Handel’s Messiah is today considered to be one of the great triumphs of Western culture, a familiar part of both the Christmas and Easter seasons. But the form in which it is heard today is the result of additions and deletions, reorchestrations and adaptations, and other changes made to address the exigencies of mounting a production of vocal music in Georgian Britain. From its very first performance, changes were being made to the original manuscript in order to suit the vocalists and instruments available.
In the winter of 1741-1742, George Frideric Handel was in Ireland at the invitation of the Duke of Devonshire, then Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. The composer was increasingly known for producing oratorio, although he had cut his teeth on Italian opera and was well known for his instrumental compositions, including the 1717 Water Music. He had composed a series of English-language oratorios as Italian opera diminished in favour throughout the 1730s (although he persisted with the operatic form until 1741). By the time he received the Duke’s invitation, he had become famous for producing highly successful oratorios. These were attended by people from all walks of life, from members of the royal family down to Oxford undergraduates, who, it is said, sold their furniture in order to purchase tickets.
The Duke’s invitation was to be the occasion for a history-making premiere, although there is no evidence that His Grace was aware of it at the time. The original plan was for a series of charity concerts—so enormously successful that a second run was rapidly organised—in which Messiah did not feature. Yet Messiah was already completed: the librettist, Charles Jennens, had provided Handel with the text during the previous summer, and the composer had leapt to work. Beginning on 22 August 1741, he completed the score in a mere twenty-four days. Jennens was not pleased, seeing this as a sign of haste rather than genius, although musicologists have since judged that the work is relatively free of error. At the end of his manuscript, Handel included the letters ‘SDG’ for Soli Deo Gloria: ‘May the glory be to God alone.’
Handel sat on Messiah for the rest of 1741, and through the charity concerts in Dublin which ran through the beginning of 1742. Then, in March, a spring charity concert series was proposed, and at last Handel prepared Messiah for debut after securing permission for the use of church choirs in the performance. The autograph manuscript calls for nine performers: two each of violins, oboes, and trumpets, along with a timpani, a viola, and a basso continuo. But, for the Dublin premiere, Handel was already making changes. The oboes were left out, and an organ (Handel’s own, shipped to Ireland at whatever expense) and harpsichord were added.
The vocal sequences, too, were subjected to a series of changes necessitated by the performers that Handel had in Dublin. Two arias were adapted for Susannah Cibber, an enormously popular actress of the day, albeit of less than the highest vocal quality. The sister of Thomas Arne (the composer of “Rule, Britannia”), she was also married to the son of Colley Cibber, the infamous actor, playwright, and poet laureate. Handel dutifully transposed the arias into a lower key to better fit her vocal range. He also added a new duet and chorus version of ‘How beautiful are the feet,’ which complimented the choral performers at his disposal.
The intimate scale of scoring for the 1742 performance Handel’s Messiah is in stark contrast to many modern ‘big Messiah’ performances, featuring enormous orchestras and huge choral ensembles. Even after acquiring the services of not one but two Dublin cathedral choirs, Handel’s vocal contingent only ran to, at most, sixteen boys and sixteen men (from which those who were ordained would be excluded), and two women—a total of, at most, thirty-four singers, but more likely closer to around sixteen. But the lack of mammoth scale was no problem for Messiah’s success. Coming directly after several successful Handel productions in Ireland, it had no trouble selling its tickets. Seven hundred people attended the premiere on 13 April 1742—so many that the men were asked to leave their swords at home, and the women were asked to dispense with the hoops in their skirts. The response was overwhelming: the charity, for indebted prisoners, took in £400 (roughly £50,000 today).
Handel took Messiah to London, where it debuted on 23 March 1743, to cool reviews and charges that the stage was no place for sacred music. Again, Handel had contrived to adjust the score for the vocalists at his disposal: this time, a new one-off setting of ‘And lo, the angel of the Lord,’ and a piece for tenor—‘Their sound is gone out’—for which Jennens had written the libretto, but which Handel had not used in Dublin. These adaptations were to no avail; Handel had to cut back the number of planned performances, further straining his relationship with Jennens, who demanded additional changes ahead of the 1745 revival. The work still failed to capture the public’s imagination, and, although the reception had been warmer, Handel decided to move on. It was only in 1749 (the year in which he composed his Music for the Royal Fireworks) that he would revisit it, with still more new compositions for his singers.
In 1750, Messiah became associated with an annual charity performance for Captain Coram’s Foundling Hospital. By this point, the scale of the production was already beginning to swell: the 1754 performance included fifteen violins, five violas, three cellos, two double basses, four bassoons, four oboes, two trumpets, two horns, drums, a nineteen-voice chorus, and five soloists: at least seventy-two performers, dwarfing the Dublin premiere, but only approaching the scale of some of the more modest modern productions of the oratorio. Since Handel’s time, the scale, scope, and number of Messiah performances seems only to have increased.
Listeners seeking to recapture the intimate experience of the original 1742 Dublin premiere may not be able to travel back in time, but work in modern musicology has given them the next best thing. In 2006, the Dunedin Consort & Players under John Butt recorded the 1742 Dublin Version of Messiah in a CD on the Linn Records label. The recording has been the subject of a great deal of praise—justly, as it happens, for it is a work of admirable intimacy and warmth. Butt’s commentary, provided in a set of liner notes, stresses that the Dunedin Consort recording does not fancy itself ‘definitive’ but rather a best effort at capturing the Dublin premiere in order to help understand the development of the work into the form (or forms) by which we know it today. In this respect, too, it is an enormous success.
From 1749, Handel conducted the Foundling Hospital charity performance of Messiah every year, only taking time off due to blindness. He attended his last in-person performance at Covent Garden in April 1759. Eight days later, on 14 April 1759, George Frideric Handel died. His Messiah will live forever.
