As we approach “Messiah” season, when orchestras, church choirs, community choruses and sing-along participants celebrate Christmas with George Frideric Handel’s sacred oratorio (never mind that it was first performed in Easter season), composer and musical biographer Jan Swafford, writing in The Atlantic, examines the work’s unique qualities, in its own time and ever since.
“Among the towering masterpieces of Western music, the ‘Messiah’ occupies a distinctive place: It is familiar to more people than any other work of its kind,” Swafford writes. “Bach’s B Minor Mass and ‘St. Matthew Passion’ and Monteverdi’s Vespers are comparable among supreme choral pieces, but they aren’t performed at your church or the high school down the street. . . . A fair percentage of the world probably knows the ‘Hallelujah’ chorus well enough to sing along.”
The oratorio’s wide and lasting appeal is “a tribute to the overwhelming effect of the ‘Messiah,’ which is a feat of sustained inspiration arguably unsurpassed in the canon of Western classical music,” Swafford writes. “ ‘Comfort ye, comfort ye my People,’ the libretto opens, pulling us in at the beginning, its flow of compelling melody and stirring choruses enthralling us for the next two hours and leaving us singularly exalted.”
Swafford’s essay also will introduce many readers to Charles Jennens, the “rich squire and crabbily conservative political dissident” who assembled (and tinkered with) biblical texts to produce the oratorio’s libretto: