Among the many pedestaled titans of Western music, George Frideric Handel was the primary composer whose work not solely rapidly grew to become celebrated in his personal time however has been heralded ever since. Earlier than Handel, no actual “repertoire” of tolerating music had existed. Composers have been thought of craftsmen in an evanescent artwork, their creations commonly outmoded by more energizing work. Most music that bought carried out was comparatively new. Claudio Monteverdi, the preeminent European composer of the early seventeenth century, was largely forgotten inside a long time of his demise, in 1643. Johann Sebastian Bach amounted to hardly greater than a cult determine after he died, in 1750, his main works unplayed properly into the following century.
When Handel died, at 74 in 1759, he was already properly fortified for posterity. A star since his 20s, he had been the topic of grand portraits and was depicted as Orpheus in a 1738 statue in London’s Vauxhall Gardens. Whereas Bach earned an unmarked grave in Leipzig and one obituary 4 years after he died, Handel was buried in Westminster Abbey.
Handel stands aside in one other manner from the musical giants who’ve since been rediscovered and enshrined: Every of them is famend for an array of often-performed items. His stature is owed above all to a single work—the oratorio Messiah. Among the many towering masterpieces of Western music, the Messiah occupies a particular place: It’s acquainted to extra folks than some other work of its variety. Bach’s B Minor Mass and St. Matthew Ardour and Monteverdi’s Vespers are comparable amongst supreme choral items, however they aren’t carried out at your church or the highschool down the road. The Messiah usually is, trotted out throughout the Christmas season by newbie {and professional} choruses across the globe. A good proportion of the world in all probability is aware of the “Hallelujah” refrain properly sufficient to sing alongside.
This skewed acclaim is unfair to Handel, who was as brilliantly prolific as any composer who ever lived. However it is usually a tribute to the overwhelming impact of the Messiah, which is a feat of sustained inspiration arguably unsurpassed within the canon of Western classical music. “Consolation ye, consolation ye my Individuals,” the libretto opens, pulling us in originally, its movement of compelling melody and stirring choruses enthralling us for the following two hours and leaving us singularly exalted.
Causes for the Messiah’s enduring energy are manifold, although definitely they start with the music itself, which manages to affix the lofty and the populist, as does all of Handel’s work. In Each Valley: The Determined Lives and Troubled Instances That Made Handel’s Messiah, Charles King takes his cue from the oratorio’s potential to convey, period after period, “a transporting sense that one thing cosmic and profound was at stake, even when the cares of this world occurred to intrude.” King, who launched into the e-book throughout the pandemic, discovered renewed consolation within the Messiah’s arc, particularly its message of hope in tough occasions, beginning with these first phrases: “Consolation ye.” He additionally felt moved to recuperate “the Messiah’s sheer weirdness” by exploring its origins within the murkier currents of what’s remembered because the age of cause.
King, a professor of worldwide affairs and authorities at Georgetown College and a splendid author, has made a specialty of standard cultural historical past. A meticulous researcher, he delivers surprises, and his prologue is one in all them:
Some days he would wander the manor home in a clean stupor, barely in a position to carry a foot … He was so afraid of the chilly that he lay beneath six blankets in winter and 4 in summer time. He by no means married, fathered no kids, and made distant enemies extra readily than shut pals.
These wonderful and vivid sentences should not, because the reader expects, about Handel. They’re about his exquisitely odd and obsessive acolyte, Charles Jennens, the Messiah’s librettist, a determine few listeners are conscious of.
King proceeds to relay extra about Jennens’s inside life and inventive struggles than about Handel’s, of which firsthand experiences are skimpy. Jennens’s story is certainly fascinating. A wealthy squire and crabbily conservative political dissident, he was “emotionally tormented,” however nonetheless managed to be a big artwork collector, Shakespeare scholar, and patron of music. King’s resurrection of Jennens’s essential position, laboring in personal over a libretto that he hoped would encourage “the Prodigious” (as he referred to as Handel) to new musical heights, helps illuminate how uncommon Handel’s oratorio was and stays.
Right here is the “weirdness” that King emphasizes. An oratorio is basically an unstaged opera, a narrative advised in music. The Messiah is a group of gnomic scriptural passages which are prophetic in import however provide no story in any respect. “It has nothing that could possibly be referred to as a plot,” King observes. “Its kind is extra like that of a discovered poem, constructed from Bible verses which have been rearranged and, right here and there, edited” by a depressive man struggling to seek out his manner towards hope and a return to a pre-Enlightenment imaginative and prescient of faith. Jennens, for whom religion and kingship have been imbued with thriller, endorsed the legitimacy of the deposed Stuart monarchy and rejected the rational Deist perspective. For his half, Handel—a usually agreeable although fiercely proud man, witty and gluttonous and gouty, and given to polylingual swearing—was in all probability detached to such political and sectarian issues. However he knew an excellent librettist when he noticed one.
The type of King’s e-book is like an intricate collage, gathering very completely different characters with the purpose of concentrating on the encompass, the context. Not all the figures are immediately linked to Handel, and at occasions King’s deep background verges on the tangential. However an analogous storyline hyperlinks his solid of characters: They’re dealing with dire predicaments (of extensively various types), in a time of political flux and worry, all of them managing to hold on—a spirit of perseverance that runs by means of the Messiah.
For instance, King delves at size into the outlandish marital travails of the contralto Susannah Cibber, whom Handel turned to as he rounded up singers for the Messiah premiere, in 1742 in Dublin, a propitious convergence for each. We be taught, as a scandalized public did, all about her husband’s outrageous abusiveness, her lover’s and household’s efforts to guard her, the 2 lawsuits her husband filed in opposition to the lover (a creditor whom he’d initially welcomed right into a ménage à trois). Cibber’s well-known struggling lent her musical lamentations within the oratorio a uncooked energy—“He was despised and rejected of Males,” she sang, “a Man of Sorrows, and acquainted with Grief”—for a shocked opening-night viewers and in a lot of her performances after.
Different lives and points are extra peripherally entangled in King’s story of the Messiah’s emergence. A distressing chapter on the British slave commerce, to which Handel had a minor monetary connection, options an African Muslim named Ayuba Diallo who finally ends up enslaved in Maryland. Towards all odds, he finally succeeds in returning to Bundu, in West Africa. His episodic journey consists of an interlude in London, the place “it could not have been uncommon to see Diallo strolling previous Jennens’s townhouse in Queen Sq.”—although who is aware of if the 2 ever met. A number of occasions in his absorbing narratives, King reaches for these types of oblique associations.
And what about Handel’s evolution, private and musical? In any case, he’s the composer who made the Messiah, even when he didn’t do it alone, or have the originating concept for it. Handel generally will get a bit misplaced alongside the way in which in Each Valley. After a well-stocked chapter concerning the oratorio and its premiere, King understandably—he isn’t a musician or musicologist—doesn’t commit a lot area to exploring the particulars of Handel’s model and popularity, or the particular place of the Messiah in his work as a complete.
The compositions that Handel churned out at a exceptional fee have been concurrently demand-driven and distinctive, convention-bound and transcendent. Working inside the musical language of his time, he may conjure any impact: dancingly energetic, profound, aristocratic, folksy, eerie, heart-filling, comedian. He may do all of it, and he had an uncanny sense of easy methods to seize an viewers. (His effervescent Water Music is a well-known instance.) Few may work quicker; that Handel wrote the Messiah in 24 days has lengthy stirred speak of divine inspiration, although in reality he was recognized to prove a three-hour opera in three weeks. Some have speculated that he was manic-depressive and wrote when he was manic. Indisputably, his pace was abetted by liberal borrowing from his personal work and beneficiant pilfering from different composers’ (not unlawful in pre-copyright occasions, however nonetheless considered a bit cheesy). 4 Messiah choruses are lifted from his earlier items, none of them sacred. About his plagiarisms, Handel was unapologetic, saying roughly that these folks didn’t know what to do with their stuff.
He wasn’t fallacious: Handel the enthusiastic copier was additionally a pioneer in creating the English oratorio. Born in Halle, Germany, in 1685, he settled in England in 1712 and focused on the style of Italian opera seria, a London craze whose reputation later pale. Going through chapter by the 1730s, Handel revived his profession by turning from seria—courtly leisure filled with mannered drama—to the pared-down English oratorio. Making use of his operatic abilities and dramatic instincts, he transfigured this new musical style with outcomes that the majority choral composers you can identify—Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms—are manifestly indebted to. In contrast, the artificiality of his operas, the main a part of his output, has saved them from turning into repertoire staples.
In all of his work, Handel was among the many biggest, most irresistible of tunesmiths. Like Bach, he believed in a union of phrase, that means, and music. To that finish, Bach usually pursued esoteric symbolism and numerology, with vocal strains crossing within the music when Christ is talked about, and the like. Handel wished his illustration to be extra on the sleeve. “Their land introduced forth frogs,” the soprano sings in his oratorio Israel in Egypt, to an accompaniment that’s hopping, hopping, hopping. When the refrain proclaims, “There got here all method of flies,” the strings escape in buzzing.
In these locations, Handel performs the plagues of Egypt for laughs, however he does the identical type of factor in earnest within the Messiah. “Each Valley shall be exalted,” the tenor sings in a robustly rising line, which sinks for “and each Mountain and Hill made low.” Then “the Crooked” (jagged line), “straight” (held word), “and the tough Locations” (jagged once more), “plain” (lengthy held word). Every phrase and picture of the textual content is painted like this.
In the meantime, you hear Handel lifting the music to mighty climaxes time and again, and it by no means will get outdated.
“For unto us a Baby is born, unto us a Son is given,” the refrain sings, tossing that bit forwards and backwards in dancing counterpoint. Momentum begins to collect, the notes climbing, the rhythm bouncing us joyously alongside: “And the Authorities shall be upon his Shoulder; and his Title shall be referred to as.” Then we arrive at spine-tingling proclamations: “Fantastic, Counsellor, The Mighty God, The Eternal Father, The Prince of Peace,” as strings race ecstatically above. What Beethoven, who thought of Handel his solely musical superior, significantly admired was his potential to get dazzling results with easy means. As each composers knew, easy is tough.
Among the many presumably apocryphal tales about Handel, one has him commenting to his servant, upon ending the “Hallelujah” refrain, “I did assume I did see all Heaven earlier than me, and the good God Himself seated on His throne, with His firm of Angels.” The truth is, nothing signifies that he thought of the Messiah his magnum opus on the time, or anticipated that this piece—with its grandeur, its gravitas, its energy to be emotionally transferring at almost each second—could be his ticket to immortality. Well-known although he was, Handel was nonetheless a jobbing composer, and composers had by no means been endowed with an immortal aura.
But he was wanting to share an awestruck response to the Dublin premiere. As King experiences, Handel wrote a letter just a few months after the occasion, enclosing an Irish bishop’s verdict: “The entire is past any factor I had a notion of until I Learn and heard it,” the cleric reported. “It appears to be a Species of Musick completely different from some other.”
The letter was to Jennens, the Messiah’s librettist. Handel wished him to know “how properly Your Messiah was obtained in that Nation.” One of the crucial impressed composers of all time may need been conscious, in some sense, that he had transcended himself, however he couldn’t declare to know the alchemy that had labored this surprise. Within the spirit of his oratorio, the purpose of his letter to Jennens appears to have been to not blow his personal horn however to present consolation to his companion within the endeavor.
*Lead picture credit score: Illustration by Paul Spella. Sources: Heritage Photos / Getty; Photo12 / UIG / Getty; Geoffrey Clements / Corbis / VCG / Getty; Print Collector / Getty; Lebrecht Music & Arts / Alamy; CBW / Alamy; Album / Alamy.
This text seems within the December 2024 print version with the headline “The Weirdest Hit in Historical past.”
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