About the work
Handel composed Messiah in about three and a half weeks in August and September 1741. It was first performed in Dublin on 13 April 1742, in the Great Music Hall on Fishamble Street, as a benefit for prisoners and hospitals. The libretto is Charles Jennens's, and every word of it is scripture, from the King James Bible and the psalter of the Book of Common Prayer.
It was written for Lent and Easter; the Christmas tradition came later, because Part One is the prophecy and the nativity. This set plays Part One, mostly Isaiah, with Malachi, Haggai and Luke's shepherds, and closes with the Hallelujah from Part Two, as many Christmas performances do.
There are no characters. The soloists narrate and reflect; nobody plays Mary, the shepherds or the angel. On the house the soloists are voices of light, and the chorus is the whole house.
It ends a season of three oratorios on the house, after Mendelssohn's Elijah and Handel's Judas Maccabaeus, and the three share the Hebrew prophets. Elijah closes on Malachi's promise that Elijah will return; Messiah opens its prophecy with Malachi too: "The Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to His temple." Christian tradition reads these passages of Malachi and Isaiah as prophecies of Christ, and that is the reading Jennens's libretto sets; Jewish tradition reads them differently. Each set presents its own work's tradition on its own nights.
Every note is Handel's, transcribed by hand from Ebenezer Prout's edition of the full score (Novello, London, 1902): the strings, the voices, and the trumpets and timpani where Handel has them. There is no choir in the sample library, so the sung lines are played on instruments, every voice with its own colour and instrument, and the lights follow the notes.
The stage
From the street the porch is the back of the scene, as on the house's other oratorio and opera stages.
| place on the house | what it is |
|---|---|
| Porch Front | the far light: where the glory appears, where the angel speaks from, where the trumpets sound from afar. |
| Left and Right | the land and the people, and in the nativity scenes the fields with the shepherds. |
| Porch Left / Porch Right | the way between: the road, the highway in the desert. |
| Side | the bed and the full-house moments. |
Any star in the set hangs where the Christmas playlist's star does, over the middle of Porch Front.
Who is who
| voice | colour | played on |
|---|---|---|
| tenor (Comfort ye, Ev'ry valley) | warm white #fff0d8 | violins and oboe |
| bass (Thus saith the Lord, The people that walked in darkness) | deep amber #e08a20 | cellos and bassoon |
| alto (But who may abide, O thou that tellest, He shall feed His flock) | soft rose-violet #c890d8 | violas, clarinet |
| soprano (the angel's narration, Rejoice greatly) | silver #e6f0ff | flute and oboe |
| chorus | the whole house, white-gold #fff2c8 | strings, winds doubling, organ |
| trumpets | bright gold #ffd040 | trumpets |
| darkness | deep blue-black #06081a | |
| the refiner's fire | white #ffffff and gold #ffb020 |
Where the music comes from
Every note is transcribed by hand from Ebenezer Prout's edition of the full score (Novello and Company, London, 1902), read from the copy on the Internet Archive (messiahsacredora00hand_0, from the University of Toronto's music library). PDF page = printed page + 26. A full score has each part on its own staff, so the strings are read part by part, not guessed from a keyboard reduction. Only Handel's parts are kept: the strings, the voices, and the two trumpets and timpani in Nos. 17 and 44. Prout's "additional accompaniments" (flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, trombones and organ, his re-writing of Mozart's) are left out; the orchestration here adds its own doublings, as a performance would. Prout's chords for strings in the secco recitatives, printed for use without a keyboard, are read where a scene uses them (Nos. 14, 15 and 19) and left out elsewhere (No. 8).
The timing follows the score's tempo marks, not a recording; where a scene needed a little more speed to fit, the command and the scene's docstring say so. There is no choir in the sample library (the VSCO 2 Community Edition orchestra), so the sung lines are played on instruments: the soloists each on their own (see who is who above), the chorus on strings with oboes and bassoons doubling and the VSCO2 organ under the big choruses, and a Surge XT harpsichord for the continuo. The trumpets are held back until "Glory to God", their first entry in the work, and play there on their own distant, reverberant bus ("da lontano"). A staged production would add sounds where the lights show an event (the thunder under "I will shake the heavens", the fire under "refiner's fire", cymbal swells into the glory), so these scenes add them too. Every pitch is Handel's.