Why Handel's 'Messiah' endures

St. Paul Pioneer Press ^ | 12/22/11 | Jennifer A. Marshall

[rhema]

It's one of the most famous and widely shared pieces of music in history.

Handel intended his oratorio "Messiah" for Lent, and it was first performed just after Easter 1742. But over the centuries, public performances of the masterwork became a rite of Christmas.

It is 270 years since Handel composed the classic, yet crowds continue to gather and listen, once again, for hours. Today's audiences typically reserve that kind of time for a Lady Gaga concert or the opening of a new "Mission Impossible" movie.

What explains the enduring attraction of Handel's "Messiah"?

For one thing, the sheer beauty of the music. For another, the incredible skill of the composer. In one of history's most astounding creative feats, Handel produced the 260-page score in just 24 days.

Beethoven - whose Ninth Symphony's final movement ("Ode to Joy") rivals the "Hallelujah Chorus" of "Messiah" for widespread emotional appeal - is said to have revered Handel as the greatest of composers.

The lasting popularity also owes to the work's moving text, drawn from the Bible. From prophecy to incarnation to death and resurrection, the life of Christ has been called the greatest story ever told. Indeed, Leland Ryken and other Christian literary scholars have noted how the narrative qualities of biblical revelation are finely tuned to the way we're made as humans.

Together, the music and subject of Handel's "Messiah" reach the sublime status of great art that speaks to "what is permanent in the human soul," as the 19th-century poet and cultural critic Matthew Arnold wrote. No wonder we love to hear it at Christmas, the time of year that calls us back to the permanent things.

Master artists and authors create a "unity and profoundness of moral impression," Arnold wrote, "which constitutes the grandeur of their works, and which makes them immortal."

That kind of moral impression is grounded in the conviction that human nature persists, truth exists and life has meaning and purpose. Such courage of conviction has been waning for some time.

A century ago, the great English writer G.K. Chesterton diagnosed that "what we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place." Modesty used to rein in our ambition; it shifted to constrain conviction, "where it was never meant to be."

Things haven't improved since Chesterton's time. Today's radical postmodernist academics teach young people there is no universal human condition or transcendent morality. Reality is culturally determined, they say, a mere social construct erected by personal background and identity. This relativism leaves some philosophers skeptical about the nature of rationality and truth altogether.

To be sure, experience does influence our perspective on reality. Whether a child grows up in Bedford Falls or Berkeley or Bahrain will shape her outlook. So will racial, socioeconomic and religious characteristics. Just as eyeglasses are shaped by a sanding process, many factors grind the lens through which each of us sees reality.

But it remains a lens. It does not change reality itself.

Great art helps continue to refine and polish that lens with accounts of truth that transcend our own outlooks.

Wise voices across generations have urged a perennial return to classic works to gain perspective on our age and experience. "Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes," C.S. Lewis explained. We need to read "old books," he said, to correct the blind spots of our day.

Lewis didn't idealize the past, though.

"People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes," he wrote. "Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction."

The well-aged insights of great works of art, literature and music help us sift today's culture, as Arnold explained, to identify what will "cultivate what is best and noblest" in us as human beings.

Plenty of entertainment will lose its popularity long before the end of the century - if not the decade. But great works endure because they appeal to universal longings of the human spirit. Nearly three centuries since its debut, crowds continue to gather for Handel's "Messiah" because the stunning crescendos and familiar choruses draw us toward answers to "the hopes and fears of all the years."

[Doogle]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_VARtvgGBY&feature=related

[paudio]

I believe part of the reasons is it was written in English that makes it easier for English-speaking people, and people who speak English, to understand the message right away.

[Valin]

Why Handel’s ‘Messiah’ endures

Because it’s good music? Of course I could be wrong.

[Elsie]

For one thing, the sheer beauty of the music.
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The lasting popularity also owes to the work's moving text, drawn from the Bible.

Amen and AMEN!!!

[SkyPilot]

George Handel was a very, very devout Christian man.

He wrote that piece as worship to his Savior, Jesus Christ.

Handel was much sought after in his day as a composer, and even kings saw his gift. When king George I died, Handel was commissioned to write the coronation piece for his son and new king, George II.

Soon after wards, Handel completed work on Messiah, and it is said that he used Revelation as inspiration. And I saw in the right hand of him that sat on the throne a book written within and on the backside, sealed with seven seals. And I saw a strong angel proclaiming with a loud voice, Who is worthy to open the book, and to loose the seals thereof? And no man in heaven, nor in earth, neither under the earth, was able to open the book, neither to look thereon.And I wept much, because no man was found worthy to open and to read the book, neither to look thereon. (Revelation 5:1-4)

If there was no Christ, there would be no hope for mankind.

Handel celebrated the absolute joy of Christ being able to open the scroll. Of Christ being crowned King.

I believe his wonderful music is heavenly inspired.

[CrazyIvan]

It’s also great fun and a challenge to perform.

[Elsie]

Their theology maybe a glaring heresy; but, by golly, their MUSIC is AWESOME!

[Adder]

What explains the enduring attraction of Handel’s “Messiah”?

Because its played in a nonstop rotation during the Christmas season? [Hallelujah.]Same reason Frosty endures...

/snark

[ConorMacNessa]

I've had the honor and pleasure of being in the choir (I am a tenor) for this masterpiece both in church and with the Oratorio Society of Washington (now known as The Washington Chorus) in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall. On each occasion, by the time we got to the Worthy Is The Lamb/Amen I was so pumped up it would take me hours to come down. It endures because it possesses timeless greatness and remains relevant even in these depraved times. In fact, it is probably more needed and timely now than when it was composed.



The work is all the more remarkable considering the medical problems he faced before and while composing it. Handel stands with J.S. Bach as one of the consummate masters of the Baroque Period.

Etiam non princeps sed usque ad genua, Principis Pacis!

[aruanan]

It endures because it possesses timeless greatness and remains relevant even in these depraved times.

Ha ha ha. You know, things were a LOT more depraved back in Handel's time, you're just not aware of it.

[vanilla swirl]

Amen

[yawningotter]

Saying it is a challenge to perform is putting it mildly.

[Aunt Polgara]

The Mormon Tabernacle Choir is Magnificent!

For sheer joy, this is my favorite: the mall flashmob Alleluia chorus.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXh7JR9oKVE

[ConorMacNessa]

I know quite well about the depravity extant in Handel's time. I know first-hand of the depravity that abounds in our own. There is plenty to go around and has been throughout history.

Etiam non princeps sed usque ad genua, Principis Pacis!

[Valin]

It’s also great fun and a challenge to perform.

For some of us the same can be said of Chopsticks.

[Valin]

Well put!

One of the things I have discovered in reading/studying history is...”It was the best of times, it was the worst of times......”

[gov_bean_ counter]

One question I would ask of Mr. Handel...

What did you have against Tenors???

Handel's "Messiah" has its own playlist on my ipod.

[PjhCPA]

And to think, he wrote that all in 24 days!

[Jerrybob]

Handel’s Messiah is THE premier piece of music in the English speaking world; in a perfect world, selections from Messiah would be heard, non-stop, in every big-box store everywhere — instead of the insipid “Have a holly, jolly Christmas” and “Santa Baby”....