[lqclamar]

There are few things more contemptable in this world that a left wing music snob. The purpose of this hit piece on Handel is nothing more than an attempt to secularize his work - to make the Messiah an icon of music alone, stripped of its religious meaning and purpose. This sleazeball's object is to make that religious meaning a contemptable relic of the past, and his article jumps through every hoop imaginable to achieve it. Of course, there is more conjecture and spin to his interpretation than actual history. The Hallelujah Chorus says absolutely nothing about the Roman destruction of the Jewish temple, but rather is a reference to the resurrection of Christ based on a verse in Revelations. But just enough information exists out there for this sleazeball to spin it into something plausible sounding.

In reality, all he's doing is attempting to lay a secular leftist claim to a distinctly non-secular musical work, thus permitting it to be "enjoyed" by secular liberals who claim to hold the only true key to "understanding" it. In reality these liberal music snob types seldom if ever truly "understand" classical music. They know nothing of the symphonic form, the tonal mechanics of the concerto, or the intense mathematical complexity of instrumental coordination. As a result they are the very same types of people who draw the highmarks of western music into a culturally relative equivalency with everything from jihadi incantations to hip hop to postmodern discordance to barbarian fertility rituals from the darkest corners of the third world. It's all an artsy-fartsy "high culture" thing to them where music is appreciated not for its genius but because it sounds either "sophisticated" or "exotic" to its musically untrained yet multicultrually obsessed listener.

[Always Right]

Leave it to the NYT to print trash on Easter.

[jimbo123]

Michael Marissen
Daniel Underhill Professor of Music History
Department of Music and Dance
Swarthmore College
Swarthmore, PA 19081-1397, USA

my office phone: 610-328-8237
department fax: 610-328-8551

michael_marissen@swarthmore.edu

[Captainpaintball]

The dangerous thing about revisionist religious history is that it is designed for the increasing number of those who believe in nothing... They’ll fall for anything.

[gusopol3]

I agree with you, but I think the flow of the narrative puts the Hallelujah Chorus as the celebration of the Second Coming, as it follows the evangelists’ age.

[denydenydeny]

The horrible thing about our culture is that this lunatic interpretation of Handel will become the absolute gospel truth for people on the Christophobic Left. At the moment the Wikipedia entry on the work is rational and nonpolitical, but I guarantee you that it will be "updated" soon to "reflect" the "controversy".

The fact that there is no rational basis for this belief doesn't matter--the lie is easier to understand than the truth.

It's the continuing Saul Alinsky-ization of the culture. Just toss the lie out there and make the truth look stodgy and boring. The culture's fruit-fly attention span is made for the lie, as long as it's catchy.

[Age of Reason]

As a kid in the 1960's, I learned to like classical music from listening to WQXR, the radio station of the New York Times.

But the station changed its format over the decades.

They went from occasionally playing 20th century garbage to almost always playing it.

What surprises me, is that once a year, during the holiday season, they ask their listeners to vote for their favorite works.

Bach, Handel, Beethoven, Mozart and the like make up the vast majority of what their listeners like.

Yet the station persists in playing their nihilistic 20th century garbage almost constantly.

And when they are not playing 20th century garbage, they will dredge up some earlier piece of cacophony or some obscure, trite 19th or 18th cent. version of elevator music and play that.

I conclude that the station is purposely fostering a dislike of "classical music" in young people.

I picture a teenager tuning in to QXR for a moment, hearing the garbage they play, and concluding that is typical of classical music, and so classical music is the worst junk imaginable.

It's like it's a commie plot or something to dumb down each new generation of Americans.

[henbane]

. . .all he's doing is attempting to lay a secular leftist claim to a distinctly non-secular musical work.

Marrissen is obviously on his own jihad to prove some of the greatest masterpieces of classical Christian music are basically antisemetic rants of one kind or another.

Take a look at some of this guy's publications to see the blatant agenda. Without doubt Marrissen has put his revisionist crosshairs on Bach and Handel.

Marissen's books include The Social and Religious Designs of J. S. Bach's Brandenburg Concertos (Princeton, 1995), Lutheranism, Anti-Judaism, and Bach's St. John Passion: With an Annotated Literal Translation of the Libretto (Oxford, 1998). His current projects include a book entitled Bach on High Christology and the Infancy Narratives in Luke and Matthew, and a monograph entitled, Handel's Messiah and Christian Triumphalism.

[Alex Murphy]

So “Messiah” lovers may be surprised to learn that the work was meant not for Christmas but for Lent, and that the “Hallelujah” chorus was designed not to honor the birth or resurrection of Jesus but to celebrate the destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple in A.D. 70.

Ping to read & verify

[Pyro7480]

Classical ping! (Left-wing art snob BARF alert!)

[Cincinna]

Music revisionism at its most ridiculous.

But then again, this is the NY Times, whose “tribute” to Passover was an article proclaiming that the Book of Exodus was false, and that there is “no proof” that the Red Sea parted and the Jews were led out of Egypt. Modern archaeology and science says different.

[endthematrix]

"There are few things more contemptable in this world that a left wing music snob."

Few indeed. An art snob...or an immigration lawyer.

[Paisan]

Well said, sir !