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Keates - Messiah: the composition and afterlife of Handels masterpiece

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From Handels renowned biographer, the story of one of the most celebrated compositions of Western classical music, Handels famous oratorio, Messiah
In the late summer of 1741, George Friderick Handel, composed an oratorio set to words from the King James Bible, rich in tuneful arias and magnificent choruses. Jonathan Keates recounts the history and afterlife of Messiah, one of the best-loved works in the classical repertoire. He relates the compositions first performances and its relationship with spirituality in the age of the Enlightenment, and examines how Messiah, after Handels death, became an essential component of our musical canon.
An authoritative and affectionate celebration of the high-point of the Georgian golden age of music, Messiah is essential reading for lovers of classical music.

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Copyright 2017 by Jonathan Keates Hachette Book Group supports the right to - photo 1

Copyright 2017 by Jonathan Keates

Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the authors intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the authors rights.

Basic Books

Hachette Book Group

1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104

www.basicbooks.com

First published in 2016 by Head of Zeus, UK

First U.S. edition: October 2017

Published by Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

The Hachette Speakers Bureau provides a wide range of authors for speaking events. To find out more, go to www.hachettespeakersbureau.com or call (866) 376-6591.

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017952758

ISBNs: 978-1-5416-9735-5 (hardcover), 978-1-5416-9749-2 (ebook)

E3-20170920-JV-NF

The sixty-four-year-old George Frideric Handel in 1749 corpulent and bewigged - photo 2

The sixty-four-year-old George Frideric Handel in 1749, corpulent and bewigged, in a portrait by Thomas Hudson that was owned by the composer himself.

C REDIT: P RIVATE C OLLECTION / B RIDGEMAN I MAGES

T he making of Handels Messiah was an act of faith, in more senses than one, on the part of two remarkable men: the composer George Frideric Handel and his friend, the littrateur and musical enthusiast Charles Jennens. As devised by them both, the work represented an entirely new concept in the genre of sacred oratorio as understood during the mid-eighteenth century, hence there was no guarantee of a favourable reception at its earliest performances. In a cultural milieu so preoccupied with rules, canons, form and decorum, a unique musical artefact like Messiah would take time to establish itself with audiences and performers.

This is a tale of endurance, survival and ultimate triumph, marking the life-record of an outstanding work of art across two and a half centuries. Following Handels death in 1759, Messiah soon became the victim of its own popularity, a cult object overshadowing the versatility and originality of the masters wider musical achievement in the field of opera, church music, chamber cantatas and instrumental compositions. Only during the twentieth century did a gradual recovery of the score as first conceived and performed bring its particular narrative to a kind of fortunate conclusion, which the sensibility of Handels own age would have seen as entirely fitting. We are in a more advantageous position than our Victorian ancestors to appreciate the conceptual profundity and deftness of design entailed in Charles Jennenss scripture collection, and to admire the intense energy, idiomatic sophistication and imaginative focus with which Handel addressed himself to the task of setting this to music. I hope that this brief tribute to Messiahs inherent robustness and integrity will encourage readers to listen to itand take part in itanew.

Picture 3

B y 1741, the year in which he composed Messiah, George Frideric Handel was a dominant figure on Londons musical scene. Three decades earlier he had arrived as a visitor from his native Germany, presenting his opera Rinaldo at the Queens Theatre in the Haymarket, writing a court ode for the birthday of Queen Anne and composing church music for official celebrations of the Peace of Utrecht, which ended the War of the Spanish Succession. His professional profile, that of a sophisticated foreign artist gifted in a variety of musical forms and styles, was quickly established and he saw obvious advantages in making London his permanent home. The capital had its own lively culture of music and theatre, sustained by increasing prosperity as a business centre with a stock market in which Handel himself would become a shrewd investor. Geographically and socially, this eighteenth-century metropolis fell into two distinct zones: the City, where trading and banking took place, and, to the west, what was loosely called the Town, a fashionable, fast-expanding area of residential streets and squares surrounding the royal palace of St Jamess and containing the theatres in which so much of the composers working life would be spent.

Handels music room in 25 Brook Street Mayfair where the composer made his - photo 4

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

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