Viewed from ground level, peering upwards, Handel’s Messiah is one big momma. But here I totter on my little feet, desk stacked with books, computer stuffed with articles, iTunes humming with recordings, contemplating an article on the oratorio. My program note isn’t due any time soon, but not having been born yesterday I know better than to delay making at least a tentative start. One doesn’t tackle Messiah lightly, unless one hasn’t a shred of humility or is such a doofus as to be oblivious to the challenge. Uriah Heep I’m not, but neither am I God’s gift to program annotation or some transcendent expert on either Handel or Messiah. I’ve got plenty of homework to do.
George: thinking big
Not that I’m objecting, griping, bitching, kvetching, whining, or anything of the sort. No way. It’s an honor to write on Messiah. Being one of a multitude of writers to take on Handel’s perennial hit doesn’t dilute the privilege one bit; if anything, it enhances the experience. Messiah annotators range from elite scholars through crackerjack commentators to some careless schmuck paraphrasing the Wikipedia article. The approaches run the gamut; one finds sincerely devotional articles aimed at congregational audiences, flippant and funny hey-dude tracts hoping to cool-ize Handel for teens, or intense scholarly affairs obsessing about minutiae—say, what those horn players included in the post-1750 performances at the Foundling Hospital actually did, given that there are no parts for them in the score. And then there are engaging and informative articles as well, just dandy for the interested and educated reader.
I suppose I turned my cards face up with that last sentence.
I have before me John Tobin’s Handel at Work, 79 pages (not counting prefaces, table of contents, pictures, index, and the like) focusing entirely on Handel’s modifications made from the original 1741 manuscript to his final performances in the 1750s. There is no one Messiah. Donald Burrows’s magisterial monograph in the Cambridge Music Handbooks series goes into the revisions as well, along with taking a stab at just about everything else Messiah-ish. I wonder how Burrows felt back in the 1980s when he was in the thick of it: did the mountain loom above him as well?
Ruth Smith, in a tightly-researched 30-page article in Music & Letters from 1989, makes a convincing case that Charles Jennens, the librettist (compiler?) wasn’t anywhere near the supercilious, arrogant boob he has been made out to be. I consult Jennens’s own edition of Shakespeare’s King Lear, the source behind a savage attack on Jennens from Shakespeare scholar George Steevens, to satisfy my own curiosity—did he really blindly rewrite Shakespeare to suit himself? I find something remarkably like a modern-day Arden Edition, each page half-full or so with variant readings from the quartos and folios, every editorial decision discussed at length in footnotes. Some of Jennens’s readings might be a bit strange, but that’s no reason to diss the guy. Nobody ridicules Arden editors, but nonetheless the Arden 2nd edition of Hamlet bucks every current I know by having Hamlet refer to his "all too sullied flesh" in his opening soliloquy, despite just about everybody and his dog preferring the Prince’s flesh to be all too solid.
So at the moment—here at the foot of the mountain, squinting up at the summit floating impossibly far above me—I’m inclined to treat Jennens more gently than does Christopher Hogwood, who slams his "self-importance and intolerance, the high-handed manner of a wealthy country gentleman, opinionated and cruel in his criticism, whose ostentation made many of his contemporaries his enemies" while allowing that "he was also a man of taste and learning." But I’m aware that scholars who spend a great deal of time in the company of their subjects—as Ruth Smith has with Jennens—have a tendency to become apologists. Oh, well: I’ll drive off the Jennens bridge when I get to it.
Placing Messiah in the context of its time: what to do about Deists and the overall Enlightenment tendency to poke holes in sanctimonious blather about biblical infallibility? They have to be in there—Jennens probably wrote the libretto as an argument against Deism. But how much? Any point in getting involved in the whole issue of Catholics vs. Protestants (still very much a hot-button topic in 1740s England), the dynastic succession of James I’s progeny compared to the incoming Hanoverians? Jennens had problems with that, too.
Placing Messiah in the context of Handel’s own life and output: the shift from opera to oratorio, previous settings of Jesus-lore (La Resurrezione, Brockes-Passion)?
Reception: the Dubliners loved it, the English had a collective cow, mostly about the impropriety of the performing venue (a theater) and some of the soloists, such as comedian Kitty Clive. Definitely worth talking about. Of course the English got over it, but some of those sputtering objections to the first London performances are just too delectable to pass over.
Obviously the structure of the libretto—its three parts, each divided into sections—will have its place in the article. As will the sources of those numbers that Handel reworked from his earlier music. Discussions of recitatives, most definitely; Messiah contains a much higher percentage of accompagnato recits than the norm, and there’s good reason for that. Orchestration, oh yes.
Changes in the score during Handel’s life? Whatever can be worked into a short passage, I think; most people find that stuff boring.
Performing traditions? Oh, I think so. Those monstrous huge forces of the late 18th century, Mozart’s gorgeous reworking, Beecham’s ultra-cool if ultra-unscholarly approach, and of course modern thinking, including today’s tendency towards itty-bitty ensembles. The sing-it-yourself mania has run its course; maybe work in a joke about dance-it-yourself Nutcrackers. (Just think about 2,000+ people in the SF Opera House attempting a simultaneous entrechat. Then just think about all those sprains, banged knees and elbows, broken toes, etc., as 2,000+ people collide into each other and their seats, and all the groaning from the injured as the Sugar Plum Fairy keeps going dinkity-dinkity-doonk.)
(No, it won’t work in a program note—but what a delectable notion.)
And those gazillion articles, books, program notes, liner notes? They offer both reassurance and confidence. Reassurance: if they did it, so can I. Confidence: I can’t do any worse than some of the crap I’ve already encountered.
This is a great year for big program-annotating projects. In addition to Messiah, my to-do list includes articles on Latin American music, Bach’s B Minor Mass, symphonic works about cities, and Haydn’s The Creation. Not to mention a basketful of assorted pieces, ranging from big-ticket items (a Shostakovich symphony) to the delectably obscure (a concerto grosso by 18th-century Bolognese composer Lorenzo Zavateri). A writer writes, after all, and this writer is most definitely writing. And reading. And listening. And happy.