By 1738 George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) occupied an enviable position on the English musical scene. Handel’s career to that point had involved multiple trips across the European continent, each of which added something to his creative arsenal. Gone were the early years, marked by precocious talent and “back desk” jobs in the bustling orchestras and opera houses of Hamburg. Gone, too, were Handel’s heady days passed in Italy as a special guest, absorbing the lavish musical styles he witnessed during three intense years. Not long thereafter, around his 25th birthday, Handel settled permanently in London. Although his career would not unfold without setbacks, at least he now had a focus and locus for all subsequent professional projects. Over the next 50 years he would create an immense body of works that forever altered the course of music history: Italian operas imported to satisfy London audiences; organ concertos that showed off his technical ability; grand symphonic and choral works for ceremonial occasions; chamber music to edify and please his patrons during intimate moments; and, of course, oratorio – that novel combination of sacred message and operatic medium.

During the first two decades of his London residency (1712-1732), Handel became a leading impresario and musical director. He skilfully adapted to changing tastes among the theater-going public. He responded to, and even helped to cultivate, a craze for Italian opera upon which he was perfectly poised to capitalize. However, interest in Italian opera began to cool during the 1730s, so Handel quickly pivoted to follow his audiences toward musical spectacles in English. 1738 marked a turning point, signaling a decisive move from Italian opera toward English oratorio. Of Handel’s 40 Italian operas, only one was composed after 1738 even though he lived another 20 years. A large part of Handel’s shift stemmed from financial concerns. Conventional sources for funding (patronage and subscriptions) were running dry, and Handel knew it. Plans for a new opera season were scrapped in mid 1738.  Still, Handel’s operatic muse could not be turned off quite so easily. He embraced a rising interest for operatic music sung in English – i.e., oratorio.

Oratorios had existed already for 150 years as non-staged works for operatic forces frequently treating sacred topics rather than secular, classical themes. Originally oratorios allowed some measure of theatrical experience even during times when opera was banned (as during Lent). By Handel’s day, this religious function was perhaps less strong in Protestant England, but it still governed one’s choice of subject matter. He had already tried this approach with Esther (1732) and Athalia (1733), dramatic vocal works in English and based on biblical stories. Thus, fresh on the heels of his final Italian opera, Handel wrote both Saul and Israel in Egypt in 1739. Three years later, The Messiah appeared – musically speaking, of course.

Since that day, Messiah has become globally familiar. For general music audiences, the work and the composer are inextricably linked. We don’t hear Messiah so much as we hear Handel’s Messiah. Despite writing a thousand other works, Handel’s fame most often rises – and occasionally falls – by virtue of this one fabulous, complicated, quirky, and majestic composition.

As wonderfully detailed in Charles King’s recent bestseller, Every Valley (on sale at intermission tonight!), we would not have Messiah without a deep cast of supporting characters. Among the most significant is Handel’s librettist, Charles Jennens. Independently wealthy but also quarrelsome and a hypochondriac, Jennens spent most of his time at his Gopsall Hall estate. The lifelong bachelor became increasingly reclusive, but in the 1730s and 1740s he worked closely with Handel on several major libretti, including Saul, Israel in Egypt, and others. Apparently the two men did not always see eye-to-eye; Jennens could be quite harsh in his judgments about Handel’s musical settings. Despite being older by some 15 years, Handel usually deferred to Jennens even regarding changes to musical details in the composition.

While the composer dabbled in other projects, Jennens began a deep dive into material centering on the great mystery of God, Christ, and their role in redeeming all of humanity. According to Charles King, Jennens was going to pursue an age-old philosophical and ethical dilemma, one that had been treated by famous thinkers from antiquity to the present: “how to live bravely in the face of disaster and defeat.” He cobbled together various passages from scripture – working from the King James Version, of course – as well as other, non-biblical sources in order to connect aspects of Hebrew prophecy with New Testament realization. Gradually the material fell into three parts, as summarized by King:

The First part was to cover the prophecy of God’s plan for redeeming mankind and the future events through which that prophecy would unfold . . . The second part showed the suffering and tribulation of the world and narrated the traditional story of the passion of Jesus Christ . . . The third part was a grand hymn of thanksgiving for God’s erasure of human faults and the final triumph over death (p. 182).

The challenge of setting this all to music was a task even Jennens was unsure that Handel could accomplish. As King continues, “There was no storyline to any of it, no named characters, and only one episode that could be called a scene or incident,” that being the annunciation of Christ’s birth. “Moreover, Jennens was using not just incidents drawn from the Bible but the sacred words themselves, restitched from across the Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament, edited here and there by his own hand for meaning and clarity – and nowhere a rhyming couplet or anything that resembled the text of an actual song” (p. 183).

Many commentators have noted that Messiah does not offer a conventional plot with beginning, middle, and end, each dramatically interconnected. King himself refers to the work as a “rainstorm of images and feelings, rather than a narrative that a listener might be expected to track from beginning to end” (p. 204). Still, there is enough sense of chronological progression to justify performing the entire work rather than – as happens all too often – presenting only individual arias or choruses. Whether the narrative sense is strong enough to support a staged presentation is a more hotly debated matter, one that we will touch on a bit later.

Handel worked on Messiah in late summer 1741 in preparation for its premiere in Dublin, Ireland, to help raise funds for a children’s convalescent hospital. Privileged London audiences would have scoffed at the idea of premiering such a work in Dublin – considered a provincial backwater. Indeed, the musical force on display at the premiere was

as patched together a company as Handel had ever assembled – the notorious and feverish [soprano Susannah] Cibber, a German soprano, two amalgamated church choirs, and the equivalent of an army band – tasked with performing a collection of sacred scripture, in English translation, with no plot, all of it set to music that drew from the conventions of Italian opera, and the concert’s profits going to pay other people’s debts. The whole cast probably met only once before the premiere, and even then, to heighten interest for the main event, the organizers had arranged for the rehearsal to be open to the public (King, pp. 202-203).

The London premiere followed a year later, and the work has never left the performing repertoire since.

Still, Messiah’s popularity has waxed and waned over the last 283 years. It has been adapted to all manner of occasions and contributed musical soundbytes to countless pop culture moments. (To wit, was that your “Hallelujah chorus” ringtone I heard earlier?)  Yet the music itself has held up remarkably well. Handel labored for barely a month in composing the music. Such speed was quite common, and within a week of finishing Messiah in mid-September 1741, he was already deeply occupied with another oratorio (Solomon). Despite Messiah’s subsequent fame, it was not enthusiastically received at first. Planned performances were curtailed, the music was revised and often excerpted to feature only select popular numbers. Over time, these favored movements allowed the work to enjoy a second life, being performed at festivals and church services across the continent. Today only a few numbers are generally heard, and their fame gives some false impressions of the total work. For instance, today Messiah literally overwhelms musical life around Christmas despite the fact that its libretto only briefly relates to Christ’s birth; it could equally be deemed a passion piece and presented at Easter.

This evening’s performance attempts to breathe new life into Handel’s most famous oratorio by offering a staged version directed by Timothy Nelson. Staunton audiences will likely know Nelson’s previous Handel projects, including Theodoraand Orlando, for their musical sensitivity and ritualistic staging. Nelson hones his craft, bringing new perspectives to familiar opera and oratorio, as artistic director of InSeries in Washington DC. Moreover, he seems to have created the first ever staged Messiah production in the United States in 2007. Staged Messiahs have appeared multiple times since then and have their own performance history in Europe. Still, it is a signal honor to welcome Nelson back to Staunton to present a new, staged adaptation of Handel’s masterpiece.

For Nelson, Handel’s Messiah makes so much more sense as a musical work that transcends its typical concert space. Messiah “is every bit as dramatic, gestural, and character-filled as any other of Handel’s stage works.” The key, Nelson feels, hinges on a proper understanding of how and why oratorio first emerged as a genre:

Oratorio was not developed as a concert work intended to elevate the sacred beyond the theatrics of dramatic storytelling – not in the least. Oratorio was born out of real-world restrictions placed upon composers in Rome where theaters were almost entirely banned . . . [It] was never imagined as a rejection of the theatrical, but rather as a way of achieving the theatrical subversively. Handel had this in mind when economic and political forces in London made him abandon Italian opera for oratorio. It was not rejection of theatricality, but rather a way to retain the theatrical. Oratorio, whether staged or not, should aspire to this retention of drama, theater, boldness and, yes, subversiveness.

Nelson finds five principal characters in Messiah, including a tenor (“a prophetic and sometimes despondent voice crying in the wilderness”), a bass (“full of wonder and terror, rage but also compassion”), a more complex alto part, and two soprano roles. As an iconic part of our collective cultural experience, it is hard to extricate this piece from its unique performance history. Nelson believes reverence for Messiah – which he fully shares – can place it behind museum glass in a way that inhibits our ability to keep renewing emotional connections. “A staged Messiah should have the power to transform even people who may have never heard Handel’s music,” says Nelson.  “And for those that know Messiah’s varied performance tradition over the past 200 years, there is again an added layer to the experience of how this musical interpretation is part of a living dramatization of the work.”

Jason Stell, © 2025