50 Fun Facts About Handel's Messiah

Which rock guitarist later lived next door to Handel's London home?

Hendrix moved into the top-floor flat at 23 Brook Street in 1968, two centuries after Handel composed Messiah and died next door at number 25; the two homes now form a single museum.

For which Christian festival was Messiah originally intended and first performed?

Easter was the plan from the start: the text was ready in July 1741 for a performance the following spring, and the last Messiah Handel attended, eight days before he died, was an April one as well.

Who compiled the libretto of Messiah from the King James Bible and the Coverdale Psalter?

Charles Jennens wrote none of the words himself: he chose and stitched together verses from across the Bible, which is why nobody in Messiah plays a character or acts out a story.

Which Old Testament prophet's book supplies the words of Messiah's 'Ev'ry valley' and 'For unto us a child is born'?

Isaiah's book was written centuries before Jesus, and that was the librettist's point: Part I tells of Christ's coming almost entirely through ancient prophecy rather than through the evangelists.

The Hebrew word 'Messiah' means what?

The Anointed One is also what the Greek word 'Christ' means, so 'Jesus Christ' was at first less a name than a title: Jesus the Messiah.

Handel was born in 1685 in which German town?

Halle lies in the same corner of Germany as Eisenach, where Bach was born a month later; the two giants of the age never met, though Bach once sent his son to Halle to invite Handel over.

Which honour had London given Handel by 1741?

A statue in Vauxhall Gardens was paid for by the pleasure garden's owner, whose crowds loved Handel's music; it was reckoned the only such tribute to an artist in his own lifetime.

Which 1728 hit by John Gay and Pepusch mocked Handel's Italian stage works and signalled London's changing taste?

The Beggar's Opera put thieves and highwaymen where gods and heroes had stood and set its songs to tunes everyone knew; within months the costly Italian company Handel wrote for had collapsed.

What was Handel's first English oratorio, written for a private patron and revived in London in 1732?

Esther reached the public only as a concert: when royalty asked to see it acted, the Bishop of London forbade a Bible story on the stage, and the unstaged English oratorio was born.

With which 1711 work, staged with live sparrows, did Handel first conquer the London stage?

Rinaldo began his thirty years of writing Italian operas for London; the run ended in 1741 when Deidamia closed almost at once, months before he composed Messiah.

How long did Handel take to compose the music of Messiah?

24 days sounds miraculous, but it was his normal working speed: a fortnight after finishing he had already written the first act of his next oratorio, Samson.

What did Handel write at the end of his manuscript of Messiah?

SDG — Soli Deo Gloria, 'To God alone the glory', was no one-off flourish: Bach signed his church music with the same initials, and Handel used them on other scores too.

How did the librettist regard the speed with which Handel composed Messiah?

As careless negligence: he had hoped for a year's work, pressed Handel to correct the 'grossest faults', and judged the result 'not near so good as he might & ought to have done'.

Which institution holds Handel's autograph manuscript of Messiah?

The British Library has the score by way of the royal family: the heir of Handel's copyist gave the composer's manuscripts to George III, and they sat in Buckingham Palace for generations.

Which instruments are absent from Handel's original score of Messiah and joined in his London performances?

Oboes and bassoons are missing from the original score, which asks only for strings, trumpets and drums, forces Handel could count on finding in Dublin; he added the winds when he took the work to London.

The Messiah chorus 'For unto us a child is born' was adapted from what?

One of Handel's Italian love duets, written weeks earlier, explains the odd stress on 'FOR unto us': in the original the singers open on an emphatic 'No!', refusing to trust love.

How many parts is Messiah divided into?

Three parts mirror the three acts of the operas Handel had been writing for thirty years; like them, Messiah was made for the theatre rather than for a church service.

Which is the only 'scene' in Messiah taken from the Gospels?

The annunciation to the shepherds is the one stretch of straight storytelling, taken from Luke; elsewhere Christ's life is told at one remove, mostly through prophets, psalms and epistles.

Part II of Messiah, which ends with the Hallelujah chorus, dwells mainly on which part of Christ's story?

His Passion and death fill most of Part II, yet no crucifixion is ever narrated: the suffering is told through Old Testament prophecy and psalms written centuries earlier.

What is the pastoral instrumental interlude at the mid-point of Messiah's Part I called?

The Pifa is named after the pifferari, shepherd pipers who came into Rome at Christmas to play in the streets; Handel had almost certainly heard them there as a young man.

The opening Sinfony of Messiah is written in what style?

A French overture, slow and stately before it breaks into a fugue, opens the work; the librettist thought passages of it 'far unworthy of Handel', but the composer 'retain'd his Overture obstinately'.

Which key do Messiah's Hallelujah chorus and 'The trumpet shall sound' share?

D major comes round at the work's moments of glory, the trumpet numbers and the triumphant close, which is why one scholar sums up the whole score as 'an aspiration towards D major'.

In 'The trumpet shall sound', which voice shares the spotlight with Messiah's solo trumpet?

The bass shares the aria with a trumpet that Handel has kept almost silent all evening; he used brass so sparingly that its return here, at the last judgment, lands with full force.

The words of the Hallelujah chorus come from which book of the Bible?

Revelation supplies them, from its visions of heaven at the end of time, so the famous chorus greets not Christ's birth or resurrection but his final victory over his enemies.

Which Messiah aria at the premiere reportedly moved a clergyman to cry out that the singer's sins were forgiven?

He was despised drew the cry 'Woman, for this be all thy sins forgiven thee!' from the Rev. Patrick Delany; the singer had lately been at the centre of a notorious adultery trial.

Which soprano solo, setting words from the Book of Job, opens Part III of Messiah?

I know that my Redeemer liveth was chosen for Handel's own memorial: on his monument the sculpted composer has this aria's score open before him.

Which chorus actually closes Messiah?

Worthy is the Lamb ends the work, flowing into a long fugue on the single word Amen; the Hallelujah chorus only closes Part II.

At which Dublin venue was Messiah first performed?

The Great Music Hall, Fishamble Street, was newly built; Handel had already filled it with two popular concert series that winter before he risked his new oratorio there.

Whose invitation brought Handel to Dublin for the 1741–42 season?

The Duke of Devonshire, the king's viceroy in Ireland, asked him over to give concerts for Dublin's hospitals, a welcome escape after his last two operas had failed in London.

Where did the choir for Messiah's first performance come from?

St Patrick's and Christ Church cathedrals lent their singers, some of whom doubled as soloists, so the first Messiah had a few dozen voices, not the choirs of hundreds that later took it over.

What were ladies asked not to wear to Messiah's Dublin premiere?

Hoops in their dresses took up so much floor that leaving them off, with gentlemen also asked to come without swords, let about 700 people into a hall meant for 600.

Messiah's first performance won the release of 142 people who were locked up for what?

Unpaid debts were the offence: one of the charities sharing the concert's £400 existed to buy imprisoned debtors their freedom, and the rest went to two Dublin hospitals.

Which actress, famed for tragedy more than for singing, performed the contralto solos at Messiah's Dublin premiere?

Susannah Cibber had only a small voice, but an actress's gift for moving an audience; Handel lowered two numbers to suit her, and her brother was Thomas Arne, the composer of 'Rule, Britannia!'.

At which London theatre was Messiah introduced on 23 March 1743?

Covent Garden was a playhouse, not a church, and that was the sticking point: scripture sung on a stage by actresses troubled the devout, so Handel kept the word Messiah off the bills.

Under what title did Handel present Messiah in London in 1743, to avoid religious offence?

The New Sacred Oratorio was all the bills dared say; putting the Saviour's title on a theatre poster was thought improper, and the name Messiah stayed off London bills for six more years.

Which monarch supposedly stood at the London premiere, starting the custom of standing for the Hallelujah chorus?

George II is the king of the story, which Victorian biographers told as fact; modern scholars find no evidence that he was even in the theatre, and the first mention of audiences standing dates from 1756.

From 1750, annual charity performances of Messiah were given at which London institution?

The Foundling Hospital, a home for abandoned children, made Handel a governor in recognition of his generosity, and he left it a fair copy of Messiah's score and parts in his will.

Handel rewrote 'But who may abide' in 1750 for Gaetano Guadagni, a star of which voice type?

A castrato could pair power with dazzling speed, so Handel added the blazing 'refiner's fire' section to show Guadagni off; the singer later became Gluck's first Orfeo.

What affliction led Handel to call on his pupil J. C. Smith to help direct his oratorios in his last years?

Blindness closed in while he was writing his last oratorio, Jephtha: he had to break off in the middle of the chorus 'How dark, O Lord, are Thy decrees', and the manuscript shows his failing sight.

Where was Handel given a state funeral after his death in April 1759?

Westminster Abbey was his own choice: his will set aside £600 to pay for a monument to himself there, and it was unveiled there in 1762.

How many performers did the 1784 Handel Commemoration concerts have, according to a plaque at the venue?

525 was the plaque's count, roughly ten times the forces Handel himself used, and it set a fashion: by 1857 the Crystal Palace was fielding a chorus of 2,000.

Which composer reorchestrated Messiah in 1789 as Der Messias, adding clarinets and trombones?

Mozart made the arrangement for a baron's private concerts in Vienna; he dropped the organ part altogether and handed its harmonies to the added wind instruments.

Which composer called Handel 'the greatest composer that ever lived' and said he would kneel at his tomb?

Beethoven was speaking of Messiah when he said it; what he prized in Handel was how much the older man could do with the simplest means.

Which playwright, as a music critic, mocked Victorian Handel festivals and asked for a Messiah with a chorus of twenty?

George Bernard Shaw earned his living as a London music critic before his plays made his name, signing his early columns 'Corno di Bassetto'; he wanted Messiah 'seriously performed once before we die'.

Which conductor's brisk 1920s recording of Messiah aimed to get nearer to Handel's intentions?

Thomas Beecham went the other way some thirty years later: his 1959 recording used a flamboyant modern re-orchestration commissioned from Eugene Goossens, which one reviewer of the day said was Beecham's Messiah, not Handel's.

Which anthem by Handel has been sung at every British coronation since 1727?

Zadok the Priest has also found a second life in football: its slow-building opening was reworked in 1992 into the anthem of the UEFA Champions League.

What was the librettist's aim in assembling the Messiah text, as a devout Anglican?

To challenge advocates of Deism, who accepted a creator but denied that God steps into human affairs, he built the text from prophecies and showed them fulfilled in Christ.

Why was Messiah's librettist barred from an Oxford degree and any public career?

He opposed the Hanoverian succession and would not swear loyalty to kings he thought usurpers, yet his great collaborator was court composer to those very kings.

Although Messiah covers Christ's whole story, in which season is it most often performed?

Advent has claimed it even though only the first part deals with Christ's birth; the December habit took root in the 19th century, on both sides of the Atlantic.

Which words are the first to be sung in Messiah?

Comfort ye my people is sung by a lone tenor over hushed strings; Handel keeps the chorus waiting for several numbers, so a work that ends in a blaze begins almost in a whisper.