Music: Misunderstood Messiah

“And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly Host praising God” and singing Handel’s Messiah. Though cynics may snarl “But who may abide the day of His coming?” they will be a small, silent (or at least ignored) minority. As Christmas threatens from Tokyo to Toledo, Messiahs are busting out again all over the world. The work is being staged, illustrated with color slides, tinkled through by tiny orchestras, blasted over by huge ones, shouted by great singers and squeaked by small ones. In New York and San Francisco, people are paying to sight-read the choruses at “Messiah sing-ins,” and at the White House, President Nixon heard a 30-minute sample. One way or another, Handel’s Messiah these days is as omnipresent as its namesake—and just about as worshiped and abused.

Written during a hectic three-and-a-half weeks in the summer of 1741, Handel’s oratorio has always been a smash. If a nearly endless succession of well-meaning popularizers have taken gross and extravagant liberties with it, Handel is partly to blame. A shrewd businessman, he ensured The Messiah’s success by hiring the best and most popular singers in 18th century London to sing it. If the bass singer was not very good, Handel would turn the bass aria into a recitative, rewrite it for an alto or even a soprano. For flexible soprano voices, he would doll up the music with ornaments and, if another soprano complained, he would steal a few arias from the first soprano and slip them to the second. To further befuddle historians, Handel was continually juggling arias to fit whatever boy soprano, male alto or countertenor happened along. As a result, a wide range of different but thoroughly authentic “original versions” of the oratorio came into being.

Obese Orchestras. Thereafter, everybody got into the act. From Mozart to obscure professors, composers reorchestrated and rearranged The Messiah. Since everybody wanted to sing it too, the choruses became enormous, and orchestras swelled proportionately. On the theory that if Handel had had a big orchestra he would have used it, a series of uncalled-for instruments puffed Handel’s clean, baroque textures into plodding Victorian obesity. This musical elephantiasis reached some sort of a climax in 1959, when Sir Thomas Beecham recorded a Messiah that sounded a bit like Richard Strauss’s Elektra: with cymbals, bells, triangles, and even a gong.

But by the mid 20th century, a nagging suspicion had long been growing that perhaps Handel might have been right all along. Brave souls began conducting The Messiah in the “original version”—or at least one of them—in which chorus and orchestra were small and Handel’s rich, polyphonic style remained clear. By 1958, when such scholarly editions as that by British Musicologist Watkins Shaw appeared, much of the world knew how the work may have sounded in Handel’s day. American Conductor Thomas Dunn, who has made a specialty of The Messiah, has played four different versions of the oratorio on consecutive nights, insisting on crisply double-dotted rhythms, embellishments and cadenzas. The full impact of brass instruments and drums is saved for the “Hallelujah.” Choruses are kept small enough to manage the fast passages with some semblance of accuracy. The leaner, swifter Messiah turns out to be far more exciting.

But tradition (often defined as the memory of the last bad performance) dies slowly. “There is this custom that any music dealing with sacred matters must necessarily be pale-faced and solemn,” says British Conductor Colin Davis, whose recording of The Messiah is the best presently available. “I think it’s a horrible hangover from the 19th century.” Though some Messiahs are now smaller and better, many are bigger and worse. The stultifying Sunday-afternoon-in-church Messiah lives on, giving singers pleasure and listeners the fidgets. “Messiah has been the world’s most misinterpreted piece,” says Conductor Dunn. “But people get involved with it and it is a moneymaker. There are even legends about it—like the story that King George once had to get up and go to the bathroom and everybody in the theater rose, which is supposed to explain why everybody stands up during the Hallelujah chorus.”

However played, Handel’s Messiah transcends the boundaries of taste, religion, nationality and race. Its text, a skillful compilation of scriptural passages, is both dramatic and moving, suggesting the story of Jesus of Nazareth but shying away from the details. This, Dunn says, may be the secret of its universal popularity. “It’s not so Roman Catholic that Protestants get all upset, and the Jews don’t mind because Jesus Christ is mentioned only three times. Furthermore, it’s a piece about a concept of salvation without being too specific. Even atheists don’t get uptight.”

Professor Koten Okuda, Japan’s most noted Handel scholar, agrees. The Messiah, he says, is a Christmas staple in Japan and its greatest admirers are Buddhists and Shintoists.