Jonathan Keates - Messiah: The Composition and Afterlife of Handel’s Masterpiece

Handels music room in 25 Brook Street, Mayfair, where the composer made his home from 1723 until his death in 1759. The double-manual harpsichord is a modern copy of an eighteenth-century instrument by the Flemish firm of Ruckers.

C REDIT : H ANDEL H OUSE T RUST L TD

In its smartest quarter, on the edge of Hyde Park (then still rural, grazed by sheep and cows), Handel chose to settle in 1723, taking a house on an annual lease in the newly built Brook Street, close to the church of St Georges, Hanover Square. The dedication of the church and the naming of the square were neither of them irrelevant to Handels fortunes.

In 1714, when Queen Anne died, she was succeeded not, as some had hoped, by her exiled half-brother James Francis Edward Stuart, but by her cousin Georg Ludwig, Elector of Hanover, who ascended the British throne as King George I. This proved an obvious advantage to the composer, who had spent a brief period as music director (Kapellmeister) at the court in Hanover. He may indeed have combined his visits to London in 1710 and 1712 with information-gathering in relation to the succession issue. King George came from a music-loving family and Handel found himself commissioned to write church canticles for the Chapel Royal at St Jamess and to create what we now know as the Water Music, a sequence of airs and dance movements that accompanied a royal river excursion from Whitehall to Chelsea in the summer of 1717.

Hanover had its own opera house, so in London, at what was now the Kings Theatre in the Haymarket, George I was happy to patronize a new enterprise, the so-called Royal Academy of Music, begun in 1719 as a seasonal subscription programme of operatic productions. His 1,000 contribution headed a distinguished list of subscribers, Persons of Honour underwriting performances intended to reflect the highest available standards and production values in the world of international music theatre. Handel himself was commissioned to engage singers and orchestral musicians, and for the next twenty years the composition and presentation of opera would play a central role in his creative life.

Later ages tended to regard this extended stretch as a writer for the stage either as a kind of aesthetic wilderness in which Handel spent too long straying or as a drudgery from which he yearned to break free. Almost as soon as he died, in 1759, his operasnearly forty of them in allwere forgotten, with the exception of a few arias in which generally innocuous English verses were substituted for their original Italian texts, more specific in expressing individual emotions such as triumph, rage, passionate yearning or erotic excitement. Only as of the late twentieth century has an astonishing revival of interest in these dramas, together with a viable approach to techniques of performance and staging for modern audiences, meant that such magnificent works as