On June 1, 1723, Johann Sebastian Bach assumed the duties of Cantor for the churches of Leipzig. Though the city was something of a cultural backwater in the early 18th century, it was a powerful center of Lutheranism in Germany, and the position of music-master to its churches was a prestigious one. Bach, fully aware of the importance of his job, enthusiastically launched into his duties during his early years in Leipzig — most of his nearly 300 cantatas date from the first decade of his tenure. With only six months on the job, the 38-year-old composer made a special effort to impress his superiors with the music for his first Christmas season as Cantor, and he composed three new cantatas for the morning services of December 25, 26 and 27, as well as another for the New Year’s worship of the following week. In addition to these pieces (and playing the organ, and conducting the rehearsals, and copying the parts), he wrote his glorious Magnificat for the special afternoon Vespers service that was a beloved Leipzig Christmas-day tradition.

The text of the Magnificat is the Canticle of the Virgin Mary as given in the Gospel of St. Luke (i, 46-55), and was a regular part of the Roman Catholic Vespers and the Anglican Evensong services. Though usually sung in plainchant, these verses had prompted polyphonic compositions for special occasions since at least the 14th century. It was to enrich such important religious days that the Canticle was retained in the Lutheran Vespers services for Christmas, Easter and Pentecost. The Christmas Vespers in Leipzig began at 1:45 p.m., and included the formal order of worship, a cantata preceding the sermon, and the Magnificat as the brilliant finale to the day’s activities. Due to the imposing length of the Lutheran service in Bach’s time (often four hours in duration!), it was necessary that the closing items of the Vespers be succinct so that the Benediction would come before dusk. The compact nature of Bach’s twelve Magnificat movements demonstrate that he took this requirement to heart. The real reason for the local popularity of the Magnificat (beside its function of ending nearly eight hours of worship on Christmas day) was that it accompanied a tableau-vivant representation of the Nativity, with many of the Biblical characters portrayed by the Church members in costume.

For the original 1723 version of his Magnificat, Bach interspersed five German Christmas hymns among the Latin verses to accompany the stage action of this mystery play. (The durability of this spectacle in the affection of the Leipzigers is attested by the fact that the City Council had tried unsuccessfully to abolish it since at least 1703.) In 1733, Bach revised the work by transposing it to its present key of D major and eliminating the Yuletide insertions, thereby making it practical for performance at Easter and Pentecost as well as at Christmas.

The esteemed English musicologist Sir Donald Tovey wrote, “Bach’s Magnificat is one of his most comprehensively representative works. From it, almost any point in Bach’s treatment of words, of musical forms, and of instrumentation can be brilliantly represented.” Each of the twelve movements engenders a clear and vivid mood: from the jubilant opening and closing choruses (which, by sharing the same music, serve as supporting pillars for the entire structure) to the pathos of the duet Et Misericordia; from the surging power of Omnes Generationes to the bucolic sweetness of Esurientes Implevit Bonis; from the anguish of Deposuit Potentes to the confident optimism of the Doxology (Gloria Patri), Bach’s Magnificat is not just a beautiful work of art but also a document of the composer’s faith in God’s multifarious and omnipotent attributes. It is music that is joyous, festive and uplifting while being at the same time introspective and touching. Like his later B minor Mass and St. Matthew Passion, Bach’s Magnificat scales the summit of the musical expression of man’s faith.

It was Gay and Pepusch’s satirical romp of 1729, The Beggar’s Opera, that first soured the fashionable London taste for what Samuel Johnson described in his 1755 Dictionary of the English Language as “an exotic and irrational entertainment” — Italian opera. As both composer and impresario, Handel was London’s most important producer of opera, and he toiled doggedly for the entire decade of the 1730s to keep his theatrical ventures solvent, but the tide of fashion (and the virulent cabals of his competitors) brought him to the edge of bankruptcy by 1739. As early as 1732, with the oratorio Esther, he had begun casting about for a musical genre that would appeal to the changing fancy of the English public. Neither that work nor the oratorio Alexander’s Feast of 1736 had the success he had hoped, however, and the strain of his situation resulted in the collapse of his health in 1737, reported variously as a stroke or as acute rheumatism and depression. Much to the surprise and chagrin of his enemies, he recovered and resumed work. The oratorios Israel in Egypt and Saul appeared in 1739, but created little public stir. Determined to have one last try at saving Italian opera in London, Handel spent the summer of 1740 arranging production details and searching for singers on the Continent for his upcoming winter season. After returning to England in early autumn, he completed what proved to be his last two operas, both of which failed ignominiously on the stage: Imeneo, premiered on November 22nd, closed after only two performances; Deidamia (January 10, 1741), after three. In February, Handel largely withdrew from public life and seldom left his house in Brook Street, near Grosvenor Square. His rivals rejoiced.

Rumors began to circulate that Handel was finished in London. Some held that his health had given way for good; others, that he had died. The story given greatest credence, one fueled by Handel’s composition of some Italian duets — pieces largely useless in London — was that he planned to return to the Continent. However, in the summer he suddenly sprang back to creative life, inspired by a small book of Biblical texts that had been compiled by Charles Jennens, a moneyed fop of artistic pretensions but a sincere admirer of the composer who had earlier supplied the words for the oratorio L’Allegro, il Penseroso e il Moderato, based on Milton’s poem. Handel’s imagination was fired, and he began composing on August 22nd. Stories have it that he shut himself in his room, eschewing sleep and leaving food untouched, while he frantically penned his new work. Twenty-four days later, on September 14th, he emerged with the completed score of Messiah. “I did think I did see Heaven before me and the great God Himself!” he muttered to a servant.

It was long thought that Handel, a devout Christian and Bible scholar, composed Messiah out of sheer religious fervor, with no thought of an immediate performance. In his study of the composer, the distinguished scholar of 18th-century music H.C. Robbins Landon contends that the work was written at the request of William, Duke of Devonshire, the Lord Lieutenant of Dublin, who visited London early in 1741. William, who knew Handel largely through his sacred vocal music, apparently asked him to provide a new work for performance at a series of concerts in Dublin that would aid various local charities. Handel’s newly regained creative enthusiasm stirred by William’s request continued to percolate, and he began Samson immediately upon finishing Messiah, completing all but two numbers of that score within six weeks.

Handel was undoubtedly glad to leave London and its bitter disappointments in November 1741 for the journey to Dublin to produce his new oratorio; he arrived in the Irish capital on November 18th, being “universally known by his excellent Compositions in all Kinds of Musick,” trumpeted the city’s press. Choristers were assembled from Dublin’s cathedrals, the best available soloists and instrumentalists were enlisted, and the date of the premiere was set for April 13th. Messiah was a triumph. “It gave universal Satisfaction to all present; and was allowed by the greatest Judges to be the finest Composition of Musick that ever was heard,” announced Faulkner’s Journal.

The Irish triumph of Messiah did not follow Handel back to London, however, at least not immediately. He wanted to present his new oratorio as soon as he returned, but he knew that there would be, in the words of Robbins Landon, “strong opposition to hearing the words of the New Testament in a theatre peopled by actors and actresses of loose morals and dubious sexual habits.” He chose instead to give the Old Testament-based Samson on February 18, 1743, and it proved to be the first of his oratorios that won unqualified acclaim in the British capital. Messiah was ready for its London premiere on March 23rd at Covent Garden, though he chose not to bill the work under its true title but called it, simply, “A New Sacred Oratorio,” hoping to skirt some of the indignation of the more puritanical audience members and of Edmund Gibson, the Bishop of London. The ploy succeeded only in part. “Any work about the Omnipotent should never be performed in a playhouse,” fumed one clergyman. Some of his colleagues tried to shut down the theater. Messiah, still known only as “Handel’s New Oratorio,” was given twice more in 1743, and twice again in 1745, then put aside. Not until the death of Bishop Gibson and his succession by the more liberal Thomas Sherlock in 1748 did Handel again mount Messiah, at last under its original title, for a single performance at Covent Garden on March 3, 1749. It was, finally, the following year that Handel’s masterpiece began to receive its due. After the April 13, 1750 Covent Garden performance, Handel presented it again, on May 1st, for the benefit of the London Foundling Hospital, and it was thereafter given annually for the same cause. It was the last work he directed, only eight days before he died on April 14, 1759.

For all of its unparalleled popularity, Messiah is an aberration among Handel’s oratorios, the least typical of his two-dozen works in the form: it is his only oratorio, except Israel in Egypt, whose entire text is drawn from the Bible; it is his only oratorio without a continuous dramatic plot; it is his only oratorio based on the New Testament; it is his only oratorio presented in a consecrated space during his lifetime, a reflection of the sacred rather than dramatic nature of its content (“I should be sorry if I only entertained them; I wished to make them better,” he told one aristocratic admirer); it has more choruses than any of his oratorios except Israel; the soloists in Messiah are commentators on rather than participants or characters in the oratorio’s story. None of this, of course, detracts a whit from the emotional/artistic/(perhaps) religious experience of Messiah. (Handel and Jennens never appended the definite article to the title.)

Its three parts — The Advent of the Messiah, The Passion of Christ, and His Resurrection — embody the most sacred events of the Christian calendar, yet its sincerity and loftiness of expression transcend any dogmatic boundaries. In the words of George P. Upton, the American musicologist and turn-of-the-20th-century critic of the Chicago Tribune, “Other oratorios may be compared one with another; Messiah stands alone, a majestic monument to the memory of the composer, an imperishable record of the noblest sentiments of human nature and the highest aspirations of man.”

©2021 Dr. Richard E. Rodda