“It is difficult in no common degree to write anew concerning The Messiah,”1 said the music writer Henry F Chorley in 1859. The piece was, of course, 117 years old at the time, and there has only been more written on this landmark composition since. Handel’s Messiah is not just a popular classic, after all: it’s also a hugely important work. As musicologist Richard Taruskin has pointed out, it is the first musical composition (apart from plainchant) to have enjoyed continual, regular performances since its première – it is “the first ‘classic’ in our contemporary repertoire, and Handel is therefore the earliest of all ‘perpetually-in-the-repertory’ (‘classical’) composers”.2 And it shows no signs of budging either, enjoying a yearly Christmas slot in concert halls, town halls and churches around the world. It’s a little ironic, given the piece’s title, but a resurrection has never been necessary.
Far be it from me to suggest quite why the work has such enormous staying power, but clearly something about it is malleable enough to have fit the spirit of each age since its composition. It inspired and sometimes shocked its mid-18th-century audience. The 19th century cast it in a grander, louder, bigger form. And, heralding today’s economic changes, austerity Messiahs have been going on for some time now. But although its image – its sound, in fact – has changed, its value has seldom been in doubt.
Right from its remarkable Dublin debut in 1742, the accolades have poured in thick and fast, as Donald Burrows’ account of its reception history makes very clear.3 The Dublin News Letter proclaimed on 10 April (after only the rehearsal) that this “new sacred Oratorio... in the opinion of the best Judges, far surpasses anything of that Nature, which has been performed in this or any other Kingdom”, while The Dublin Journal declared it to be “the finest Composition of Musick that ever was heard” (and also asked women concertgoers to forego hoop-framed skirts in order to make more room in the hall). But perhaps most remarkable is the evaluation of Dr Edward Synge, Bishop of Elphin:
The whole is beyond any thing I had a notion of till I Read and heard it. It Seems to be a Species of Musick different from any other...4
The London première of the following year was a touch more problematic, with it drawing criticism for taking place in a secular venue. But it soon found its place in the hearts of Londoners, and especially it found a charitable function as well, with regular performances from 1749 at the newly established Foundling Hospital (which now holds the manuscript, a gift of Handel’s in his will).
Its renown spread internationally, too, in the later 18th century. George Burns’s Music Room in New York City Tavern was home to a partial performance in 1770, and it reached as far afield as Calcutta and Jamaica in the 1780s. No less a figure than Ralph Waldo Emerson heard it in Boston in 1843 – a “wonderful piece of music”, he said, although he did question its relevance to a secular society.5 Its greatness, though, was beyond question, to the point where comparisons to Shakespeare poured in: Chorley makes this connection several times in his 1859 volume on Messiah, and German writer Georg Gottfried Gervinus wrote an entire book in 1868 entitled Haendel und Shakespeare.
In the UK, both Messiah and Handel more generally were sufficiently venerated as early as 1784 (Britain not having enjoyed any comparable compositional talent since his time) to be made the subject of a major “Commemoration” event approximating the hundredth anniversary of his birth. A Westminster Abbey performance which crammed 513 players and singers into the piece might sound rather crass to modern tastes, but there’s little doubt about its contemporary success. Mary Hamilton, a royal governess and diarist, wrote: “I was so delighted that I thought myself in the heavenly regions... The Spectacle... was sublime, So universal a silence, So great a number of People.”6