{"id":641,"date":"2015-10-05T00:37:58","date_gmt":"2015-10-05T05:37:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.praeclara.org\/?page_id=641"},"modified":"2018-03-24T17:36:24","modified_gmt":"2018-03-24T22:36:24","slug":"handels-messiah-sacred-or-profane","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.praeclara.org\/?page_id=641","title":{"rendered":"Handel’s Messiah: Sacred or Profane?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"UALR<\/a><\/strong>by Thomas E. Kaiser, Professor of History<\/strong>
\nUniversity of Arkansas at Little Rock<\/strong><\/p>\n

Although Handel\u2019s Messiah<\/em>\u00a0has long been a staple of church music and appreciated throughout the world as a testimony of the Christian faith, this was not always the case. Indeed, it is one of Messiah<\/em>\u2019s strangest mysteries that many listeners in the eighteenth century, particularly clergymen, were outraged by the masterwork and condemned it as no less than a sacrilege. Among them was one Reverend John Newton, who, following a performance of the work in 1784, fired off more than fifty sermons assailing the oratorio as a trivial amusement \u201cno better than a profanation of the name and truths of God\u201d\u009d and no less than a second \u201ccrucifying of the Son of God.\u201d\u009d For long thereafter, the religious content and meaning of Messiah<\/em> \u2014 or lack of it \u2014 was contested by churchmen, Christian and non-Christian scholars and listeners alike, and the debate is still not over. Why so much controversy over a transcendent work of such apparently impeccable Christian orthodoxy?<\/p>\n

\"GF<\/a>One clue lies in the historical context within which Messiah<\/em> was composed. Born in Germany in 1685\u2014the same year as Johann Sebastian Bach\u2014Georg Friedrich Handel was raised as a Lutheran and remained a firm believer all his life. Yet, unlike Bach, he was not a church composer and upon his arrival in England in 1710 devoted most of his efforts to writing Italian opera for the concert hall. By the 1730s, however, Italian opera was going out of fashion in England for being too aristocratic and \u201ctoo foreign,\u201d\u009d and so instead Handel began cranking out oratorios. Not only were oratorios more accessible to Handel\u2019s audiences because they used English texts, but they were also much cheaper to produce because they did not require elaborate costumes or scenery. For dramatic materials, Handel turned to the Bible, which made perfect sense since Protestant England was then experiencing a religious revival due largely to the spread of Methodism, and many segments of the concert audience were intimately familiar with both the Old and New Testaments.<\/p>\n

But Handel had to be careful. By staging dramas drawn from the Bible in theaters and concert halls \u2014 not all of which had stainless reputations\u00a0\u2014 he risked offending religious sensibilities, and as the outraged comments of the good Reverend Newton indicate, he was not always successful in persuading audiences that he was upholding the faith instead of commercializing it for profit. One way of shielding himself from criticism was to dramatize stories taken not from the New Testament, but from the Old, which was slightly less fraught with theological controversy. Because of its much longer historical sweep, the Old Testament also provided more characters and situations for Handel to exploit, and thus, with one notable exception, every oratorio Handel composed on Biblical subjects \u2014Esther, Deborah, Samson, Saul, Joshua, etc.\u00a0\u2014 derived exclusively from the Old Testament. The exception, of course, was Messiah<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"William<\/a>Why then did Handel compose Messiah<\/em>? Or more precisely, why did he dare? The immediate answer is that by 1741 Handel\u2019s life and career were in trouble. Not only was he deeply in debt and partially paralyzed by stroke, but his latest Old Testament oratorios, including Israel in Egypt, had been poorly received. When the Duke of Devonshire invited him to compose a work for a concert in Dublin to raise money for a variety of charities (including the Charitable Musical Society for the Relief of Imprisoned Debtors), Handel most likely decided upon Messiah<\/em> in the belief that an oratorio based on \u201cnew material\u201d\u009d\u00a0\u2014 the New Testament \u2014 might succeed where his previous oratorios had failed and that perhaps the concert\u2019s Christian charitable purpose would shield him from charges of committing sacrilege.<\/p>\n

Even then, Handel took extra precautions. Although Messiah<\/em> is about the life and passion of Jesus, more than half its texts derive from the Old Testament. Even more striking, Messiah<\/em>, unlike his operas and other oratorios, does not feature voices representing individual characters engaged in a drama. Instead, like many church hymns, its texts are drawn from selected Biblical passages that \u201cimpersonally\u201d\u009d prophesize the coming of a Messiah in Part I, recount the Passion of Christ in Part II, and forecast the Resurrection of the Dead in Part III. As such, Messiah<\/em>, composed for the concert hall, makes a strange contrast with Bach\u2019s St. John Passion<\/em> and St. Matthew Passion<\/em>, which, although written for the church, more closely resemble opera in that individual voices sing the parts of individual characters in the Passion story.<\/p>\n

\"Methodism<\/a>Although Messiah can surely be appreciated for its musical qualities alone, does all this make the great work any the less religious? Handel\u2019s own attitudes toward Messiah<\/em> remain a mystery, and we will probably never know if he intended this work as a clever career move or as a tribute to God, or, as is quite possible, both. But despite the strictures of the Reverend Newton and others like him, we know that there were members of Handel\u2019s audiences who immediately felt that Messiah had powerful religious meaning, because they\u00a0\u2014 in the belief that God dwells everywhere\u00a0\u2014 could look beyond the fact that it had not been intended for the church. John Wesley, the co-founder of Methodism and a keen appreciator of religious music, was among them. \u201cI doubt,\u201d\u009d he wrote following a rare church performance of Messiah in 1758, \u201cif that congregation was ever so serious at a sermon as they were during this performance.\u201d\u009d Upon hearing the oratorio in 1750, Anne Granville Dewes waxed even more enthusiastically to her brother that Handel\u2019s \u201cwonderful Messiah<\/em> will never be out of my head; and I may say my heart was raised almost to heaven by it.\u201d\u009d It was only, she insisted, \u201cthose people who have not felt the pleasure of devotion that can make any objection to that performance, which \u201d\u00a6makes us truly sensible of the power of the divine words [Handel] has chose[n] beyond any human work that has ever yet appeared.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

Because of objections like Newton\u2019s, Messiah<\/em> was slow to win favor with English audiences, and some might say the jury is still out on its religious meaning. Yet surely the party of Wesley and Dawes is winning converts every time the great work is performed.<\/p>\n

\n

Photo credits:<\/strong>\u00a0Portrait of G.F. Handel, attributed to Balthasar Denner [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons; portrait of William Cavendish, 3rd Duke of Devonshire,\u00a0Joshua Reynolds [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons; portrait of John Wesley,\u00a0William Hamilton [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Thomas E. Kaiser, Professor of History University of Arkansas at Little Rock Although Handel\u2019s Messiah\u00a0has long been a staple of church music and appreciated throughout the world as a testimony of the Christian faith, this was not always the case. Indeed, it is one of Messiah\u2019s strangest mysteries that\u2026<\/p>\n

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