular, but also preaching.

• 55:50Speaker 05

  I think let's go back to comfort, right? This is a message of comfort to a community, a formerly enslaved community. We're talking about the Israelites here and this is a very powerful message to communities of color, especially formerly enslaved communities. And interesting thing, Mervyn Warren said, who was one of the main arrangements, he said, "We hear Messiah and it's lofty and regal and elegant, but Handel was scorned in his day." That's really interesting. And we think of Handel as being this absolute rock star, but he did have some pretty rocky stages in his career. And right when he was composing Messiah was potentially one of his very low points.

• 56:32Speaker 06

  And certainly in the mythology about Handel, it becomes absolutely, as you say, you're bottom for Handel and you know, he's, he's ill, wrong, he's broke, wrong. And you know, he, he goes without food for the three weeks that he's composing it. You know, that's the myth and it's a very attractive one.

• 56:48Speaker 03

  Because I read the Stefan Zweig.

• 56:50Speaker 06

  There you go. That's exactly the source. Yes.

• 56:51Speaker 03

  And that was, he was, he was ill, he was broke. The people were chasing him at the door for his debts.

• 56:58Speaker 05

  But that narrative is very powerful for people, isn't it?

• 57:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, it is.

• 57:02Speaker 04

  But also I think that if people don't know the work, you get this myth that it might end with the Hallelujah chorus.

• 57:10Speaker 03

  It's true.

• 57:11Speaker 04

  It doesn't, you know, and in many ways, in terms of composition.

• 57:17Speaker 04

  The best arias are in part three.

• 57:19Speaker 05

  Well, certainly, I know that my deemer live up, you're missing out on something.

• 57:23Speaker 04

  And also, if God be for us, which often is, if you look at the actual musical composition, what he's writing, it's an extremely good piece. He actually takes, as it were, well, actually, both of those are interesting because whereas the operatic darkapo aria, A, B, you know, as he's working from biblical texts, the two big arias there are three verse texts, they're in three sections, and everyone moves on from the previous verse, you know, that's something I think that doesn't happen in any of the other arias. There's something, something different.

• 58:04Speaker 03

  But on the Hallelujah choruses, presumably the reason why that has become so popular is it's a big old sing-along. And, you know, people do feel uplifted by that communal experience.

• 58:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, perhaps it's worth going in here that the flash mob Hallelujah choruses, do we know what flash mob choruses are?

• 58:24Speaker 03

  Flash mobs are choruses that appear apparently spontaneously in

• 58:29Speaker 06

  Exactly, in shopping malls, and yes, yes, yes.

• 58:32Speaker 03

  But there are hundreds of iPhones filming the whole thing.

• 58:35Speaker 06

  So if you look on YouTube at flash mob Hallelujah choruses and count up the number of views that the main ones have had, it comes to over 70 million, which is more than the population of Britain.

• 58:51Speaker 03

  Time for a cup of tea.

• 58:54Speaker 03

  In Our Time with Misha Glenny is produced by Simon Tillotson, and it's a BBC Studios production. Some events have far-reaching consequences. The white noise, everything goes black, and apparently I was screaming. That's the moment that my life changed forever.

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