Come Again to Days of Joy Handel

Handel Messiah — George Frideric Handel (at age 64 in 1749) produced works, including *Messiah* that dazzled even the musical titans who would succeed him. Age Fotostock

George Frideric Handel's Messiah was originally an Easter offering. It burst onto the phase of Musick Hall in Dublin on April xiii, 1742. The audience swelled to a record 700, every bit ladies had heeded pleas past direction to habiliment dresses "without Hoops" in lodge to make "Room for more company." Handel's superstar status was not the only draw; many also came to glimpse the contralto, Susannah Cibber, so embroiled in a scandalous divorce.

The men and women in attendance sat mesmerized from the moment the tenor followed the mournful cord overture with his piercing opening line: "Condolement ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God." Soloists alternated with wave upon moving ridge of chorus, until, most the midway point, Cibber intoned: "He was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief." Then moved was the Rev. Patrick Delany that he leapt to his feet and cried out: "Adult female, for this be all thy sins forgiven thee!"

At present, of grade, Messiah is a fixture of the Christmas season. Woe to the concert hall in the U.s. or Britain that fails to schedule the piece around the holiday, when, also, CD sales and Web downloads of the oratorio soar. For many apprentice choirs, the work is the heart of their repertoire and the high point of the year. In nigh of Handel's oratorios, the soloists dominate and the choir sings only cursory choruses. Simply in Messiah, says Laurence Cummings, director of the London Handel Orchestra, "the chorus propels the work forward with great emotional impact and uplifting messages."

This year, the 250th anniversary of Handel'south expiry, has been a boon to the Baroque composer and his best-known work. The commemoration has centered in London, where Handel lived for 49 years, until his death in 1759 at historic period 74. The BBC has broadcast all of his operas, more than forty in total, and every one of the composer's keyboard suites and cantatas was performed during the almanac London Handel Festival, which included concerts at St. George's Hanover Square church, where Handel worshiped, and at the Handel Firm Museum ("See Handel Slept Here,"), longtime residence of the man that Ludwig van Beethoven himself, citing Messiah, said was the "greatest composer that ever lived."

He was born in Halle, Frg, into a religious, affluent household. His father, Georg Händel, a historic surgeon in northern Germany, wanted his son to study the law. But an acquaintance, the Duke of Weissenfels, heard the prodigy, and so barely 11, playing the organ. The nobleman'southward recognition of the male child'due south genius likely influenced the doctor's decision to allow his son to become a musician. Past xviii, Handel had composed his start opera, Almira, initially performed in Hamburg in 1705. During the next five years, he was employed as a musician, composer and conductor at courts and churches in Rome, Florence, Naples and Venice, too as in Germany, where the Elector of Hanover, the future King George I of England, was briefly his patron.

Handel'south restless independence contrasted him with the other great composer of the age, Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), whom he did non meet. "Bach never moved out of the cocoon of courtroom patronage or church building employment," says Harry Bicket, a conductor, harpsichordist and London-based manager of The English Concert chamber orchestra. Handel, on the other paw, rarely attached himself to whatsoever benefactor for long, although he would compose court music when asked. He wrote The Water Music (1717), i of the few of his pieces other than Messiah recognizable to the boilerplate concertgoer, for George I, to exist performed for the monarch as His Majesty's barge navigated through a London culvert on a summer evening. "Merely [Handel] didn't hang effectually palace antechambers waiting for his lordship or royal highness," says Jonathan Keates, author of Handel: The Man and his Music.

Such free-spirited musical entrepreneurship was more than possible in London, to which Handel moved permanently in 1710. A commercial boom underpinned by overseas merchandise had created a thriving new merchant and professional class that bankrupt the monopoly on cultural patronage by the nobility. Adding zest to the London music scene were rivalries that split up the audition into two wide musical camps. On one side were defenders of the more conventional Italian opera style, who idolized the composer Giovanni Bononcini (1670-1747) and brought him to London. Enthusiasts of Handel'due south new Italian operas cast their lot with the High german-born composer. The partisanship was captured in a 1725 verse past poet John Byrom:

Some say compared to Bononcini,
That Mynheer Handel'due south but a Ninny;
Others aver, that he to Handel
Is scarcely fit to concur a Candle

Increasingly elaborate opera productions led to ascent costs due, in part, to hiring musicians and singers from Italy. "It was generally agreed Italian singers were better trained and more talented than local products," notes Christopher Hogwood, a Handel biographer and founder of the Academy of Aboriginal Music, the London period-instrument orchestra he directs. Merely beautiful voices were often accompanied past mercurial temperaments. At a 1727 opera performance, Handel's leading sopranos, Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni, really came to blows onstage, with their partisans cheering them on. "Shame that ii such well-bred ladies should call [each other] Bitch and Whore, should scold and fight," John Arbuthnot (1667-1735), the mathematician and satirist, wrote in a pamphlet describing the increasing hysteria of London's opera world.

In the 1730s, the emotional and financial toll of producing operas, as well as changing audience tastes, contributed to Handel'south growing interest in sacred oratorios—which required neither elaborate scenery nor strange stars—including, eventually, Messiah. "With oratorios, Handel could be more his own main," says Keates.

Despite his fame, Handel'southward inner life remains enigmatic. "We know far more than well-nigh the environment in which he lived and the sort of people he knew than well-nigh his individual life," Keates adds. Part of the explanation lies in the dearth of personal letters. We must rely on contradictory descriptions of Handel by admirers and detractors, whose opinions were colored by the musical rivalries of 1700s London.

Although he neither married nor was known to accept had a long-lasting romantic relationship, Handel was pursued by diverse immature women and a leading Italian soprano, Vittoria Tarquini, according to accounts by his contemporaries. Intensely loyal to friends and colleagues, he was capable of appalling temper outbursts. Because of a dispute over seating in an orchestra pit, he fought a well-nigh-fatal duel with a young man composer and musician, Johann Mattheson, whose sword thrust was blunted past a metal button on Handel'south coat. However the ii remained close friends for years later on. During rehearsals at a London opera business firm with Francesca Cuzzoni, Handel grew so infuriated by her refusal to follow his every instruction that he grabbed her by the waist and threatened to hurl her out an open window. "I know well that you lot are a real she-devil, but I will have you know that I am Beelzebub!" he screamed at the terrified soprano.

Handel, who grew increasingly obese over the years, certainly had an intimidating physique. "He paid more attention to [food] than is condign to any man," wrote Handel's earliest biographer, John Mainwaring, in 1760. Creative person Joseph Goupy, who designed scenery for Handel operas, complained that he was served a meager dinner at the composer'south home in 1745; only afterward did he discover his host in the side by side room, secretly gorging on "claret and French dishes." The irate Goupy produced a caricature of Handel at an organ keyboard, his confront contorted into a pig snout, surrounded past fowl, wine bottles and oysters strewn at his feet.

"He may take been mean with food, but not with money," says Keates. Amassing a fortune through his music and shrewd investments in London's burgeoning stock market place, Handel donated munificently to orphans, retired musicians and the sick. (He gave his portion of his Messiah debut proceeds to a debtors' prison and hospital in Dublin.) A sense of humanity imbues his music as well—a point oftentimes made by conductors who compare Handel with Bach. But where Bach's oratorios exalted God, Handel was more than concerned with the feelings of mortals. "Even when the subject field of his work is religious, Handel is writing about the human response to the divine," says conductor Bicket. Nowhere is this more than apparent than in Messiah. "The feelings of joy yous become from the Hallelujah choruses are 2d to none," says conductor Cummings. "And how can anybody resist the Amen chorus at the end? Information technology will always lift your spirits if you are feeling down."

Handel composed Messiah in an astounding interlude, somewhere betwixt three and 4 weeks in Baronial and September 1741. "He would literally write from morning to night," says Sarah Bardwell of the Handel House Museum in London. The text was prepared in July by the prominent librettist, Charles Jennens, and was intended for an Easter performance the following twelvemonth. "I hope [Handel] will lay out his whole Genius & Skill upon it, that the Limerick may excel all his former Compositions, as the Discipline excels every other Subject," Jennens wrote to a friend.

There were several reasons for the option of Dublin for Messiah's debut. Handel had been downcast by the apathetic reception that London audiences had given his works the previous season. He did non want to risk some other critical failure, peculiarly with such an unorthodox slice. Other Handel oratorios had strong plots anchored past dramatic confrontations between leading characters. But Messiah offered the loosest of narratives: the first part prophesied the birth of Jesus Christ; the second exalted his sacrifice for humankind; and the last section heralded his Resurrection.

Dublin was one of the fastest-growing, most prosperous cities in Europe, with a wealthy elite eager to display its sophistication and the economic clout to phase a major cultural event. "And then information technology was a dandy advantage for Handel to make the voyage to Dublin to try out his new work, and so bring it back to London," says Keates, comparing the composer to Broadway producers who tried out plays in New Haven before staging them in New York Metropolis.

Messiah'southward success in Dublin was in fact quickly repeated in London. It took fourth dimension for Messiah to find its niche equally a Christmas favorite. "There is and then much fine Easter music—Bach's St. Matthew Passion, well-nigh especially—and then little bully sacral music written for Christmas," says Cummings. "Simply the whole first part of Messiah is near the nativity of Christ." By the early 19th century, performances of Messiah had become an even stronger Yuletide tradition in the United States than in Uk.

There is trivial incertitude about Handel's own fondness for the work. His annual do good concerts for his favorite charity—London's Foundling Infirmary, a dwelling for abandoned and orphaned children—ever included Messiah. And, in 1759, when he was blind and in failing health, he insisted on attention an Apr six performance of Messiah at the Theatre Regal in Covent Garden. 8 days later, Handel died at home.

His total manor was assessed at 20,000 pounds, which made him a millionaire past modern standards. He left the bulk of his fortune to charities and much of the remainder to friends, servants and his family unit in Germany. His ane posthumous present to himself was £600 for his own monument at Westminster Abbey, final resting identify for British monarchs and their most accomplished subjects. 3 years later on Handel's death, the monument by French sculptor Louis François Roubillac, was installed.

Abroad, Handel's reputation—and that of his all-time-known composition—only connected to abound. Mozart paid Handel the supreme compliment of reorchestrating Messiah in 1789. Even Mozart, however, confessed himself to exist humble in the confront of Handel's genius. He insisted that whatsoever alterations to Handel's score should not be interpreted as an try to ameliorate the music. "Handel knows meliorate than any of us what volition make an result," Mozart said. "When he chooses, he strikes like a thunderbolt."

Classical music addict Jonathan Kandell is based in New York City.