Overture Magazine - 2015-2016 Season November-December 2015 | Page 32

{ program notes

Handel’s Messiah
Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall

Friday, December 4, 2015 — 7:30 p.m.
Sunday, December 6, 2015 — 3 p.m.

Edward Polochick, Conductor and Harpsichord
Jennifer O’Loughlin, Soprano
Nancy Maultsby, Mezzo-Soprano
Sean Panikkar, Tenor
Soloman Howard, Bass-Baritone
Concert Artists Of Baltimore Symphonic Chorale

George Frideric Handel

Messiah
Part I

INTERMISSION
Part II
Part III

The performance will end at approximately 10 p.m. on Sunday
and 5:30 p.m. on Sunday

ABOUT THE CONCERT:
MESSIAH

George Frideric Handel
Born in Halle, Saxony (now Germany), February
23, 1685, died in London, April 14, 1759

Handel’s great oratorio Messiah has
become such a beloved musical icon in
the nearly 270 years since its birth in

30

O v ertur e

| WWW. BSOMUSIC .ORG

1741 that it is not at all surprising that
many myths and legends have grown
up around it. We have been told that
Handel himself compiled its mostly
Biblical text or, alternatively, that it
was sent to him by a stranger; that its
success transformed him overnight
from a bankrupt operatic has-been to
England’s most revered composer; that
at its London premiere the king himself

rose during the “Hallelujah Chorus” to
express his approbation. But Messiah’s
real story is much more complicated,
though no less fascinating.
In the early 1740s, Handel was
indeed in considerable professional
and financial trouble. After emigrating
from Germany to England as a young
man, he had enjoyed a celebrated career
as the country’s leading composer of
operas, mostly in Italian and enhanced
by spectacular costumes and scenic
effects. But by the end of the 1730s,
Handel’s serious grand operas were
falling out of fashion. The success of
John Gay’s much simpler, English-language The Beggar’s Opera fueled a new
enthusiasm for popular-style comic
operas. Unable to fill London’s opera
houses anymore, Handel retreated
from the field and turned his genius to
sacred dramas or oratorios.
He was not a novice in this genre.
Even while busy writing operas, Handel
had composed a number of oratorios, notably Israel in Egypt and Saul. Typically,
his oratorios were not so very different
from his operas; they told a dramatic
story — in this case drawn from the
Bible or other sacred literature — and
their soloists played actual characters.
They were performed in theaters and
concert halls, not churches. But Israel
in Egypt took a new musical approach
with the chorus becoming the central
character. And Messiah, while giving the
soloists more to do, still used the chorus
for its climactic moments. Moreover, it
broke with Baroque oratorio tradition as
a meditation on the coming of the Messiah and his promise for humanity rather
than a narrative of events in his life.
Handel himself did not compile the
group of texts drawn from the Bible’s
Old and New Testaments for Messiah.
Instead, this was the work of Charles
Jenne