THE FLORIDA ORCHESTRA | 2017-2018
Program Notes
59
Charity, by making Room for more company.” Through
these sacrifices, the capacity of the hall was raised
from 600 to 700 on April 13th. An almost equal number,
hoping for a ticket, are said to have milled about
outside. Messiah was a triumph. “It gave universal
Satisfaction to all present; and was allowed by the
greatest Judges to be the finest Composition of Musick
that ever was heard,” announced Faulkner’s Journal.
Handel repeated Messiah on June 3rd, and lingered a
while longer before leaving Dublin on August 13th with
sincere but never-fulfilled promises to return.
The Irish triumph of Messiah did not follow Handel
back to London, at least not immediately. He wanted
to present his new oratorio as soon as he returned, but
he knew that there would be, in the words of Robbins
Landon, “strong opposition to hearing the words of
the New Testament in a theatre peopled by actors and
actresses of loose morals and dubious sexual habits.”
He chose instead to give the Old Testament-based
Samson on February 18, 1743, and it proved to be the
first of his oratorios that won unqualified acclaim in
the British capital. Messiah was ready for its London
premiere on March 23rd at Covent Garden, though
he chose not to bill the work under its true title but
called it, simply, “A New Sacred Oratorio,” hoping to
skirt some of the indignation of the more puritanical
audience members and of Edmund Gibson, the Bishop
of London. The ploy succeeded only in part. “Any work
about the Omnipotent should never be performed
in a playhouse,” fumed one clergyman. Some of his
colleagues tried to shut down the theater. Messiah,
still known only as “Handel’s New Oratorio,” was given
twice more in 1743, and twice again in 1745, then put
aside. Not until the death of Bishop Gibson and his
succession by the more liberal Thomas Sherlock in
1748 did Handel again mount Messiah, at last under
its original title, for a single performance at Covent
Garden on March 3, 1749. It was, finally, the following
year that Handel’s surpassing masterpiece began to
receive its due. After the April 13, 1750 Covent Garden
performance, Handel presented it again, on May 1st,
for the benefit of the London Foundling Hospital, a
charity that had been established in 1740 by Captain
Thomas Coram for the “Maintenance & Education
of Exposed & Deserted Young Children.” The concert
also commemorated the dedication of the Hospital’s
Chapel and the organ therein that Handel had already
contributed. (Handel’s other local charitable interest
was the “Society for the Support of Decayed Musicians
& Their Families,” later more sanitarily renamed the
Royal Society of Musicians.) Messiah, buoyed by a
wave of public good will inspired by Handel giving its
proceeds to a worthy cause, was a huge success. He
presented it for the Hospital annually thereafter. It was
the last work he directed, only eight days before he
died on April 14, 1759.
What To Listen For
For all of its unparalleled popularity, Messiah is an
aberration among Handel’s oratorios, the least typical
of his two-dozen works in the form: it is his only
oratorio, except Israel in Egypt, whose entire text is
drawn from the Bible; it is his only oratorio without a
continuous dramatic plot; it is his only oratorio based
on the New Testament; it is his only oratorio presented
in a consecrated space during his lifetime, a reflection
of the sacred rather than dramatic nature of its content
(“I should be sorry if I only entertained them; I wished
to make them better,” he told one aristocratic admirer);
it has more choruses than any of his oratorios except
Israel; the soloists in Messiah are commentators on
rather than participants or characters in the oratorio’s
story. None of this, of course, detracts a whit from
the emotional/artistic/(perhaps) religious experience
of Messiah. (Handel and Jennens never appended
the definite article to the title.) Its three parts — The
Advent of the Messiah, The Passion of Christ, and His
Resurrection — embody the most sacred events of the
Christian calendar, yet its sincerity and loftiness of
expression transcend any dogmatic boundaries. In the
words of George P. Upton, the American musicologist
and turn-of-the-20th-century critic of the Chicago
Tribune, “Other oratorios may be compared one with
another; Messiah stands alone, a majestic monument
to the memory of the composer, an imperishable
record of the noblest sentiments of human nature and
the highest aspirations of man.”
© 2017 Dr. Richard E. Rodda
Please visit www.FloridaOrchestra.org
for our full program notes.