The miracle of Messiah’s composition, then, is not how rapidly Handel wrote the music, but how comprehensively astute, finely-detailed, and consistently powerful it is. Enthusiastic Romanticists of later eras would attribute this swiftness to divine inspiration, though Handel composed other works of comparable size, more secular in nature, just as swiftly. Handel completed the entire score in only 24 days. In some places, Handel borrowed and modified music he had written for other occasions, adapting it to Messiah’s texts and framework. Unusually for Handel, he started at the beginning of the texts and worked consecutively through them, tracing and accentuating through music the powerful dramatic arc that Jennens had created. He sent the libretto to Handel in July 1741, and Handel began setting it to music the following month. (Handel couldn’t win-when Messiah was later scheduled to be performed in Westminster Abbey, other members of the clergy declared it blasphemous for a public entertainment to take place in a consecrated church!)īut Jennens outdid himself with Messiah, compiling a libretto with profound thematic coherence and an enhanced sensitivity to dramatic and musical structure. And having operatic singers and actors declaim scripture in a theater was, according to some, akin to sacrilege. Even more controversially, the lyrics for Messiah were drawn directly from scripture, in a collation by Charles Jennens, an aristocrat and musician/poet of modest talent who had worked with Handel on a couple of earlier oratorios. A number of critics and clergy considered it blasphemous for a “theatrical entertainment” to be based on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. Principally at issue was the oratorio’s theme. Though the English audiences had for several decades embraced Handel as their favorite composer, that admiration was no guarantee of this work’s success. He had penned only a handful of works in the genre, some of which (especially Israel in Egypt, from 1739) were initially failures. Even with Messiah, though, Handel was still finding his footing in oratorio. To help pay the bills Handel turned to oratorio, a genre musically related to opera but without staging and costumes. The opera ventures he instituted, and which had thrived for nearly two decades, were waning in popularity and about to fail. George Frideric Handel wrote Messiah in the late summer of 1741, when his future as a composer was in real jeopardy.
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