You Had Me at Hallelujah: The Magic of Handel's Messiah

Chorus America: Take us back to when the Messiah was created. What did Handel have in mind with this oratorio?

Thomas Kelly: The interesting thing about Messiah is that Handel composed it not knowing who was going to perform it. He had come from a long series of opera compositions. When he composes an opera he knows exactly who the singers are going to be and he knows what theater it is going to go in and exactly how the voices are.

For this piece he didn't. He composed it on spec, although maybe he was really inspired. There is the story about how he said he saw the heavens open and the angels, and maybe it's true, because he always had a very special place for Messiah. But he composed it before he was invited to go to Dublin [where Messiah was premiered] and he didn't know what he was going to find there. So he composed a kind of "guesswork" Messiah. What is amazing is how little he had to do to it when he got to Dublin, when you consider how many changes he had to make to Messiah later for different singers and different places.

We do know of a couple of changes he made in Dublin. There was a tenor aria or two that he changed to a recitative—my guess is that he didn't think the singer was quite up to it. If he had liked the change he made he would have kept it, but we have scores and parts from many later performances, mostly in London, and he never used those adjustments again.

He left things pretty much as they were, which means that Handel was a very good judge of what an average set of performing artists would be. And maybe that is one of the things that make it so usable to us for the next 250 years: that it is music that almost anybody can do.

It is strange to think of Handel making revisions constantly to a work like Messiah. From our vantage point, it seems that the piece should be sacrosanct.

Most of the revisions he made were not so much to make it better but to adjust it to the forces at hand. When some very cool singer came into town, he rewrote the aria so it fit in the singer's voice like a glove on a hand. We wish we had Handel here nowadays. Handel would just run in and rework the arias so no note is too high or too low and all your little twiddly bits are the things you do best in your voice.

"There may be conductors who want to make a statement and put their stamp on Handel's Messiah. But I would rather have Handel's stamp on Handel's Messiah."

In that first performance in Dublin, was it a small choir? What was the setting?

There were two Anglican cathedrals in Dublin—Saint Patrick's and Christ Church—each with a choir of men and boys, which had the same choirmaster, Mr. Roseingrave. I don't know how he did it...running back and forth from one cathedral to the other. But anyway, it was these two smallish choirs that were put together to be the choir for Messiah. Probably no more than 35 people, maximum. Then there were the female soloists, but the male soloists were drawn from the choir itself. The orchestra was called the State Music of Ireland and was conducted by Matthew Dubourg, a violinist whom Handel admired a lot. It was probably the size of what we would consider a modern Baroque orchestra.

Was the Messiah a hit from the beginning?

Yes. They said things like "it was performed in the most regular manner." People thought it was a good version of what they were used to. They were certainly used to operas—recitatives and arias and choruses—and they thought this was a good version of that kind of music. Oratorios were a fairly new thing for Handel. He had mostly been an opera composer. I don't think people said that it was the greatest thing ever made; they said it was very well wrought and very well performed. But it's never gone away since and it has always been a favorite of audiences.

Do you have a preferred kind of Messiah performance? It has been done by very small ensembles all the way up to huge forces.

I play for my students many different versions because Messiah is not just one thing; it changes over time, don't you think? Each generation makes for itself a Messiah of the kind they like. I have a recording of John Philip Sousa's band playing and singing Messiah and others with bands of various sorts. I always think I am making fun of them, but there is one recording of Sir Adrian Boult from 1960 and it is a Cadillac of a Messiah—London Symphony Orchestra and some huge choir and organ added in—and it is just beautiful. It's thunderous, huge, titanic, and I think it's great. There is also a 1926 recording of Malcom Sargent in Albert Hall that is pretty cool. And there is the famous reorchestration of it by Sir Thomas Beecham.

I guess for myself, I kind of like the sports car rather than the Cadillac version of Messiah. I don't want to say lean and mean, but the kind of clarity and crystalline quality it has when there is a small number of focused instruments and a small number of focused voices. I like that and it is probably closer to what Handel heard. But you know, maybe Handel would have liked a thousand singers and a thousand in the orchestra.

And then there is Leonard Bernstein's recording from the 1950s. He takes out parts of the Messiah and puts it back together the way he likes it.

Messiah is one of those things that everybody practices being expressive about. It's like certain kinds of modern drama where the director needs to make a personal statement with a Shakespeare play. There may be conductors who want to make a statement and put their stamp on Handel's Messiah. But I would rather have Handel's stamp on Handel's Messiah.

What is it about the Messiah musically that makes it so durable—and open to these kinds of interpretations?

Parts of it are unbelievably simple. If you think of what the chorus does at the beginning of "Hallelujah" there's really nothing there. You go "hallelujah" and then what happens? You do it again—and then you do it shortly: hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, ten times. It takes Handel a long time to get going. There is a sense in which if you didn't have a different kind of attitude about this, you might think it was stupid. We don't think it's stupid. We think it's noble and classical because of its simplicity and its balance.

"Perhaps the chorus speaks not just for the people on stage but for everybody in the hall and for all of humanity."

Of course, Messiah is not simple everywhere and some of the really difficult passages of music are given to the chorus—think "For Unto Us A Child Is Born," "His Yoke Is Easy," and "All We Like Sheep." There is an airy lightness to those choruses—they are unlike choruses in any other Handel oratorios that I know of.

We talk of singing The Messiah, but isn't it really just called Messiah (no "the")?

Handel seems to call it Messiah: An Oratorio and sometimes he was nervous about putting on this thing called Messiah, so he called it A New Sacred Oratorio. Given that he intended for Messiah to be performed in a concert hall for a paying audience, he may have been a little bit nervous that people would think it was inappropriate or sacrilegious to ask people to pay money to hear singing on a religious subject with text straight out of the Bible.

That may also be one of the reasons why he kept Messiah aside for charitable purposes. During the last years of his life, he gave a benefit performance every year in London for an orphanage called the Foundling Hospital, and he left behind a score so that they could continue to do benefit performances of Messiah after he died. The first concert in Dublin was also a benefit—for prisoners and people in hospitals.

So Handel had a special place in his heart for Messiah, perhaps in composing it, but certainly in the way he used it for the good of humanity. So it's nice that it is something that still makes us feel better about ourselves and our fellow human beings because there is some evidence that Handel thought of it in the same way.

Tell us about the tradition of standing when the "Hallelujah" chorus is sung. Where did that get started?

I don't know for sure why people started standing. The tradition is that the king liked it and stood up and you don't sit in the presence of the king. If the king stands up, everybody stands up.

Do you know when the tradition of performing the Messiah annually around Christmas time started?

I don't know and if you think about it, it is not really a Christmas piece. It passes through Christmas and then goes on to a lot of other biblical material that doesn't have anything to do with Christmas. So I don't know quite why we want to perform Messiah at Christmas rather than at Easter or some other time.

Is there anything that choral singers may not know about Messiah that would really help them understand it and appreciate it more?

One of the differences between Handel's operas and his oratorios is the richness of the choruses. His operas are generally a string of recitatives and arias with an occasional chorus. In the oratorios, and particularly in Messiah, there are a lot more choruses. I wonder why that is. What if chorus members are to think of themselves kind of like the chorus in a Greek play, where they are part of the performance but also part of the audience. Perhaps the chorus speaks not just for the people on stage but for everybody in the hall and for all of humanity.