Messiah 1741
So well known as to be the stuff of legend, Handel composed Messiah in the white heat of inspiration in London during the late summer of 1741. His intention, so far as we know, was for a London premiere in Lent the following spring. An annual season when the authorities required the suspension of all staged theatre production, it was equally an ideal time for Handel to promote his dramatic talent for an ’all-but-staged’ oratorio. The Old Testament especially has rich pickings for the operatic imagination as Handel’s Saul and then Israel in Egypt had amply demonstrated just before the composition of Messiah.
Messiah, however, began life not on the London stage but in a modest concert room in Dublin in April 1742. In the years immediately following enthusiasm in London grew for performances with arias adapted to feature Handel’s latest operatic imports. By the end of his life in 1759, Messiah had become a celebrity annual event, with the versions of arias from those final years becoming the standard Messiah.
In the last few years, however, much interest has emerged in the discovery of the early performances of Messiah from Dublin onward. Messiah 1741 stems from the ambition to reveal for a first time Handel’s initial plan of Messiah: to find the wellspring from which all the composer’s other transformations would flow. Blessed with many late eighteenth-century sources, a new edition has benefited particularly from the autograph (at the British Library in London), Handel’s conducting score (at the Bodleian in Oxford) and a unique copy (in Marsh’s library in Dublin), ‘John Mathew’s Messiah’, made from an early set of parts.
The venture of a ‘new’ Messiah was rewarded richly by Bergen National Opera’s premiere performances in 2016 in Norway in a staged production created by Netia Jones at the Bergen International Festival. Meanwhile its recording history has begun with Felix Koch in Mainz recording during Covid with his excellent Gutenberg-Kammerchor and Neumeyer Consort for the German label Rondeau (released in 2023).
The American premiere was given by Michael McCarthy at National Cathedral in Washington just after publication by Breitkopf & Härtel in December 2018. Having worked with Mike since the early ‘90s – in London and then Washington – this was a total delight. A year later and just before Covid Jeremy Filsell, who played in the Washington performances gave the New York premiere at Saint Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue in 2019.
Since Covid the greatest pleasure of all was to produce a recording myself working with another long-standing colleague James Richman. It was a luxury in the superb Meyerson Concert Hall in Dallas to have two Christmas seasons with James. He and his outstanding musicians graciously gave the opportunity to explore Messiah again as familiar, but yet as new: ‘as if the ink were still wet!’ An added boon that ONYX Classics in London released the Dallas recording in November 2024.
