Unsettling History of That Joyous ‘Hallelujah’ (NYT vomit alert)

New York Times ^ | 4/8/07 | Michael Marissen

[lqclamar]

IN New York and elsewhere a “Messiah Sing-In” — a performance of Handel’s oratorio “Messiah” with the audience joining in the choruses — is a musical highlight of the Christmas season. Christians, Jews and others come together to delight in one of the consummate masterpieces of Western music.

The high point, inevitably, is the “Hallelujah” chorus, all too familiar from its use in strange surroundings, from Mel Brooks’s “History of the World, Part 1,” where it signified the origins of music among cavemen, to television advertising for behemoth all-terrain vehicles.

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. For most Christians in Handel’s day, this horrible event was construed as divine retribution on Judaism for its failure to accept Jesus as God’s promised Messiah.

[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.

[lqclamar]

Leave it to the NYT to print trash on Easter.

Indeed, but then again is it any different from what they print on any other given day of the year?

[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

[rabscuttle385]

Sounds like The Old Grey Lady Hag's new motto is:

"All The News Sh*t That's Unfit to Print."

[lqclamar]

That explains a lot. His CV is a list of articles that seem to revolve around the thesis of finding “hidden” anti-semitism in everything written by Handel, Bach, or practically any other composer who wrote Christian music.

[lqclamar]

Here's a photo of the limp-wrist who wrote this article. He makes Noel Coward look resolute by comparison.

[lqclamar]

Here's a photo of the limp-wrist who wrote this article. He makes Noel Coward look resolute by comparison.

[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.

[CondorFlight]

Hogwash.

“Handel and his contemporaries did have a high opinion of the characters populating the Hebrew Bible, not as “Jews” but as proto-Christian believers in God’s expected Messiah, Jesus.”

I might call to the writer’s attention that England was one of the nations to offer sanctuary to Jews when they were expelled from Vienna and other Austrian lands by Maria Theresa; that the King himself protested the expulsions; that Jews enjoyed full legal rights (to give testimony in court, to inherit according to law, etc.) long before these rights were acquired on the continent; etc.

“Kidder’s work reads like a blueprint for “Messiah.”

LOL! So does the NT, or any Christian course in bible study. Same verses used, same comparisons made between the two ‘twin’ testaments (old and new). Accept it or not, as you like; but it didn’t begin with Kidder.

“In Jennens and Handel’s time, Christians were all but unanimous in believing that the violence depicted in Psalm 2:9 represented the prophesying type for a later event: the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple, the fulfilling antitype.”

See above. Find me a commentary which says this. The plain reading of the Psalm is that the ‘nations’ are the gentile nations of the world; as verse 2.10 goes on to say, “Therefore, you kings, be wise; be warned, you rulers of the earth.” —hardly a reference to the Jews, but rather to the rest of the nations. Again, standard.

[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.

[lqclamar]

The allusion is there, and certainly it is part of the Revelations text from which the lines are drawn. The oratorio's theme was to tell the Christmas and Easter stories though. The statement of Hallelujah was to reflect upon Christ as the redeemer of humanity, both in birth and resurrection. This can be seen from the Chorus' role as the conclusion of the second act, which begins with the apostle John's announcement of Christ's birth: "Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world."

"Hallelujah, for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth" is the fulfillment of that opening line.

[rockrr]

It didn't used to be a problem because the victor wrote the history and there typically weren't too many dissenters left alive to object.

Perhaps we should return to this model...

[lqclamar]

See above. Find me a commentary which says this.

Toward the end of his article this bozo presents his "proof" of the antisemitic interpretation by quoting from a sermon about the oratorio given by a preacher several decades AFTER Handel's death. Now there's an authoritative source on what Handel was thinking back in 1742. /sarc

[lqclamar]

Clarification - that should be John the Baptist’s announcement, quoted by the apostle John

[kittymyrib]

LOL...one can only laugh at the ridiculous attempt this writer makes to discredit Handel’s sublime achievement of marrying Biblical text and music in “Messiah”. The child of God must remind himself that such a person is unable to understand the things of God and needs our prayers.
The Scripture refers to such as being “blind and dead in their sins.” Only the Holy Spirit can enlighten such dark hearts and bring the joy of Easter to those without it.

[saveliberty]

She’s changing her image. Look, now she’s wearing purple

http://www.tvacres.com/horror_witches_seahag.htm

[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.

[Dick Bachert]

The same is true of WABE (government radio) here in Atlanta. I stopped listening several years ago.
Most of their “music” programming is the crap you indicate they play up there.
The rest of their day is consumed with statist/socialist/leftist bravo sierra TALK.