George Frederick Handel: Freeing Prisoners, Fostering Orphans, and Spreading the Gospel with the "Messiah"

George Frederick Handel was born in Germany in 1685, and was a contemporary of the other great religious composer, Johann Sebastian Bach.  They lived very near each other, but never managed to meet.  Handel was a brilliant composer, but he struggled financially.  He was perhaps too generous with his money, and not quite thrifty enough.  He was a modest man, and did not think himself a great talent.  A friend commented to Handel on how rotten the music was at a concert he had recently heard, not knowing it was Handel's music, and Handel, unoffended, replied, "You are right, sir; it is pretty poor stuff.  I thought so myself when I wrote it" (Kavanaugh, p. 31).  

Handel was not a perfect man, but he was a good man.  He "was reputed to swear in several languages when moved to wrath (usually by singers).  At the same time, he was equally quick to admit his own fault and apologize."  His morals were above reproach.  One friend, Sir John Hawkins wrote that Handel "throughout his life manifested a deep sense of religion.  In conversation he would frequently declare the pleasure he felt in setting the Scriptures to music, and how contemplating the many sublime passages in the Psalms had contributed to his edification" (p. 31-32).

Handel liked to compose music that had a religious text, for performance in secular theaters.  Possibly, being a German Lutheran living in Church of England territory (he spent most of his life in London), he liked the idea of non-denominational musical performances.  He wrote a drama called Esther and another called Israel in Egypt, which were both performed in the theater rather than the cathedral.  This really rubbed a lot of church leaders the wrong way.  The Church of England openly criticized him.  Even after the Messiah was well-known, John Newton, the composer of "Amazing Grace," preached every Sunday for over a year against its being performed publicly, rather than solely in church (p. 33).  Had it been performed only in church, however, its influence would not have been as great.

Handel donated freely to charities, even when he himself was facing financial ruin.  He was a relentless optimist, and a scriptorian.  (Perhaps those two traits often go together.)  He was a bachelor with no family to support, yet he struggled to keep enough money to support himself.  At one point in his life, the spring of 1741, at the age of 56, he was "swimming in debt [and] it seemed certain he would land in debtor's prison" (p. 29).

Then two providential things happened concurrently that changed the course of religious music forever, as well as the lives of many individuals throughout the centuries since.  The first thing was that Handel's friend, Charles Jennens, gave him a libretto he had put together. (A libretto is the term for the lyrics of a large musical work.)  It was based on the life of Christ and taken entirely from the Bible.  The second thing was that Handel received a commission from a Dublin charity to compose a work for a benefit performance.  Handel put the two opportunities together and on August 22, 1741, he set to work composing another religious oratorio that would be performed in a secular venue.  He became so absorbed in the work that he rarely left his room, and never left his house.  "In six days part one was complete.  In nine days more he had finished part two, and in another six, part three.  The orchestration was completed in another two days.  In all, 260 pages of manuscript were filled in the remarkably short time of 24 days."  He borrowed bits of musical themes here and there from works he had written or heard previously, as did most composers in that day, and combined them with new melodies and beautiful instrumentation.  He edited and rearranged a little as years went by, but not to any great degree.  The Messiah we have today is very close to the original 24-day masterpiece.  One biographer, Sir Newman Flower, said, "Considering the immensity of the work, and the short time involved, it will remain, perhaps forever, the greatest feat in the whole history of music composition" (p. 30).

The composing of the Messiah was an intensely spiritual experience for Handel.  At one point while he was working, a servant entering the room to bring food found him with tears streaming down his face.  Handel cried out to him, "I did think I did see all Heaven before me, and the great God Himself" (p. 27).  He had just finished the piece now known as the "Hallelujah Chorus."  Another friend who stopped to visit found him sobbing with intense emotion.  Later Handel tried to explain himself and said, "Whether I was in the body or out of my body when I wrote it, I know not" (p. 30).

The oratorio premiered on April 13, 1742 in Dublin.  It was a benefit concert, as planned.  The Messiah, which was written to praise the Savior who freed us all from our fallen state, raised that day 400 pounds which freed 142 men from debtor's prison and a fate which Handel had narrowly escaped himself.  Handel conducted over thirty more performances of the Messiah in his life.  Many of these were also benefit concerts, with the money going to the Foundling Hospital (orphanage), of which Handel was a major contributor.  Because the performances were in theaters for pay, rather than in churches, they could bring in money to relieve suffering.  "One biographer wrote: 'Messiah has fed the hungry, clothed the naked, fostered the orphan...more than any other single musical production in this or any country.'  Another wrote, 'Perhaps the works of no other composer have so largely contributed to the relief of human suffering'" (p. 31).

"After the first London performance of the Messiah, Lord Kinnoul congratulated Handel on the "excellent entertainment."  Handel replied, 'My Lord, I should be sorry if I only entertain them.  I wish to make them better.'"  Handel's Messiah has indeed made people better.  In one writer's opinion, the Messiah "has probably done more to convince thousands of mankind that there is a God about us than all the theological works ever written" (p. 31).

Handel died 18 years after composing the Messiah.  It was a Saturday, April 14, 1759, the day before Easter, coincidentally the time of year that Messiah was performed most in those days.  Handel had conducted his final performance of the work eight days earlier.  His close friend, James Smith, wrote, "He died as he lived--a good Christian, with a true sense of his duty to God and to man, and a perfect charity with all the world."  Over 3,000 people attended the funeral.  

A statue was erected in Westminster Abbey where he was buried.  It depicts Handel holding the manuscript of the Messiah, open to part three, "I Know That My Redeemer Liveth."  It stands as an appropriate tribute to a great man of great faith, whose knowledge of his Savior was built through study of scripture, teaching truth to others through the medium of music, and living the gospel through his charitable works.

Source:  Patrick Kavanaugh, Spiritual Lives of the Great Composers, p. 27-33

For a wonderful fictionalized account of Handel's life and his great work, the Messiah, I strongly recommend the book Hallelujah, by Scott Featherstone.  (Yes, his father's name is Vaughan J.)

Myra Hess: "Solace to Combat the Evil"

At 4:00 in the afternoon on September 7, 1940, 348 German bombers filled the skies of London, escorted by 627 fighters. They bombed England's capitol for two solid hours. Every day for 57 days, in what came to be known as The London Blitz, the bombers returned, sometimes at night, sometimes in broad daylight. This was Adolf Hitler's attempt to terrorize and cow England. It successfully destroyed large portions of the city, leveling buildings and reducing streets to rubble, but it failed in its mission to demoralize England, and a certain degree of the credit for that failure goes to a woman named Myra Hess.

"We are facing the annihilation of everything we hold important," she wrote, "and this wonderful opportunity to give spiritual solace to those who are giving all to combat the evil seems, in some mysterious way, to have been given into my hands."

How did Myra Hess combat the evil? With music.

Myra Hess was one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century. She had been scheduled for a large concert tour in the United States when World War II broke out. Her agent urged her to keep her commitment there: besides making a great deal of money, she would be safe from the danger. But Myra would not hear of it. A London-born Jew, she chose to remain in the city for the duration of the war and raise the spirits of the war-deprived city dwellers with music. All concert halls and theaters were closed at night for the black-outs, causing the city to endure a "cultural black-out" as well. Myra Hess arranged to put on chamber concerts at The National Gallery art museum in the middle of the day. The ticket price was extremely inexpensive, so that almost any Londoner could attend, from an office boy to a bobby to a shopkeeper. Beginning on the 10th of October in 1939 at 1:00 p.m., Myra Hess organized a concert every day for six years--1,698 concerts! She gathered any musicians she could for the programs and performed at 146 of them herself. Over 800,000 people attended the concerts during the war.

People lined up around the corner and into the square to get tickets, hundreds of them, sometimes over a thousand. There were so many that the concerts were made casual with standing-room allowed, and people coming and going as they wished. Some brought their sandwiches and ate their lunches while they listened. People from every walk of life took a break in their day to hear the music. One day a bomb went off in one of the rooms of the gallery, but the string quartet kept playing and the audience remained seated. Diplomat Sir Paul Mason said, "Her serenity was invigorating, not disarming. You did not go to her to be soothed, but to be braced."

Each day during the London Blitz, "audiences picked their way through streets strewn with glass and rubble," the National Gallery website reports, "skirting bomb craters and smoldering ruins, to find the National Gallery still standing and the performers at their posts." When the main gallery was bombed, the musicians simply moved downstairs to the bomb shelter. Only 300-400 people could fit, and the heat and cold were extreme in that room, but that did not deter either the musicians or the audiences. In the winter, Myra played wearing a fur coat, and stoves were placed on the stage to keep the instrumentalists' hands from turning blue. In the summer, audience members would faint with heat. But they would keep coming.

One of the most popular concerts was held on New Year's Day 1940 especially to entertain the children. Schumann's "Carnival" was played by nine concert pianists who played musical chairs on two pianos as they each took their turn. Then Haydn's "Toy" Symphony was performed with "regrettable frivolity" as the various pianists played toy instruments along with the symphony. This was not in keeping with Myra's serene stage presence, but it certainly fit her persona among family and friends. After performances she would entertain them with tricks such as lying on the closed lid of the grand piano to see if she could play it upside down, or doing her impression of Queen Victoria, complete with dour expression and doily cap. "Aunt" Myra was a great deal of fun.

As the war continued, the cost of keeping the concerts going became prohibitive and for a time it appeared they would have to end. But then donations began coming in from around the world, particularly from organizations in Canada and the United States, and also from individuals, like the great Italian conductor Toscanini and the great Russian pianist Rachmaninoff (who had emigrated to California), and hundreds of ordinary people who had heard of Myra Hess and her indomitable musicians.

Myra Hess continued to perform after the war and into old age. She played her last concert in September 1961 at the age of 71, and died in 1965 as not only one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century, but as one of the most beloved.

Watch Myra Hess play a Lunchtime Concert in 1945.



Sources:

Eye Witness to History

Naxos Music

The National Gallery