This weekend (December 12–14) British conductor and Handel expert Nicholas McGegan leads the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in Handel's popular 1742 oratorio "Messiah." In doing so at Christmastime, he's following a tradition over two centuries old. The origin of that tradition is the first of our three "Messiah Mysteries."
1. The Adventure of the Mobile Messiah
George Frideric Handel's Messiah is a Christmas tradition. Which is odd, because the composer never intended it to be Christmas music.
The oratorio was first performed on April 13, 1742, in Dublin; repeated that same June; and then moved to London, where it was first presented on March 23, 1743. I can't find any evidence that the work was in any way associated with Christmas during Handel's life. In fact, as Christopher H. Gibbs points out, "Handel performed it some three dozen times—every time, it should be noted, around Easter, not Christmas."
Still, as Jonathan Kandell notes in an article for Smithsonian, "By the early 19th century, performances of Messiah had become an even stronger Yuletide tradition in the United States than in Britain."
An important piece of the puzzle is supplied is supplied by Luke Howard in his program notes for a 2009 Messiah performance by UMS Choral Union:
Although the work was occasionally performed during Advent in Dublin, the oratorio was usually regarded in England as an entertainment for the penitential season of Lent, when performances of opera were banned.... But in 1791, the Cæcilian Society of London began its annual Christmas performances [of Messiah], and in 1818 the Handel and Haydn Society of Boston gave the work's first complete performance in the US on Christmas Day—establishing a tradition that continues to the present.
It apparently took a while for the Christmas tradition to become well established, though. As Marie Gangemil of the Oratorio Society of New York wrote in her program notes for their 2012 Messiah, the first December performance by that organization didn't take place until 1874.
But are these events sufficient to explain why the tradition became so widespread? Might there also be a supply and demand issue here? Laurence Cummings, who conducted Messiah here in 2022, observed that: "There is so much fine Easter music—Bach's St. Matthew Passion, most especially—and so little great sacral music written for Christmas. But the whole first part of Messiah is about the birth of Christ.”
So there you have it. Boston and New York picked up the idea from London, and the rest of the USA, seeing a chance to fill a product gap, picked it up from them. It's a reminder that memes were spreading long before the Internet, just a lot more slowly.
2. The Case of the Upright Audience
Another puzzle connected with Messiah is the business of standing during the "Hallelujah" chorus that ends Part II.
If you've been a classical music lover long enough, you have no doubt heard the story of how King George the II stood when he first heard it at the 1743 London premiere and how everybody else followed suit because, hey, he was the king. It's a great story with only one little flaw: there's no evidence that George II ever attended a performance of Messiah at all.
The story appears to come, not from a contemporary account, but from a secondhand description in a letter written by one James Beattie 37 years later. The story is almost certainly apocryphal and a classic example of how urban legends originate.
The idea of standing at some point in the oratorio appears to go back a long way, though. When George Harris attended a performance in 1750, he observed that "[a]t some of the chorus's [sic] the company stood up," suggesting that the custom extended beyond just the "Hallelujah." Six years later, another account mentions the audience standing for "grand choruses." In his video series on "Messiah," Andrew Megill, Music Director of Masterwork Chorus, describes a letter written by a woman who attended a Messiah in Handel's time complaining of audience members who weren't standing during the appropriate choruses—suggesting that the practice was already fairly well established.
The bottom line, though, is that nobody really seems to know where the custom originated or for that matter why so many of us are still doing it. Maybe early audiences were just so swept away by the power of some of the choruses they stood up spontaneously and the custom simply caught on. Like the Christmas performance tradition, it seems to be a meme that just won't die.
For anyone attending Messiah for the first time, it must seem just another example of the sometimes baffling and contradictory rules of etiquette that go with classical music concerts. But that's a whole different subject.
3. The Enigma of the Expanding Orchestra
Finally, a note on the size of the orchestra you'll see this weekend. That Dublin premiere back in 1743 at the Great Music Hall on Fishamble Street (capacity 700) probably used around 20 singers in toto, including soloists, along with an orchestra of strings, two trumpets, and tympani. Handel himself varied the orchestration of Messiah depending on the resources available for a particular performance as well as the size of the hall and other factors.
Still, the Great Expansion didn't really kick in until after Handel's death, when it became customary to re-orchestrate and expand the size of the instrumental and choral forces to bring the work more in line with contemporary tastes. The German-language version Mozart prepared for his long-time patron Gottfried van Swieten in 1789 (officially Der Messias, K. 572) is one of the earliest and best-known examples, but there have been numerous others. A 1787 London Messiah, for example, promised 800 performers.
Not coincidentally, Messiah started getting bigger at the same time the Industrial Revolution began to make itself heard, in the most literal sense of the word. In 1743 the Industrial Revolution was still over a decade away and the sources of most noise were biological. By the end of the 18th century the increase in environmental noise was well underway, and increased substantially during the 19th as detailed in the 1994 book The Soundscape by Canadian composer R. Murray Shafer (1933–2021).
Today, a large symphony orchestra playing fortississimo (fff) can deliver 100dbA or more—a level officially classified as “harmful” with sustained exposure. Which explains the earplugs you will sometimes see on the concert stage.
It’s not surprising, then, that during the 19th century, expanding Handel’s oratorio began to take on the aspect of an arms race, with each subsequent performance determined to become more grandiose (and in an ever-larger space) than the last. The 1857 Great Handel Festival at London's Crystal Palace employed 2000 singers and an orchestra of nearly 400. Later performances at the same venue became even more bloated.
By 1877 George Bernard Shaw, for one, had had enough. "Why," he asked, "instead of wasting huge sums on the multitudinous dullness of a Handel Festival does not somebody set up a thoroughly rehearsed and exhaustively studied performance of the Messiah in St James's Hall with a chorus of twenty capable artists? Most of us would be glad to hear the work seriously performed once before we die."
I don't know whether or not Shaw, who died in 1950, eventually got his wish. The tide did begin to turn back to Handel's original intentions in the 20th century, though, and by the 1960s performing editions began to show up based on the composer's original manuscripts and using instruments appropriate to the period. The 1965 edition by Watkins Shaw was probably the earliest, but it was a Basil Lam edition that was used in a groundbreaking 1967 Angel/EMI recording by The Ambrosian Singers and the English Chamber Orchestra. That recording would be the first of many that would return to something like Handel's original intentions.
The roster for this weekend calls for around 40 musicians plus chorus and soloists. In this respect, McGegan is in line with other recent Messiah performances by Laurence Cummings (2022), Matthew Halls (2018), Bernard Labadie (2015), and Christopher Warren Green (2012).
The actual length of Messiah varies from performance to performance. A complete Messiah contains either 47 or 53 numbers (depending on which edition you use) and can run just under two and one-half hours, not including an intermission. Given that the SLSO web site lists the duration of this weekend’s performance as two hours and 45 minutes, including intermission, it sounds like McGegan is going for the Full Handel.
By the way, Handel prepared alternate versions for a dozen of the numbers in Messiah. "Rejoice greatly" in Part 1, for example, exists in versions using both 4/4 and 12/8 time signatures. The former sounds like a march, the latter like a dance. Which one a particular conductor uses is pretty much up to them. The 1976 recording by The Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields under Neville Marriner uses the 12/8 score (my personal preference).
Want to know more? Check out Eric Dundon’s article at the SLSO Stories site, Conductor Nicholas McGegan on 5 magical Messiah moments that aren’t the Hallelujah Chorus. McGegan picks five numbers that he thinks deserve at least as much love as the “Hallelujah” chorus, including "Rejoice greatly.”
And don’t forget Symphony Preview Wednesday night, December 10, from 8 to 10 pm on Classic 107.3. Tom Sudholt and I will dish up some deep background and play some of the greatest hits from Messiah. The show will also be available for streaming at the Classic 107.3 web site. Here’s our playlist for the show.
The Essentials: Nicholas McGegan conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in Handel’s Messiah Friday and Saturday at 7:30 pm and Sunday at 3 pm, December 12 through 14 . Soloists are Sherezade Panthaki, soprano; Sara Couden, contralto (SLSO debut); John Matthew Myers, tenor; and Brandon Cedel, bass-baritone. The Saturday concert will be broadcast live on St. Louis Public Radio and on Classic 107.3.
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