During this Advent season we are reminded that in glory the Lord Jesus—our Messiah—does not stand alone; He is surrounded by a multitude whom no one can number, a multitude that sing the endless Hallelujahs before his throne. As we long to join that worship and look eagerly for His coming, Christians can find great help and great hope even at a time of war and great need in our world and perhaps in our lives, by singing Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus.

The Advent season is a call to set our eyes on Jesus as the long-expected and coming Messiah. Few works of music are better suited to help us do that than George Frederic Handel’s Messiah. Messiah is unique because its text is entirely taken from the Scriptures. Moreover, it takes as its subject the birth, redemptive work, and glorification of Christ. In what follows, I hope to inspire you to deeply reflect on the wonders of Messiah’s person and work through becoming more acquainted with this masterwork that has been passed down from Handel’s day until our own.

George Frederic Handel (1685–1759)

The man often called England’s greatest composer was actually German, born in the conservative Lutheran northern city of Halle. By eighteen he had left his hometown for the city of Hamburg, with its flourishing music scene, and found work as an opera orchestra violinist. There he also became acquainted with the new genre of “passion”—an extended choral work for Holy Week services focusing on the events preceeding Christ’s crucifixion—and he composed one. He then spent three years in Italy learning from master composers how to write Italian opera, which was the rage all across Europe.

By 1712 he would move permanently to London, where Italian serious opera was the top entertainment at the time. Opera was attended by everyone, like professional sports today—the wealthy would attend the same show night after night, socializing in their luxurious boxes, the lower classes standing on the main floor or sitting in the top balcony. Italian operas were historical tragedies that offered heart wrenching stories, dramatic action, the chance to emote with characters, and virtuoso soloists whose vocal acrobatics made them superstars. Soon Handel’s operas—Julius Caesar and others—dominated the London scene. He would also become an impresario, shaping the London music industry with his business savvy, and he rose to international fame as the top opera composer in England of his time.

Then, in the 1730s Handel’s career unexpectedly began to crumble for two reasons. The Church of England passed a ban on the performance of stage works during Lent. That meant over a month of lost income for the opera houses and for Handel. Some thought that the stroke Handel suffered in April 1737 was brought on by the stress. But beyond that setback, audience tastes had changed, which had already become clear the previous decade when “ballad opera” took London by storm in 1728. The lead characters of these comedic plays were servants and criminals who outwitted and openly lampooned the clergy, aristocracy, and politicians, the songs were popular ballads often vulgar, and they were in English. Ballad opera won the day with the lower class and the growing merchant class, causing a culture war. Serious Italian opera still had supporters, but Handel was eventually producing his works to nearly empty, unheated opera houses, and he was facing financial ruin.

Handel was at a crisis point that many musicians still face. Would he write crude music to pay the bills and please the audience, or would he invent a whole new genre that would be good for people? He chose the second path. He essentially created English “oratorio”—a genre of dramatic musical narrative that tells a story through song. By taking this path, Handel found a way to keep large audiences even during Lent, edify them with Scripture, and delight them musically with stories of famous Old Testament characters like Solomon, Esther, and Moses.^[1] The Bible was his repository for the text script—what is called the “libretto”—of the oratorios. Because of Handel, oratorio became the English sacred genre for more than a century to come. And again, people were edified, the Scriptures came to life, and Handel did it all without the staged action of a play.

In 1741 Handel was invited to produce a season in the city of Dublin which changed his life forever. He would typically compose works ahead for each season, so he wrote Messiah not for a commission, but to take with him to Dublin for a possible performance. The speed with which Handel composed Messiah in summer of 1741 is miraculous but true—he wrote the work in 24 days—an astonishing rate for an almost three hour musical piece that weaves together both instruments and voices.^[2] He reported working night and day and barely eating during those few weeks, and later described his experiencing “as it were the heavens opened” as he was setting the Scriptures and creating this musical portrait of Christ and his future glory.

The premier of Messiah in Dublin on Tuesday, 13 April 1742 was a benefit for several hospitals, and audience response was tremendous. There were six sold-out performances with 600 people at each. The advertisement famously requested the women to attend without hoop skirts and the men to come without their swords to allow more seating space.

Upon Handel’s return home to London in 1742, he received an invitation to produce a concert to dedicate the organ he had donated to the new Foundling “Hospital,” a children’s home for abandoned infants and children. For this he chose to perform Messiah.^[3] Handel’s May 1750 Foundling performance of Messiah had huge sales (almost 1400 tickets were sold, a massive number at that time) and brought in the sum of 1,000 pounds. The repeated connection with charity performances catapulted Messiah to fame. Charles Burney, eminent English musician, diarist-historian and a younger member of Handel’s circle, would write decades later about this Foundling concert: “And from that time to the present, this great work has been heard in all parts of the kingdom with increasing reverence and delight; it has fed the hungry, clothed the naked, fostered the orphan, and enriched succeeding managers of the Oratorios, more than any single production in this or any country.”^[4] By the mid 1750s, Messiah performances were becoming fairly widespread in cathedral cities which became regional hubs for oratorio seasons, and continued to spread internationally. Even today, Messiah remains a staple work in concert halls and large churches around the world both at Christmas and before Easter. But how did Handel decide what words to put in this famous composition? He had some help from a friend.

Charles Jennens, Handel’s Librettist

Charles Jennens (1700–73) was Handel’s “librettist”—the one who selected the texts to be used in the oratorio. Jennens was a “scholar . . . with a deep knowledge of his Bible, a passionate high church Anglican, patron of the arts, generous philanthropist” and estate heir who faithfully held morning and evening Prayer Book prayers for his household in the elegant chapel of his family’s magnificent country house. Among other things, he was also a pioneering editor of Shakespeare. With Jennens experience in handling dramatic texts and serious study of Scripture, he was the ideal librettist and collaborator for Handel in this project. He and Handel had an admirable and deeply respectful working relationship for decades, and they would collaborate on several biblical oratorios (including Saul and Jephthe, Handel’s last).^[5]

For the title page of the Messiah word book first printed for the 1743 London performances Jennens selected two quotations. First is the Latin phrase Majora canamus, “We sing of higher things,” which is Virgil.^[6] By quoting Virgil on his title page Jennens was stating emphatically: “We are about to sing of something infinitely higher and greater than all this world’s wisdom and enlightened human reason can offer.”

The second quote from I Timothy 3:16 and Colossians 2:3 makes his point brilliantly. Both are taken from Christological hymns cited by Paul in his epistles: the Timothy hymn is the shortest one, and it contains the gospel—from incarnation to glorification—compressed into six breathtaking lines set in three parallelisms and introduced by the prologue phrase, “For great is the mystery of godliness.” The Colossians quote highlights Jesus, “In whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” As his concise, personal commentary on the work at hand, Jennens could scarcely have chosen better texts.

The Libretto and Musical Styles

“Anthologizing a sacred text at this time was a Protestant notion,”^[7] writes English choral conductor and historian Andrew Gant, who notes that the practice continued among composers of English anthems and other church music even long after Handel: “The later great luminaries of English church music like Samuel Sebastian Wesley [Charles Wesley’s grandson] became expert at gathering text like a shepherd from all over their Bible by a kind of personalized concordance, linking themes, words and ideas across texts and testaments.” This is verified in countless pieces of sacred choral music, but “Messiah is the ultimate example of this process,” Gant contends.^[8]

The libretto (or “word book”—the listing of the biblical texts used in the musical composition) of the oratorio is organized into three Parts in which the story line of Messiah unfolds in fifty-three separate movements or “numbers” (two are merely instrumental). The fifty-one movements with lyrics quote eighty-five total verses of Scripture. Jennens carefully selected, juxtaposed, and arranged the biblical texts in the three Parts to create a narrative portrait of Christ that invites the listener to ponder the majestic person and work of Jesus the Messiah. Within each Part, Jennings grouped the individual movements into smaller units he called “scenes.” Handel, when setting each text to music, could choose between one of three musical types:

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