Messias 1789
After Handel’s death in 1759 the fame of Messiah spread abroad to his native homeland. Within a decade the attempts to create a German singing version had begun; by 1780, the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had inspired his fellow poet and linguist, Johann Gottfried Herder to create a German text that followed the English original closely. First performed that year in Weimar, Messiah was a statement to a new age, one that represented for both Herder and Goethe all that a faith-story could and should offer without the authority of the church lurking ominously in the shadows behind. The new text soon migrated to Leipzig, to the Thomas Kirche, where Johann Adam Hiller, third cantor after Bach, re-cast Handel’s original for the latest Leipzig orchestra. Messiah-fever was spreading throughout Germany….
Meanwhile in Vienna diplomat and court librarian Gottfried van Swieten, well aware of the appeal of Handel generally, was not to be outdone by London’s recent 1784 celebrations. Commemorating the composer’s birth a century before, participants at Westminster Abbey had numbered in the hundreds. Van Swieten thus would bring Handel’s oratorios to Vienna –and with the aid of the ever-impecunious Mozart – upscaled to the standard of the Viennese classical orchestra.
An ideal candidate for the modernisation process, van Swieten commissioned Mozart to maintain Handel’s original string parts while adding a full complement of winds. Providing him with a newly prepared score with Handel’s original, his copyists left additional blank staves for pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons and horns. With a Viennese orchestra to hand, however, Mozart, could hardly have been expected only to add winds unisono to Handel’s string parts; and thus with his dramatic imagination let loose on his esteemed forebear, his own distinctive commentary would emerge, in affectionate dialogue with his Handel.
The new ‘Messias 1789’ transported Handel’s baroque masterpiece into the evermore popular world of nineteenth-century oratorio, to the stage that would host Haydn’s Creation and Mendelssohn’s Elijah. First published by Breitkopf & Härtel in 1803, Mozart’s ‘additional accompaniments’ arrived within a few decades in London (and then America) for English-language Messiah editions, where they remained the basis for any orchestral Messiah performance until well into the 1960s after which they were over increasingly overtaken by the rise of the modern baroque orchestra.
Editorial work is now well underway in Prague where the Lobkowicz musical archive houses the original performance material together with part of Mozart’s autograph. It has been such a pleasure to work at the archive by the kind permission of William Lobkowicz: sitting in the Nelahozeves Palace (which looks down on Dvorak’s birth place) alongside the aspiring young musicologists from Vassar College who spend the summer in the archives cataloguing. With much yet to be discovered, I eagerly look forward to the new edition of Messias 1789 as the ideal companion to Messiah 1741, the two works bookending nearly half a century of performance before 1800 and at the same time offering us yet another Messiah perspective for our own time.
