The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
George Frideric Handel · a sacred oratorio in three parts · fifty-three numbers for four soloists, chorus and orchestra · words selected and arranged by Charles Jennens from the King James Bible and the psalter of the Book of Common Prayer · composed in London between 22 August and 14 September 1741
Mode
Sacred oratorio without drama; prophecy, address and proclamation in place of story
Mythos
Promise and fulfilment; a god born, suffering, dying, rising, ascending and returning, and the dead raised at the last trumpet
Phase
Three parts: prophecy and the nativity; the Passion to God’s reign; the redemption of the dead; E minor to D major
Presentation
Concert music; fifty-three numbers for four soloists, four-part chorus, strings and continuo, oboes and bassoons, two trumpets and timpani, to words compiled by Charles Jennens
Register
From secco recitative and a shepherds’ drone to a fugue of jeers, the “Hallelujah” and the Amen
Scale
From the prophets to the end of time; a congregation and a crowd; no single person
Governing Proposition
The story of Christ is stripped to its prophecies and given to no one: no singer is Christ, and the birth, the death and the rising are never told. A chorus that is in turn congregation, mob, rebels and heaven sings it in the first person plural. The wager of the work is that a suffering is known by what it does to those it is for, and that the people who confess it are the people who jeered.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Messiah begins without a voice. The Sinfony is a French overture in E minor, the form that opened an opera, and it says nothing of what is to come. Then the key turns to E major and a tenor sings the first words: “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God.” They are Isaiah’s, and they come before anything has been suffered. The work gives its consolation at the start and spends the rest of its length showing what the comfort cost. An air follows on “Every valley shall be exalted”, the voice climbing on the word, and then the chorus enters for the first time, with “And the glory of the Lord”.
The words were chosen and ordered by Charles Jennens, and almost all of them are scripture word for word: Isaiah and the epistles of Paul in the King James Bible, the psalms in Coverdale’s version as the Book of Common Prayer prints them. Of the fifty-two numbers with words, fifteen draw first on Isaiah, eleven on the psalms, six on the fifteenth chapter of First Corinthians and five on the second of Luke; thirty-two draw first on the Old Testament and twenty on the New. The compilation is a making in its own right, and its first act is to take the story away. No one in Messiah is a character. No soloist sings as Christ, as Mary or as an apostle, and Christ is never named in a sung line as an actor in the story. He is “he”, and at the last “the Lamb”.
What is left is a plan in three parts. The first is prophecy, the coming, the nativity and the healer; the second the Passion, the rising and the ascension, the gospel sent out and refused, and God’s reign; the third the redemption, the dead raised at the last trumpet, and the Lamb. There are fifty-three numbers, fifty-four with the shepherds’ recitative in two parts, for four soloists, a chorus in four parts, strings and continuo, oboes and bassoons, two trumpets and timpani. Twenty of the fifty-four have chorus, and the second part carries eleven of the nineteen choruses. Only five tell a story in the past tense, and they are the shepherds of Luke. The birth, the crucifixion and the rising are never narrated. Handel wrote it in London in twenty-four days; the autograph is dated from 22 August to 14 September 1741.
Movement II
The first part waits, and its waiting is not mild. The alto puts the question in a pastoral air: “But who may abide the day of his coming?” Before the answer can settle, the music breaks into a Prestissimo: “For he is like a refiner’s fire.” That is the air as it stands in the version Handel settled for London and the Foundling Hospital by the early 1750s. He rewrote numbers for the singers he had from 1742 onward, and no performance in his lifetime gave every number in one form. The coming the first part waits for is a fire as well as a comfort, and this one air holds both.
“For unto us a child is born” came from an Italian love duet that Handel had written weeks before; it is one of four choruses reworked from such duets. Its voices run in light counterpoint, and the long run on “born” falls where the Italian words had it, on a syllable that does not need it. Then the counterpoint stops and the whole chorus breaks out in block chords: “Wonderful, Counsellor”. The duet had no such moment. Handel added it, and a borrowed dance becomes an acclamation, the names of the child called out by every voice at once.
Near the middle of the first part, and nowhere else in the work, there is a story. An instrumental number, the Pifa, sets a rustic siciliana over a drone, named, by tradition, for the pifferari, the shepherd pipers Handel heard in Rome. Then the shepherds of Luke in recitative: the night, the angel, the multitude. The trumpets are heard for the first time, and from a distance: “Glory to God in the highest, and peace on earth, good will towards men.” At the end of the chorus the angels withdraw quietly. The one window onto narrative closes, and the part turns to the healer and ends in consolation.
Movement III
The second part opens on the Passion, and for ten numbers, from “Behold the Lamb of God” to the death, the work does not turn away. The second of them is the longest air in the work: “He was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.” Its middle section turns to the blows, “He gave his back to the smiters”, and then the grief returns at length. In Dublin it was sung by Susannah Cibber, an actress. Patrick Delany is reported to have called out to her afterwards that her sins be forgiven, though the words are given in more than one form.
Then the chorus takes the first person plural, three choruses in a row. “Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows”, in dotted rhythm; “And with his stripes we are healed”, a fugue in the old church style; and “All we like sheep have gone astray”, a lilting dance, its lines scattering in runs. It had been a love duet in Italian. At its close the dance stops and the tempo falls to Adagio: “and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.” Straying is light and its cost is heavy, and the music makes the turn between one line and the next. Nothing has been narrated. The suffering is known by what it does to the people singing.
Two numbers later the same singers are the mob at the cross: “He trusted in God that he would deliver him”, a fugue of jeers. Messiah gives the congregation and the crowd one chorus, and so one voice. The death follows, and it is not told. “Thy rebuke hath broken his heart”; “Behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto his sorrow”; and then Isaiah: “He was cut off out of the land of the living.” The crucifixion falls between those lines and is never sung. The rising follows, and the chorus divides into questioners and answerers at “Lift up your heads”.
Movement IV
Then the work turns outward. A run of six numbers, from “Unto which of the angels” to the chorus “Their sound is gone out”, carries the ascension, the worship of the angels, the word given and the preachers sent; “How beautiful are the feet” is a short soprano air in G minor. It is the plainest stretch of the work and the one most often cut. Its business is to carry the gospel from the risen Lord out to the nations, so that the nations can refuse it.
They refuse it in the words of the second psalm. “Why do the nations so furiously rage together”, complete in the standard version, sets the kings of the earth against the Lord. The chorus takes the rebels’ part and resolves to break their bonds, and the answer is a rod of iron and a potter’s vessel dashed in pieces. The singers who confessed in the Passion and jeered at the cross are rebels now. In the words as sung, the enemies are the nations and their kings. The block is four numbers of rage, and the next chorus stands on it.
“Hallelujah: for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth.” The trumpets return, in D. The chorus moves between unison, block chords and fugue. “The kingdom of this world” is given over; “And he shall reign for ever and ever” becomes a subject that the voices pile up in entries; and “King of Kings, and Lord of Lords” is set on rising repeated notes over the trumpets. The chorus closes the second part, not the work. Audiences stand for it by custom, but it is placed as an answer: the reign proclaimed is the reign the rebels refused just before.
Movement V
The third part is about the dead, and it begins with Job: “I know that my Redeemer liveth”, in E major, the key in which the tenor first gave comfort. Then Paul. “Since by man came death” is a Grave for the chorus, the instruments silent or nearly so, answered by an Allegro with the orchestra, and the alternation is the argument: death by one man, life by another. “Behold, I tell you a mystery”, and then the trumpet: “The trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible.” After it the airs argue rather than proclaim, and “If God be for us” restates what has already been won.
The work ends on Revelation: “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain”. The Amen follows, a long fugue on the one word, and it stops on a silence before its last Adagio cadence. The work that began with one voice offering comfort ends with the assent of every voice, in D major. The first person plural has run under the whole of it: ten numbers set the congregation’s “we”, “us” or “our”, from the virgin’s child in the first part to the last air of the third. The work never says who was born or who died. It says what was done for us, and gives the chorus the last word.
It was first heard on 13 April 1742 in the Great Music Hall in Fishamble Street, Dublin, for the benefit of prisoners for debt, Mercer’s Hospital and the Charitable Infirmary. Ladies were asked to come without hoops and gentlemen without swords, to make room. The choirs of St Patrick’s and Christ Church cathedrals sang, with the soprano Christina Maria Avoglio and Susannah Cibber; Handel was fifty-seven. London heard it at Covent Garden on 23 March 1743, advertised as a new sacred oratorio, and received it coolly. Scripture in a playhouse was objected to in print, and Jennens wrote in letters that Handel had set it in haste. From 1750 Handel gave it every year for the Foundling Hospital, and there it became a fixture. He attended a performance on 6 April 1759, eight days before his death. After him came the Westminster Abbey Commemoration of 1784, Mozart’s arrangement of 1789, the Crystal Palace festivals with their thousands from 1857, and, since the late 1970s, performances that returned the work to the scale of its maker.
Act III · The Twelve
The large plan is compelled: prophecy, the coming, the Passion, the rising, the gospel sent out and refused, God’s reign, the dead raised. No part could go, and inside the Passion, from “Behold the Lamb of God” to “He was cut off out of the land of the living”, every number is required. Length is not charged; separability is, and the subtractive test finds give. The ascension and Pentecost run of Part II, from “Unto which of the angels” to “Their sound is gone out”, is the work’s most separable stretch and the one most often cut. In Part III “If God be for us” restates an argument already won. And Handel substituted, shortened and transposed numbers for a decade: the work itself shows that several of its parts could change without loss to the whole.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: a suffering is known only by what it does to those it is for. Jennens strips out the story and leaves the address, and the Passion is sung in the first person plural: “Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows”. Then the same chorus sings “All we like sheep have gone astray” as a lilting dance, its lines scattering in runs, until the close turns Adagio on “the iniquity of us all”. Straying is light and its cost heavy, and the music makes the turn. Two numbers later the same singers are the mob. That the confessing congregation and the jeering crowd are one people holds without the creed. Held down because the condition is largely scripture’s, and because Part III argues doctrine more than it discloses it.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Height and frequency are both high. The Sinfony’s E minor gives way to E major and “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God”, comfort before anything has been suffered. “Wonderful, Counsellor” breaks out in block chords from the running counterpoint of “For unto us”. The trumpets of “Glory to God” sound from a distance, and the angels withdraw quietly. “He was despised” is grief at length, “Surely” grief in dotted rhythm. The “Hallelujah” sets “King of Kings, and Lord of Lords” on rising repeated notes over the trumpets; “Since by man came death” sets a Grave, nearly unaccompanied, against an Allegro with the orchestra; the Amen ends the work. Held off the top by plain stretches: the ascension run of Part II, and the arias of Part III after the trumpet.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Myth built, and the largest the West has: promise and fulfilment, a god born, suffering, dying, rising, ascending and returning, and the dead raised at the last trumpet. It is load-bearing in the strictest sense, because Jennens’s order is the order of the myth and the plan has no other principle. The myth is built from prophecy rather than story: Isaiah’s servant becomes the man of sorrows, Psalm 22 the mockery, Psalm 24 the ascension, Job’s Redeemer the rising. It is shown as a pattern already written and now kept. What holds it here is the particular. With no characters and almost no narrative, the particulars are vivid and few: shepherds at night, the Pifa’s pipers, a back given to the smiters, sheep. The myth is stated as myth more than found in a particular.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The inherited forms are Handel’s own: the English oratorio he had made from Italian opera in the 1730s, the English anthem and the German fugue, with Saul and Israel in Egypt, both of 1739, behind it. The departure lies in the text and its use. Messiah has no drama, no characters and no plot; its subject is the meaning of a story, and it put the Christian mystery, in scripture’s words, into a theatre for a paying public. The stake was real: his opera ventures had failed, he gave the work first in Dublin, and London objected in print to scripture in a playhouse. What holds it below the bar: the musical language departs little, four choruses are reworked from Italian duets written weeks before, and Israel in Egypt had already made the chorus the protagonist of a scriptural oratorio.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Change the form and the work loses part of what it knows. Its knowledge is that the story matters as address, and the unstaged oratorio without characters is the form that says it. Give Christ a voice and a stage, as a Passion or an opera would, and the “we” of the choruses becomes a crowd watching someone else. The chorus is the instrument: congregation in “Surely”, mob in “He trusted in God”, rebels in the second psalm, heaven in “Worthy is the Lamb”. The shepherds sit in Part I like a window, and the Amen gives the last word to every voice. Held down by the borrowings: “For unto us” and “All we like sheep” were Italian love duets, their melismas still falling where the old words fell, and a form that carried another text first is in part a container.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Evidence over promise. The literature is large and still moving: Jens Peter Larsen and Watkins Shaw on the sources, Donald Burrows’s handbook, Richard Luckett’s history, Ruth Smith’s reading of Jennens’s text as an answer to the deists, and a contested argument that the Psalm 2 sequence and the “Hallelujah” celebrate the defeat of Judaism. Performance has never settled: which versions, which voices for the alto numbers, how large a chorus, from the hundreds at Westminster Abbey and the thousands at the Crystal Palace to the small forces of period instruments since the late 1970s. The work yields on return, in a dance turned to Adagio and in trumpets held back for heaven. Held down because the contest over its meaning is narrower than the contest over its performance.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Messiah made the scriptural oratorio without drama a public concert work, sacred music outside both church and stage, and set the chorus as the voice of a whole people. It did not reorganise musical language. Delayed influence is credited and discounted: London was cool for seven years, until the Foundling Hospital performances. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the oratorio tradition after Handel formed around this work. The Foundling performances and the Westminster Abbey Commemoration of 1784 made Handel the first composer of a living canon; Mozart’s arrangement of 1789 carried the work into German practice; Haydn’s The Creation, Mendelssohn’s St Paul and Elijah and the Victorian oratorio followed in its line; and the amateur choral society in Britain and America was built round it.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Survival is demonstrated, and the form is whole: the autograph, Handel’s conducting score and the Foundling Hospital parts survive, and every number is known in his own versions. Presence has been continuous for more than two and a half centuries, and the work is performed each year on every continent where choirs sing. The surface fixed to its moment is small: the da capo convention dates, and Part III’s theology is a Georgian Anglican argument. The larger cost is wear. The Christmas sing-along, the standing for the “Hallelujah”, the massed festivals and the reorchestrations made it a ritual object, heard as an occasion rather than as a work. The additions of other hands, Mozart’s, Prout’s and the festival scorings, never displaced Handel’s score, and the period-instrument performances restored it.
Score: 9.5 / 10
The choral writing commands the medium at the summit of its century. The “Hallelujah” moves between unison, block chords and fugue, and sets “And he shall reign for ever and ever” as a subject the voices pile up in entries. “And with his stripes” is a fugue in the old church style. The Amen is a long fugue that stops on a silence before its last Adagio cadence. The orchestra is lean and used with purpose: trumpets held back for heaven, the Pifa’s drone. The English is set to be heard: “Every valley shall be exalted” climbs on “exalted” and lies flat on “plain”. The costs: borrowed melismas on unimportant syllables, as on “born”; stresses that fall wrong, as on “incorruptible”; routine recitatives; and in places the twenty-four days show.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The two most distant elements, the Pifa’s rustic siciliana and the Amen fugue, obey one law, the law of the text: promise kept. Every number is prophecy or its fulfilment, and the music follows the text’s tenses, from expectation in Part I to proclamation in Parts II and III. The key plan bears it, from the E minor of the opening to the D major of the close, with the trumpets held for heaven. French overture, Italian aria, English anthem, German fugue and a Roman shepherds’ tune are made to serve one argument. The strain is in the versions: a law that holds in whichever form a number is sung is a loose law. And the Psalm 2 block, rage and the rod of iron, is bound less tightly than the Passion.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The orders held are vast and few. The sacred, wholly; history at its widest, from prophecy to the end of time; the natural order, in valleys raised and mountains made level, darkness and light, flocks and shepherds; the political, in “Why do the nations so furiously rage together”, kings set against the Lord, and “The kingdom of this world” given over; the crowd, in the mob that mocks; death and the body, corrupted and raised incorruptible. They are held together through the “we” of the chorus, not listed. The absences are as plain. No individual consciousness is drawn, because no one is a character and the soloists speak for everyone. The family appears only in the virgin of Isaiah, and labour only in the shepherds.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.5, The Sublime at 9.4 and Pressure on Tradition at 9.2. A form that survives whole and a presence continuous for more than two and a half centuries; elevation that returns from the first comfort to the Amen; and an oratorio tradition, from Haydn and Mendelssohn to the choral society, that formed around it.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.2, held by the ascension and Pentecost run of Part II, the work’s most separable stretch, by an air in Part III that restates an argument already won, and by a decade of its maker’s own substitutions, which show that several numbers could change without loss to the whole. Next above it, The Swerve at 8.4: a departure in the text and its use, made along Handel’s own road, in forms he had used for twenty years, with four choruses reworked from Italian duets and Israel in Egypt already behind it.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.1, The Inner Law at 8.9, The Living Form at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.5, Pressure on Tradition at 9.2, The Archetypal Deep at 9.0 and The Unconcealment at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.4 falls a tenth short. The Universal Minimum is met (of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 8.2, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.5. Every other summit condition is met; the aggregate of 8.9 stands below the summit in any case.
Basis · the score of Messiah and its performance tradition, read from knowledge under the desk’s convention for concert music; no score, wordbook or recording was in hand, and nothing was measured on a score or a sound. The work is scored as music and English text together: three parts and fifty-three numbers in the familiar numbering of the Novello and Watkins Shaw editions, with no. 14 in two parts. Handel never fixed a single version. The version taken is the standard modern performing version, the numbers in the forms Handel settled for London and the Foundling Hospital by the early 1750s; his own revisions, made while the work was in use under him, are weighed as part of it. Arrangements by later hands, Mozart’s of 1789 (K. 572), Ebenezer Prout’s edition of 1902 and the massed festival scorings, are not part of the work and bear only on its survival. The words are Charles Jennens’s selection and arrangement from the King James Bible and the Prayer Book psalter; his choice and order are credited to the work, and what Isaiah, the psalmist and Paul discovered is weighed as inheritance. The English is the work’s own, so no translation stands between, and it is quoted only where the words are certain. Figures that could not be verified, among them the running time, the keys of most of the closed numbers, the singers for whom particular versions were written, the number of performers in 1784 and the origin of the custom of standing, are not given. The sound of the work as heard is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged.