Handel's Messiah as Opera:
an interview with Timothy Nelson
Jason Stell
Vol 3 No 1 (May 2025)
Staunton Music Festival takes great pride in presenting music that is both familiar and unfamiliar. Usually that combination involves programming a beloved masterwork together with more obscure - albeit interestingly related - pieces of music. On other occasions, the tension between "Oh, I love this piece!" and "What on earth is this all about?" centers on just one composition - an experience both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.
Such will likely be the case this August when Staunton Music Festival opens its 2025 Summer Festival with a staged version of Handel's beloved and VERY familiar masterpiece, The Messiah.
As many readers know, Handel's Messiah typifies a genre known as oratorio, a form that developed in the 17th century as a work-around when lavish operatic spectacle was either forbidden by religious edict (as in Lent) or the nature of the sacred plot suggested a more restrained staging. Perhaps misconstrued as firmly distinct genres, opera and oratorio are nearly identical in musical terms: both involve a plot set to music, both involve alternations between aria and recitative, and both typically involve a chorus for some manner of commentary or support of the action. The primary distinction is simply the matter of staging.
Still, with a work so globally known and sung by tens of thousands every Christmas, feelings run deep. "A staged Messiah? Sacrilege!" Or, "Sure, why not?" Operas are presented as concert pieces all the time when logistics - do we have time and space to devote many days to working out stage blocking, visual cues, lighting, props, costumes, etc. - necessitate a simpler approach. In fact, SMF's finale this summer is a concert version (non-staged) of Mozart's Magic Flute. In essence, is anything fundamentally different in turning the matter 180 degrees to stage an oratorio?
I recently sat down with Timothy Nelson, artistic director of InSeries Opera in Washington DC and an acclaimed visionary behind numerous productions in the US and Europe. Staunton audiences may have seen his productions of Handel's Theodora and Orlando in recent seasons. This summer Tim returns to Staunton with his newly staged Messiah. Since its premiere in 1742, Messiah has literally been performed 10,000 times. Yet staged productions of this great work can be counted on the fingers of two hands. And in a twist that I did not expect, the person behind the very first staged Messiah in the US? Tim Nelson.
Like you, I had some questions...
Jason Stell: Tim, thanks for taking time to talk with me about Messiah. We're very much looking forward to this summer's staged version.
Timothy Nelson: Thanks for asking, Jason. It's always a pleasure to talk about Handel and such incredible music.
JS: As far as we can determine, your staged Messiah back in 2007 was the first such production ever done in the US. Is that your understanding too?
TN: It's always hard to know these things for sure, so many great under-the-radar artists ever doing interesting work, but to my knowledge that 2007 production was the first of its kind in the US, and it is probably safe to say one of the first stagings of Messiah in the world.
JS: I know it's almost 20 years ago now, but can you recall WHY you wanted to do this project in the first place?
Opera director Timothy Nelson
TN: Everything for me starts with the music, so I'm sure it was a response to the inherent theatricality I heard in Handel's score. We tend to understand Messiah as inhabiting a "concert" space, by which I don't just mean something that isn't traditionally staged, but also something that is non-narrative, obscure in its dramatic gesture, and not imbued with character or embodied personality. This comes both from its unique performance tradition, but also from not fully putting it in the concept of the English oratorio Handel was inventing. Stripped of some of these misconceptions, Messiah is a dance between troped texts and musical storytelling. It's every bit as dramatic, gestural, and character-filled as any other of Handel's stage works. It's a piece of theater with or without staging. But the challenge - and the freedom - of discovering ways to embody its uniqueness must have stood out to me like a mountain to climb, just because it was there.
JS: Back then, and even today, how important is it to you to get familiar with what other directors have done with Messiah?
TN: Not at all, actually - at least for me, and I hope for my audiences. Of course, knowing other approaches can deepen and inform the audience's experience. Made-work is always in a conversation, intentionally and even unintentionally, with other made-work, histories, trends, ephemera, and so on. That said, the work should ideally always be able to be entered into and maintain its transformative power without needing past exposures. In the same way, familiarity with the biblical texts can deepen our experience, but it shouldn't be critical to having an experience with the made-work. What's so exciting in making a staged Messiah is the flexibility of the musical interpretation, decisions like tempi, cuts, vocal distribution. A staged Messiah should have the power to transform even people who may have never heard Handel's music - if there are any such people left! 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.
JS: One of the points made in nearly every review of a staged Messiah - and there have been a half dozen such productions - is the challenge of the "plotless" scenario. How do you feel about Charles Jennens' libretto? Compelling? A sprawling mess??
TN: I very strongly reject these characterizations. There are plenty of examples in Handel's oratorios where his music transforms paltry language and dramaturgy into something illuminated. With Messiah I feel that Jennens' work making the libretto, for lack of a better expression, rises to and plays equally in the final success of this masterpiece. Enough awe cannot be experienced in considering the ground-breaking, thoroughly modern aspect to Jennen's endeavor. To create a piece of drama by assembling otherwise loosely connected texts had never been done before. Today it's the same kind of work behind inspired works of contemporary theater (think of the making of John Adams' El Nino or Doctor Atomic - the former troping poetry of Sor Juana Ines della Cruz, the latter poetry of John Donne). In the 1700s it was visionary to say the least. It is the genius not only of the poetry of the King James bible, but also the brilliant organization of texts by Jennens (usually not fully credited either) that inspired the greatness of Handel's music. Without Jennens' contribution, Messiah would lack the very quality that makes it rise as something unique in the pantheon of musical-theatrical pieces. It is by no means plotless, but rather etches its narrative in the mystery of inter-textual interpretation. It requires the audience to engage actively with it. That mystery, the mystery with which the listener must contend and journey through, is the very threshold of revelation of which Messiah is capable of opening, and it's a mystery built firstly on the contribution of Charles Jennens.
Still image from Timothy Nelson's production of Les pêcheurs de perles (The Pearl Fishers) by Georges Bizet, staged in 2015 for the Dutch National Opera.
JS: Can you share a bit about your specific conception of the narrative thread and the role of dramatic principal singers? How do you conceive the lead personas?
TN: This is the first joyous opportunity a director has to craft and interpret. How many voices or characters are speaking in the piece? There could be many answers - and of course this connects to decisions about cuts and versions of arias/recits/choruses that exist in multiples of possibility. There does seem to be a consistent tenor voice throughout, a prophetic and sometimes despondent voice crying in the wilderness. Equally, there seems to be a consistent bass voice, full of wonder and terror, rage but also compassion. The alto voice is more challenging in a traditional dispersal of arias. Can the same character really sing "But Who May Abide" and also "Oh Thou That Tellest Good Tidings"? But, when considering giving some arias to other voice types, the possibility of crafting a single alto voice becomes obvious. The soprano voice clearly has one character: sacred, angelic, terrifying and apologetic. But to me there seems to be a second soprano voice that is above the terrestrial world. My solution is then a quartet of soloists that reflect back the human conditions of hope, fear, and rage to the audience, and an additional soprano voice that is a detached mouthpiece for the world beyond our knowing. Audiences can look forward to hearing some versions of text-setting that are new to them and which give life in new ways to familiar moments of Messiah. Handel has multiple versions of many such settings and each informs the work and its characterization in different ways.
JS: Does staging Messiah, treating it like an opera, suggest something new or underappreciated about oratorio in general?
TN: History really provides the key here. 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 from the time of opera's invention. This is true for even the first oratorio, Cavalieri's Rappresentatione di Anima et di Corpo, true for the oratorios of Luigi Rossi, Carissimi, his student Charpentier, Stradella's Roman works San Giovanni Battista, Susanna, and Ester. Only for a brief period in the 1620s was opera staged in Rome with works by Mazzochi, Rossi, Marrazoli and a few others. Oratorio 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.
JS: What prompted you to undertake a staged Messiah again, now?
TN: Messiah is truly immortal as a work, a story, a message. Staging it when I was a young director - going through that essential and magical process of discovering my own voices, style, self - made that 2007 production seminal in my artistic formation. Since then the staging of oratorio and other traditionally unstaged works - like the Bach Passions, Brahms' German Requiem, the Verdi and Mozart Requiems, song cycles by Messiaen, Schumann, and many more - is actually more central to my practice than even opera itself. The process of entering into the mystery of how to embody works like this is almost a sacred act for me. That all began with Messiah in 2007. Coming back to it now, formed as an artist, changed spiritually, and in a very different place in life and professionally, is the priviledge of working with such a limited canon. The opportunity to know myself better, to examine the path taken (and those not taken), and to understand more about being human - isn't that precisely what art, making or experiencing it, is about?
