Experiencing the Apollo’s Fire rendition of Handel’s Messiah brought to mind the title of Rod Dreher’s important new book, Living in Wonder, because that was what was occurring to the audience, whether they realized it or not. During the performance all were living in wonder, as Beauty, a characteristic element of God’s essence, was “calling us out of the depths of our spiritual slumber and up toward the pure light.”1
Apollo’s Fire was the first gift I would like to consider.
The second is a new book by Charles King: Every Valley. The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s Messiah. (New York: Doubleday, 2024). I quote at length from this magnificent book so that your appetite for more may be whetted. Handel’s biographer Hogwood sets the scene:
The present-day standing of Messiah makes it difficult for us to realize that for Handel its composition was an offbeat venture, unsure in its rewards and probably unrepeatable. It is the only truly “sacred” oratorio he ever wrote, it was the only one performed during his lifetime in a consecrated building, and yet was intended in Jennens’ [the librettist] words as “a fine Entertainment.” Although quintessentially the work of a theatre composer, it contains no drama in the theatrical sense; there are no warring factions (no Israelites versus Philistines), no named protagonist; the text telescopes prophecy and fulfillment, and the drama is revealed obliquely, by inference and report, almost never by narration 2
Handel’s success was due in a large part to the determination of his librettist Charles Jennens (1700 – 1773). He was to Handel what Lorenzo Da Ponte was to Mozart, a friend who helped author the libretti of several of his oratprios.4(The term itself had come from the place where music of that type was first performed, in a lay community of pious brothers, or Oratorians, of St. Philip Neri in Florence.)
Jennens’ deep knowledge of the Bible and wide literary interest led him, from 1735, to prepare or contribute to libretti for Handel The libretti were freely given and always published anonymously. Saul and Belshazzar are said to “show an impressive gift for dramatic structure and characterization. The most famous collaboration is Jennens’ libretto for Messiah, drawn entirely from the Bible, about 60 per cent from the Old Testament (with occasional small alterations).
He never married, fathered no children, and made distant enemies more readily than close friends. His Anglican parish priest would sum up his infirmities as “an impetuosity of temper,” “an extreme lowness and depression of spirits,” and “violent perturbations and anxieties of the mind.”
“Jennens built a private sanctuary filled with evidence of what the world could be – paintings, sculpture, music, all the fine arts. He collected newly published books; he hung pictures by European masters. He filled cabinets with musical manuscripts sent directly from Venice and Rome, and played the pieces competently on a harpsichord or piano. He seemed filled with “a consuming desire to be carried away by objects of awe and beauty. In his darkest moments, they were a salvation, like lifelines.”
“The original idea and the selection of sacred texts belonged not to Handel but to the emotionally tormented Charles Jennens, a country squire and political dissident who found solace in the elevating power of awe. For Jennens, the King James Bible was an innovation that magnified a constant: the unalterable reality of divine truth, as inherited from past generations. Sometime between the autumn of 1739 and the summer of 1741—the precise timing is uncertain—Jennens turned to these texts in earnest. He spread the volumes across tables, perhaps using long wooden bars to keep a passage at the ready. He copied down specific phrases on fresh sheets of paper, noting passages that his sources had quoted from the King James Bible or the Book of Common Prayer, the basic liturgy used in the Anglican church, sometimes with slight rewordings rather than the biblical originals. He drew out the explicit connections the theologians had made between the prophecies contained in the Hebrew scriptures and, as he understood it, their fulfillment in the New Testament. Kidder and other writers had been concerned with proving the status of Jesus Christ as the deliverer from the travails of the world, the savior promised by the prophets.”
“One troubled season, surrounded by what had become one of Britain’s finest repositories of human creativity, Jennens started pulling down books from his library shelves. He spent days poring over them, scribbling notes, filling up fresh sheets of paper with a sharpened quill. He copied down quotations from the sacred scriptures, some from the Psalms and the Hebrew prophets, some from New Testament epistles. He linked up one passage with another, editing and rearranging them, tying together themes that leaped out at him from the text—the whole of it not so much a story as an archaeology of ancient promises, dug up and dusted off for the present. What if the way to capture the uses of suffering and the mysteries of living, Jennens began to wonder, was to reenact them in a performance? Seeing the hidden order of things played out before your eyes could be a source of solace, he thought, but even more a route toward enlightenment, with the same direct effect that painting and music had on him. Page after page, what was emerging from Jennens’s notes was not a learned dissertation or dry essay but something entirely different: a kind of dramatized philosophy—a script even—visceral and affecting, expressed in words but also, he hoped, transcending them.”3
Sometime before midsummer 1741, Jennens at last sent his pages to Handel at Brook Street. Making something of his creation, he believed, would require Handel to summon a new burst of energy.
“The Subject,” he wrote, “is Messiah.” The pages formed his own working out of the deep meaning of everything he claimed to believe, both about the world to come and about the troubled, inconvenient one around him.
Many months had gone by since Jennens had sent his pages to Handel, with apparently no word about what had happened to them. What he learned next, however, was devastating: Handel was nowhere to be found. He seemed to have fled the capital without warning. What was even more galling was that he had taken Jennens’s new text, and whatever music he had written for it, along with him. “It was some mortification to me to hear that instead of performing it here,” Jennens wrote indignantly, “he was gone into Ireland with it.”
After at least 130 pages, a stack of paper around two inches high, on the reverse of the last page, at the bottom, he wrote “Fine del oratorio.” He had completed it, by his own assessment, on September 12, 1741, a Saturday, with the missing sections filled in, or “ausgefüllt,” as he noted, two days later.
In the months since Jennens had delivered his new libretto, Handel had received an unexpected invitation. It possibly came from William Cavendish, Duke of Devonshire, who also held the title of lord lieutenant of Ireland, the viceroy of the British king. The request was apparently that Handel come to Dublin to stage a series of concerts to lift public spirit in the face of failed harvests and bitter cold. There would be no shortage of devoted listeners, who would be afforded the rare opportunity of hearing the great master perform outside London.
“Messiah’s record of eliciting powerful emotion starts with the life and talents of Susannah Cibber (1714 – 30 January 1766). She was a celebrated English singer a, universally admired for her ability to move her audiences emotionally both as an actress and vocalist. Possessing a sweet, expressive, and agile singing voice with a wide vocal range, Cibber was an immensely popular singer, even if at times her voice was criticized for a lack of polished technique. Charles Burney, the distinguished English music historian, wrote of her singing that “by a natural pathos, and perfect conception of the words, she often penetrated the heart, when others, with infinitely greater voice and skill, could only reach the ear.” Cibber was particularly admired by Handel, who wrote numerous parts especially for her including the contralto arias in his 1741 oratorio Messiah, the role of Micah in Samson, the role of Lichas in Hercules and the role of David in Saul among others. In the mid-1730s she began appearing in plays in addition to appearing in operas and oratorios. She became the greatest dramatic actress of the eighteenth-century London stage and at the time of her death was the highest-paid actress in England.
“She was plagued by an abusive husband and mired in sensational tabloid scandals whose plan for escape involved a risky return to the stage. Its opening night in Dublin hung on none other than Jonathan Swift, the Irish cleric and satirist whose personal demons very nearly wrecked Handel’s plans, before his better angels came forward to save them. Even then, it took close to a decade for the Messiah to reach wider acclaim as Handel’s most recognizable and important work.
“ The Subject,” he later wrote with a rare hint of excitement, “excells every other Subject.” At the heart of his work was not so much a statement of faith as a test of will—an affirmation of something Jennens himself had always found hard to believe in. It was the staggering possibility that the world might turn out all right.”
“The Messiah is a work of anguish and promise, of profound worry and resounding joy, all expressed in ingenious, irresistible melodies. Its three parts, or acts, run through ancient prophecies of the birth of a rescuer for the world, then his brutal suffering at the hands of oppressors, then his atonement for the sins of humankind and the promise of eternal life for the redeemed—a set of ideas that, for the Christians who made up the Messiah’s first audiences, represented the essence of their faith.”
“In 1741, George Frideric Handel had started out with a stack of pages in English, a collection of short quotations gleaned from across the scriptures that were held to demonstrate that Jesus of Nazareth was the foretold savior. He formed them into solo songs, duets, choruses, and recitatives, the musical connective tissue between the work’s various “scenes.” He sketched the full musical score in London late that summer, premiered the new work in Dublin in the spring of 1742, and then continued to perform it, or at least attend many of the performances, until he died in 1759. Handel was German by birth, but he gained his real musical education, in his twenties, in Italy, among composers, performers, and instrument makers engaged in everything from inventing the piano to perfecting what had come to be called opera. He spent his thirties and forties rising from a newcomer to London feeling his way through the city’s rowdy theater world to court composer to the British royal family. By his fifties he was his adopted country’s most celebrated public musician. But when he began work on the Messiah, he was approaching sixty and edging toward the final phase of his career, which made this particular work something of a midlife revival—and an odd one at that. In its sung text and subject matter, the Messiah was an anomaly. It would turn out to be wholly unlike anything else Handel ever wrote. Only in the final decade of his life would it became widely known and, even then, with barely a hint of the fame it would achieve long after he was gone.”
“By the Victorian era, Messiah would become the accepted standard. Audiences and artists increasingly came to see exactly why. Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, stumbled to express how Handel had somehow captured the essence of wonder, recapitulating even the enormousness of existence itself. “As the master overpowered the littleness and incapableness of the performers and made them conductors of his electricity,” he wrote after attending a concert in Boston in 1843, “so it was easy to observe what efforts nature was making, through so many hoarse, wooden and imperfect persons, to produce beautiful voices, fluid and soul-guided men and women.” The music had weight, listeners felt. It produced a transporting sense that something cosmic and profound was at stake, even when the cares of this world happened to intrude.”
“Even without the theology, the core messages come through. To remake the world, start by rethinking it. This moment is not eternity, this particular misery part of a bigger story. There is comfort in placing yourself in the cosmos. Failing to comprehend the vastness is still a kind of success. An experience that feels like defeat may turn out to be the most glorious moment of your life.”
“The truly pressing theme in their art, music, theater, philosophy, and theology was not, in fact, the triumph of rationality. It was instead how to manage catastrophe. In speculative treatises and stage plays, paintings and works of music, one of the Enlightenment’s overlooked preoccupations turns out to be the practical grounds for remaining hopeful when the everyday evidence seems to point in the opposite direction. In this way, the Messiah matters not just as an epic piece of music but also as a record of a way of thinking, an archive in song handed down from a period of profound anxiety about improving the world whose deepest message is that one nevertheless had to try. Wade into the words of the Messiah, and it isn’t hard to find a kind of message in a bottle: a reflection on some of the largest questions of human life, written at a moment—warring, worried, and somehow just wrong—when people could feel the urgency of answering them. In an age supposedly governed by progress, why do the nations so furiously rage together? Why do people concoct vain and bizarre versions of the truth? What do we do with the knowledge of our own brokenness—our listless wandering, astray like sheep—and the trail of blood that our actions, and our obliviousness, will leave in the historical record? Adrift in a maddening world, is there really a way to live the advice that Handel set to song from the book of Isaiah: “Lift up thy voice with strength; lift it up, be not afraid…. Arise, shine, for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee”?”
“In early November, Handel set off by coach, probably bringing Smith and at least one other assistant, and headed north. It would be weeks before he got around to telling Jennens about the music that now lay somewhere in his baggage.
“A new “musick hall” had recently opened on Fishamble Street, one of the oldest streets in the city. The manager, William Neale, trumped many of the more visible venues in his opening season. In mid-December a newspaper carried an announcement that tickets would soon go on sale at a house in Abbey Street, where Handel had taken up residence, for a series of performances in Neale’s new hall. Dubliners seemed delighted to have Handel in town, and he repaid their enthusiasm with his familiar dry humor, even in the middle of a concert.
“Jonathan Swift was even more irascible in the decade and a half since Gulliver’s Travels. His renown as a satirist, commentator, and preacher had never translated into his change of fortune.
“Trouble awaited Handel and his performances In the middle of Handel’s first concert series, Swift circulated a memorandum to the senior clerics under his authority. He directed them to prohibit their choristers from participating in any future Handel performances. “And Whereas it has been reported, that I gave a License to certain Vicars to assist at a Club of Fiddlers in Fishamble Street,” Swift wrote, “I do hereby declare that I remember no such license to have been ever signed or sealed by me, and that if ever such pretended License should be produced, I do hereby annul and vacate the said License.” Any church musician who appeared at such a venue, Swift continued, his anger mounting word by word, “as Songsters, Fidlers [sic] Pipers, Trumpeters, Drummers,
“It was unclear whether Swift’s missive was aimed directly at Handel or at any performers who might lend their angelic voices to a secular cause; perhaps the ban was simply a product of Swift’s own increasingly tormented mind. But since the end of the run was within sight, Handel chose to carry on. He could always cut out a chorus here and there if he had too few singers to mount a choir.
“Susannah Cibber had come to Dublin perhaps two weeks after Handel, on December 3. For two years she had been living in England under various aliases, as an adulteress with William Sloper and their daughter, Molly.
Handel reached out to Cibber, perhaps calling on her personally or asking Smith to make the arrangements on his behalf.
She agreed to perform but there was only a week until opening night.
“With the public clamoring for more chances to hear Handel, a delegation of Dublin leaders had approached Swift, imploring him to release his choristers from the prohibition on their performing at Fishamble Street. Despite the dean’s irritability, a tentative deal had been struck to allow singers from St. Patrick’s to join Handel’s musicians, but only if the dean of neighboring Christ Church agreed. Yet just at the point of sealing the agreement, Swift had reneged, a development that had occasioned his threatening missive in late January. Everyone now seemed to take a hand in trying to persuade the dean to relent: public officials, trustees of charitable societies, friends, perhaps even his publisher, George Faulkner, who also happened to own Faulkner’s Dublin Journal, a prominent newspaper that had been advertising Handel’s concerts. No one knew precisely why or when, but sometime that spring Swift apparently changed his mind. He might have been persuaded by the fact that proceeds from Handel’s new work were to be used specifically in aid of worthy causes, such as paying off the private debts of incarcerated paupers. On March 27, Faulkner’s newspaper finally reported that “the Gentlemen of the Choirs of both Cathedrals,” St. Patrick’s and Christ Church, would participate in a special, previously unannounced concert: For the relief of the Prisoners in the several Gaols, and for the Support of Mercer’s Hospital in Stephen’s Green, and of the Charitable Infirmary on the Inns Quay”
But another obstacle soon arose in Handel’s path. Cibber was ill again,
“It was as patched together a company as Handel had ever assembled—the notorious and feverish 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 with the concert’s profits going to pay other people’s debts. The whole cast of performers 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.
“On the Tuesday before Easter, carriages began lining up early on Fishamble Street. The concert was set to begin at midday, and given advance ticket sales and the enthusiasm generated by the public rehearsal, the crowds were expected to be large. Two newspapers had printed requests that gentlemen leave their rapiers at home and ladies “ not to come with Hoops,” in order to be able to pack in as many people as possible.
Newspapers reported—more than seven hundred people in a hall Handel estimated could reasonably hold only six hundred
“Handel’s score connected the many disparate threads. He had used Jennens’s scriptural selections in ways that sometimes made the English literal and at other times struggled boldly against the words themselves. (Jennens was nowhere credited for his contribution) When the text spoke of valleys being raised up, the singer climbed higher and higher, as if scaling a cliff face, then traveled back down when mountains and hills were cut low. “And I will shake all nations,” another soloist sang, turning the word “shake” into a long run of rumbling seas and tumbling edifices. Yet when Isaiah predicted the birth of a redeeming prince, Handel set the prophet’s vision not as a solemn declaration delivered by a wizened seer but as an erupting chorus—“Wonderful, Counsellor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace”—like the blasting entrance of the full choir and orchestra at the coronation of George II. Even the pifferari, the wandering bagpipers he had probably first heard in Italy, made an appearance in a pastoral movement that recalled the shepherds who first learned of the birth of a savior.
“Cibber had been onstage since the beginning of the performance. Near the top of the second part, she stepped forward to sing openly of suffering and its consequences. Virtually anyone in the audience would have known of her hopeless marriage and debilitating scandal.
“He was despised, rejected of men,” Cibber began, singing the words Jennens had taken from the book of Isaiah. The tension built at the end of the next phrase—“a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief”—then circled and resolved, settling calmly into the end of a musical idea. Over the next several minutes, Cibber returned again and again to the same bleak description of an outcast life, before plunging into the graphic details of pain and disgrace.
“The audience would have understood the text as pointing toward the suffering of Jesus Christ and his road toward self-sacrifice. But any listener would also have recognized the obvious parallel with Cibber’s own life—despised, rejected, a person of sorrows, acquainted with grief. With a slight rewording, she could have been singing about herself. The effect must have been wrenching. By the end of the aria, it was wholly possible to believe that the greatest heroism was simple survival, that transcendence might even depend on knowing horror from the inside. It was the strangest possible formula for hope but one that, by the final notes, one could begin to see clearly: that the way to overcome one’s enemies was to shock them into witnessing their own cruelty.
“There, onstage in Dublin, Cibber was living the very admonition Jennens had found in the ancient prophecies: to gain a new life, face forward and speak into being the world you want to see. Now every line out of her mouth was a triumph. “If God be for us, who can be against us?” Cibber sang, using Jennens’s quotation from Paul’s letter to the Romans. “It is God that justifieth, who is he that condemneth?” A few minutes later, the entire choir joined in for the closing chorus—voices, strings, trumpets, and timpani together in one spiraling, glorious, exultant amen.”
As stated above, Messiah is unique in oratorios that there is no dramatic plot. The libretto is a series of vignettes from a wide variety of sources. The brilliance of the Apollo’s Fire presentation is the dramatic theater found and mined from the music and libretto.
All the drama comes. not from the text, but rather through the music.
If King’s Every Valley is an intellectual gift, Apollo’s Fire’s performance at Chicago’s historic St. James Cathedral is an emotional and spiritual gift. The best and only word to describe that performance is “thrilling”, term I have only used once before to describe a performance. The period insturments played with mastery, the glorious singing, and the brilliant leadership of Jeannette Sorrell created an experience not soon forgotten.
Maestra Sorrell insisted on certain performance conventions which contributed to the dramatic intensity of the performance. Like the convention of Readers’ Theatre, the performers were instructed to sing directly to the audience, rather than is customary, in to the ether. The practice made the audience partners in the unfolding musical drama and heightened the emotional stakes. Every moment became riveting as time ceased to exist and the audience glimpsed a reality heretofore unnoticed.
The familiar arias and duets of the soloists took on a new and immediate sparkle. Each was as accomplished an actor as they were a vocalist. Soprano Sonya Headlam started things off with the plaintive “Comfort ye my People.” Baritone Edward Vogel followed by blazing God’s defiance in “But who may abide.” (If a refiner’s fire could sing, it would sound exactly like Mr. Vogel.) Bass Charles Evan offered a strong “The people that walk ed in darkness.” Mezzo soprano Guadalupe Paz seemed to be channeling the broken, crushed spirit of poor Susannah Cibber with the heartbreaking “He was despised”. Soprano Erica Schuller and concertmaster Alan Choo teamed up for an unforgettable “How beautiful are the feet.” Tenor Jacob Perry’s “Thou shalt break them” set expectations on a God of vengeance, thereby making the glorious Hallelujah chorus a surprising and gracious act of love. Baritone Edward Vogel joined trumpeteer Perry Sutton for the most convincing rendition of 1 Corinthinans 15:52–43 “The trumpet shall sound” that I have ever heard.
On April 6, 1759, Handel attended a performance of Messiah at Covent Garden. He died eight days later on Holy Saturday and was laid to rest in the south transept of Westminster Abbey. A life-size monument sculpted by Louis-François Roubiliac portrays the composer clasping a page from the soprano aria “I know that my redeemer liveth” from Messiah. The composer’s face is a replica of his death mask. The cost of the monument was covered by Handel’s estate. Muchaw of his remaining fortune was divided between his favorite charities.rd Vogel
No Comments