A Christmas 'Messiah'

George Frideric Handel (1685–1759)

LONDON, ONTARIO – In the last hours of November we happily and gratefully took in the presentation of Handel’s Messiah at Metropolitan United Church featuring the London Symphonia with the Elora Festival Singers; arguably the finest professional choir in the country right now. The four soloists (sturdily competent if not quite stellar) were also drawn from the choir; with the tenor, bass, contralto and soprano stepping forward to deliver their songs and returning to the stand to join in with their colleagues on the exquisitely rendered choruses which constitute the real backbone and splendour of this most beloved of oratorios. The hall was all but sold out and once the obligatory hiccup of self-loathing neurosis was out of the way - otherwise known as the utterly vapid land acknowledgement - the assembled musicians proceeded to earn their rapturous and sustained ovation at evening’s end.

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Ever since the Wuhan batflu panic disrupted life as we’ve known it, it’s been challenging to find a worthy Messiah production in London at Christmas time. So this well-organized and well-promoted event felt like a return to sanity and order. In preparation for this show I had all the excuse I needed to start playing Christmas music around the house and in the car a couple weeks earlier than I can usually get away with it. And on an even more personal note, I was thrilled to hear this music again in the very same hall where I first made its acquaintance about fifty years ago. I was twenty-two or twenty-three years old when – having no idea what I was in for – I was taken along to the Met to hear something called Messiah, being performed by I don’t know what choral group. (I suppose it might even have been the Met’s own choir which, back then, was a large and accomplished musical corps.) To heighten my sense of a return, we situated ourselves in about the same spot in that balcony where circa 1975, I was sabotaged by the delightfully shocking realization that something other than rock music could touch me so deeply.
 
This was also my first experience of Messiah in concert since reading Jane Glover’s magnificent, Handel in London (2018). Herself a conductor and director of the Glyndebourne Touring Opera and the London Mozart Players, Glover's book wonderfully expanded my appreciation of the German-born George Frideric Handel (1685–1759) whose formidable industry and gift for invention did so much to help England forge its own musical identity. As a music professional Glover writes that “Handel has indeed occupied a sizable portion of my activity and my repertoire.” While she brings an insider’s perspective gleaned from hands-on experience with dozens and dozens of Handel’s operas, oratorios, anthems and orchestral works – and is able to combine that with her own wide reading and historical research – she still manages to tell a story which remains wonderfully accessible to the layman.

Though Handel’s surgeon father allowed the boy to take his first lessons in music, he was leery of the facility and passion which the young lad immediately displayed. Like so many parents, he feared the unlikely prospects of his son ever managing so unorthodox a talent – however precocious and pronounced it might be – in a way that would be congruent with financial sufficiency. I remember in grade three being haunted by a commonly reproduced illustration that a visiting music teacher showed our class of a young George Frideric in his nightshirt being apprehended in the wee hours of the morning by a lamp-bearing father who has caught him tickling the keyboard of a banished clavichord in the attic. Glover reports that while the scene as portrayed almost certainly never happened, Handel’s father did insist that his son's primary vocational training should be focused on some field other than music.

An apocryphal attic recital

So Handel proceeded to diligently prepare himself for a career in law and kept up all of his musical activities on the side. Even though his father died when he was twelve, it wasn’t until the age of seventeen that he moved full time into the pursuit of a musical career. Greatly benefiting from all of that paternally administered cautiousness and his own solid grounding in legal principles, right from the get-go Handel was cannily adept at securing contracts and sponsorships. In a field of endeavour where so many great talents get taken advantage of and exploited, even as a teenaged prodigy Handel had an innate nose for business and an unerring eye for the main chance; for what he could accomplish and what it was worth.
 
While working as a second violinist in a Hamburg opera house, he had his first opera professionally staged at the age of twenty. And the very next year he was off to Italy where he rubbed elbows with Correlli, Scarlatti and Telemann and had two more operas staged in Florence and Venice. At the age of twenty-five he was appointed court conductor to the German House of Hanover and was invited that same year to write an opera to be produced in London. Then when a convoluted crisis in succession played out with Handel’s mainstay, the Duke of Hanover, being crowned the King of England as George I, everything came together quite spectacularly. For the rest of his life, this German composer would live and work in England specializing in – then all the rage – Italian operas. He sat on the board of governors of the opera house; composing at least a third of the operas performed there while recruiting and training the singers and players and adapting or swapping out various arias and songs to suit the specific talents of his performers.

He also wrote music for state occasions – Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks being two of the most famous – as well as Zadok the Priest in 1727 for the coronation of George II. This spine-tingling choral hymn has been subsequently performed at every British coronation since then. I also treasure his dozen Concerti Grossi and the fifteen Organ Concertos which Handel himself would frequently perform between the acts of his operas and oratorios. Musicologist Michael Kennedy identifies Handel’s development of the dramatic oratorio – and of these most especially Messiah – as his “most original contribution to the art of music.”
 
Handel turned to the oratorio form out of necessity when the English audience for Italian operas – which admittedly appealed to a pretty select and wealthy fraction of the populace - was suddenly and sharply fragmenting with the opening of a second London opera company. There always had been grumbling in the wider society about why London should host operas in languages that most Londoners didn’t speak. And that frustration greatly fueled the impact when John Gay premiered his wildly popular Beggar’s Opera in 1728. Featuring sixty-nine adapted popular ballads in three acts and telling the stories of low-lifes, thieves and whores, The Beggar's Opera was as startling a gob in the face of the musical establishment as anything that Johnny Rotten ever expectorated in the general direction of progressive rock blowhards in the 1970s. It was time for Handel to develop a new kind of offering for his musical audience.

In 1732 Handel ingeniously adapted a musical form which had enjoyed some popularity in Italy and Germany – the musical rendition of Biblical narratives – and presented his first oratorio based on the Old Testament story of Esther. Referencing a story that was commonly known . . . rendered in a language that everybody spoke and understood . . . straightforwardly produced without ruinously expensive sets and costuming . . .  and capitalizing on the English genius for choral music . . . in one perfectly brilliant and perfectly simple stroke, Handel attracted whole new audiences and infused new life into English music-making. (In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it would be British composers who churned out the majority of oratorios.) And his switch to the oratorio form apparently revivified Handel as well. When he composed Messiah in 1742, setting a libretto supplied by his longtime collaborator Charles Jennens, he wrote the entire masterpiece in less than three weeks. 
 
Jane Glover gives a wonderful account of the very first performance of Messiah in Dublin, Ireland in 1742 – at Easter when it was originally thought that this lavish celebration of the life of Christ would have the most appeal. The twenty-seven year-old soprano for that historic performance was glad to get out of England where she had become the subject of scandal by extricating herself from an abusive marriage with a little help from her brothers. “Susanna Cibber received an especial tribute,” Glover writes. “After she had sung ‘He was despised’, the longest aria in the whole work, combining sorrow, desolation, guilt and even rage, the Reverend Dr. Delaney leapt to his feet, crying, ‘Woman, for this be all thy sins forgiven thee!’ If Susanna’s reputation as a fallen woman had followed her from London to Dublin, she had certainly received the most public absolution, and in the most august of circumstances. It is to be hoped that this brought her comfort rather than embarrassment.”
 
On my last visit to London, England I spent an afternoon mooching around the Handel Museum on Bond Street which was set up in the building where Handel lived for the last thirty-six years of his life. They’ve done everything they can to restore his three-storey home and studio, outfitting it throughout with period furnishings. Concerts are regularly presented there and most afternoons, students from a nearby music academy play recitals on an antique harpsichord. On the front exterior wall between two windows on what we would call the second storey and the Brits would call the first, is a blue, National Trust plaque which reads: “George Frideric Handel 1685–1759 Composer lived in this house from 1723 and died here”.
 
And believe it or not, right next door, and again between two windows on the front wall, is another blue plaque that reads: “Jimi Hendrix 1942–1970 Guitarist and Songwriter lived here 1968–1969”. Strange near-bedfellows, indeed. But there is at least one parallel between them that merits mentioning: England, and specifically London, refined each of their very different talents to its purest and most striking form. Before moving to Britain, the Seattle-born Hendrix had a career but nothing that ever would have netted him a plaque on a building.

So perhaps you’re wondering whose rendition of Handel’s Messiah I’ve been popping into our domestic sound systems to get Christmas underway. My choice is a sentimental favourite, the now thirty-year-old set produced by London Ontario’s own Gerald Fagan conducting the 135-voice London Fanshawe Symphonic Chorus, the 35-voice Gerald Fagan Singers, the Concert Players Orchestra and featured soloists Leslie Fagan (soprano), Janis Taylor (mezzo-soprano), Mark Dubois (tenor) and Gary Relyea (bass-baritone). Today, it’s hard to appreciate the way in which Fagan and his musical consortiums all but monopolized London’s sizable Christmas Messiah market for about twenty-five years. Though only the first of Messiah’s three parts is concerned with Christ’s nativity (which is why the work was originally conceived as an Easter oratorio) its association with the Yuletide has been established for the better part of two centuries. Through most of the 80s and 90s and into the 2000s, the only way other London choirs could get some Messiah action to themselves was to mount a production during the Easter season when the appeal was much more limited.
 
Always Fagan helmed at least one December performance with the big choir at Centennial Hall and a more intimate performance with the smaller chamber choir in the exquisite acoustics of St. Peter’s Cathedral. Routinely, concert presentations trim about a half hour out of Messiah’s second and third parts so as to bring the whole show in at about two hours. For a few years in the early 90s, Fagan also put on a complete and unexpurgated performance and also a do-it-yourself Messiah where audience members were invited to bring along their own scores and join in the singing on all of the choruses.
 
I was reviewing their just-released recording for SCENE magazine in December of 1995 and had phoned Gerry up with a few supplementary questions as the first disc was merrily spinning away in the background as we talked. Midway through track 20, 'He Shall Feed His Flock', as the mezzo-soprano stepped back and Gerry’s own daughter took over in her pure and soaring soprano, Gerry politely asked, “Could we just be quiet for a couple minutes?” When the song concluded he resumed with two more questions: “Can the kid sing or what? Now then, where were we?”

Over the years, I frequently drew the assignment to preview Messiah presentations for the London Free Press, usually focusing on that year’s guest soloists. In 2004 I was given a little more space than was usually available to write something up for a quarterly called Christian Life in London, and gave Gerry a heads-up that if he wanted to dig into the deeper religious significance of the work, this was his chance. He did not disappoint.
                                                                       
Fagan has brought his battered and much annotated score to our breakfast interview. “Here’s an example of the kind of thing I mean,” he says, enthusiastically flipping open the over-sized book to page 106. “We have this phrase from Isaiah, ‘All we like sheep,’ and look, the notes are all together, everything is moving exactly the same way until we get to, ‘have gone astray,’ and look at the notes here – everybody wanders off their own way. Isn’t that amazing? That’s the gift he brings to this music. With the language, with the setting of the words, he creates these word pictures all the time.”

“Look at this page!” he says now flipping through the book at random. ‘Who is this king of Glory? Who is this king of Glory? Who is this king of Glory?’ He asks that three times before you get the answer. He presents us with this repetition in almost every chorus. Whenever that happens, it’s an obvious reference to the Holy Trinity.”

Fagan turns to a page in the Easter section. “‘Surely He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows,’” he reads. “Now this is a mob scene so he has solid chords. Then he leaves those chords and goes to the chastisement where he starts to break things up. I mean, look at the angularity of the writing here when we sing, ‘And with His stripes.’ What’s going on here? Christ is being flogged, they’re cutting His flesh and each word comes with this sharp, cutting edge. But when we get to the end of that line, ‘And with His stripes . . . we are healed’, then it suddenly goes to legato with this wonderful rounded smoothness. The music itself is being healed, in a way. The man was a genius. Every year I’m bowled over by the inexhaustible brilliance of his writing and his setting of the text. And you have to remember, English was Handel’s second language which makes such sensitivity to the text even more phenomenal.”

Because Christmas music is something we return to every year throughout our lives, it eventually accumulates a formidable memorative power that is more pungent than some people are comfortable with. I don’t believe I’m morbid but I do admit that no small part of the appeal of Christmas for me is the annual opportunity it provides to commune with the beloved dead. To hear Messiah’s opening recitative of ‘Comfort ye, comfort ye my people,’ is to be sitting once again with my parents in the balcony of Metropolitan United Church on that December Sunday evening when I heard that beguiling refrain for the very first time and knew this was music I’d be avidly returning to for the rest of my life.

In December of 1991, I was late to the ‘do-it-yourself Messiah’ that the Fagan choirs were hosting at Dundas Street Centre United Church because I’d been at the bedside of my dying father-in-law. The choirs and the singalong audience were well into Part Three, just beginning ‘Worthy is the Lamb,’ when Gerry sent me in with a lyric sheet (a music score would have been wasted on me) to sit among the tenors and the basses. I remember thinking at first how wrong they sounded, how flat, but soon understood that no, they were singing it right. What was missing was the blend that comes from sitting apart from the choir in a hall or a church and hearing all the different sections at once. And then the next thing I knew, I was utterly engulfed in that great ‘Amen’. This final chorus takes six full pages to sing one word. Fagan had told me, “It is treacherously difficult but it says ‘Amen’ like it’s never been said before or since.” Sitting in with the singers that night I was startled into something like an out of body experience by the power and audacity of all those male voices; the music just cascading all around me like a meteor shower. 

My mother-in-law was the person in this world with whom I most shared my love for Christmas music and to whom I most longed to read out whole sections of Jane Glover’s Handel in London when I read it a few months after her death. We had about a ten-year run when I took Sheila to the Fagans’ matinee performances of Messiah at St. Peter’s Cathedral every year. We always sat in the lectors’ section of the pews to the west of the altar where she would be the first on her pins for the ‘Hallelujah’ chorus as well as the ovation at the concert’s conclusion. Also without fail, we were always among the last to leave the concert space. Once she’d dried her eyes and recomposed herself, Sheila insisted on personally thanking and congratulating the trumpet player, the timpanist, the cellist, the harpsichordist (usually Marlene Fagan) and whichever other musicians were still left on the floor. I foolishly wondered at first if this might not be an imposition on exhausted performers who probably just wanted to pack up their gear and get home to supper. But one look at their beaming faces – is anybody ever irritated to be told they were marvelous? - soon assured me that the adoration was mutual. No, it’s never quite the same as it used to be on those Sunday afternoons of happy memory. But whenever I’m enveloped in the revivifying waves of this immortal music in whatever form I am able to imbibe it, I also find myself back in some consoling semblance of Sheila’s company once again.

Handel's good neighbour Jimi Hendrix