Following on last night's splendid performance of Handel's immortal oratorio (see previous post), it seemed like a good time for me to reflect on my own long-running history with this work.
Messiah forms one of the earliest cornerstones of my lifelong love affair with the whole world of classical music. I grew up hearing Handel's work in all its majestic, playful, solemn diversity of style. Excerpts were sung at our annual pre-Christmas extended family party. Some of the adults sang selected solos, and the group joined in choruses.
It was talked about at home too, due to my father's decades-long membership of the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir (over 45 years). In time, my older sister, my brother, and I all took singing lessons and all took a turn singing in the Choir as well.
By now, we of the younger generation were singing some of those wonderful solo arias at the annual family Messiah fest. In one year, we actually worked our way through pretty much the whole of the first part, before wrapping up as always with the Hallelujah chorus. I've continued singing them all my life, sometimes with organ accompaniment, sometimes accompanying myself on the piano (we'll pass lightly over the hit-and-miss quality of my piano playing). Trying to sing Handel's most florid coloratura while sitting down and playing is an interesting challenge!
Mind you, I did achieve an odd distinction when I joined the Mendelssohn Choir myself for one season in 1977-78. We'd been intensively rehearsing and taping a lengthy work by Murray Schafer for the CBC, and the taping sessions ran right into mid-December. Thus, there was time for only one orchestral rehearsal before the annual Messiah performances, and no time at all to crack our scores before that one rehearsal. And right there was when the Toronto winter weather did me in, and I came down with a cold, losing my voice. I must be one of the very few members of the Choir, perhaps the only one in the last 90 years, who never actually sang Messiah with the Choir!
An odd side note: the idea that the Choir can do Messiah on next to no rehearsal got so ingrained in my thinking from this episode that I actually did a double-take when I saw in social media how many rehearsals were held with choir and orchestra for this week's concerts. Their rehearsing definitely paid off!
Looking back, I realize now that my family were participating in an old tradition of performing classical music at home. For many people, perhaps most people, this has died out as the arrival of recordings has made it unnecessary, since you no longer need to play or sing to hear the music. A pity. But no matter what, for me (as for so many other music lovers), Christmas has always meant Messiah.
And this is odd, because Handel really composed the work to be performed in the Lenten and Easter seasons, and always and only performed it then. Messiah is odd in another way, too, among Handel's output of English oratorios, a form he basically invented. All of his other oratorios are dramatic narratives, concert operas in all but name. Even Israel in Egypt, although it lacks dramatic characters, is a thoroughly dramatic and narrative work.
Messiah is another matter altogether: a purely Biblical text, meditating on the whole arc of the Biblical story of Christ from the annunciation of his birth to his final revelation as the enthroned Son of God at the last day of the world. The only narrative in the entire work comes in the four brief recitatives of the Nativity scene, leading up to the angelic chorus, Glory to God.
I'm certainly not alone in the English-speaking world in finding that Handel's immortal inspiration has a powerful grip. Last night, I was brought to tears by the understated but deeply-felt Behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto His sorrow as sung by Michael Colvin. I've never heard it given with a greater sense of the meaning of the words, or with greater emotional intensity.
For many people, the climax of Messiah comes at the end of the second part with the majestic Hallelujah chorus. Handel wrote in a letter that, when he was working on the score of Messiah, "I did think I did see all of heaven open before me, and the great God himself." It's common to assume that these words applied to the Hallelujah and perhaps they did.
For me, though, the unfailing sense of the heavens opening comes in the majestic leading chords of the final choral fresco, Worthy is the Lamb that was slain, and then again a few minutes later in the first fortissimo outburst and the final massive cadences of the concluding Amen -- and the power of this music brings me to tears once more, every time I hear it.
There have been times in my life when I have grown tired of Messiah, when I've felt as if it's finally losing its grip on me. Bach's beautiful but very different Christmas Oratorio claims an equal share of my time when Christmas rolls around. But then, I sit down to listen at home, or (as last night) attend a top-notch live performance, and all that familiar music unfolds its beauty for me once more. And then the final chorus opens the gates of heaven, and I find that I've fallen in love with Messiah all over again.
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