HANDEL’S MESSIAH

Greymouth Evening Star, 8 December 1945, Page 8

HANDEL’S MESSIAH

INTERESTING PARTICULARS • Writing to the Wellington “Dominion,” Mr. L. D. Austin, states: — “Now that the annual open season for oratorio is again with us, it may be timely to draw attention to a couple of misapprehensions which seem to have become inseparable from the above-mentioned work. First, the title is “Messiah,” not “The Messiah.” This may appear a trivial distinction, but actually it is almost as significant as the difference between “Hamlet” and “The Hamlet.” Handel christened his production simply “Messiah”’ so why not respect his direction “The second point relates to the rapidity of its composition. Much is made of the fact that Handel originally wrote the work in 24 days. What is not well known, however, is that his profound dissatisfaction with it after the first performance, in Dublin, on April 13, 1742, caused him to revise and practically to rewrite the oratorio entirely—a task which engaged him for the better part of a year. “This being indubitably the case, it follows that “Messiah” as we hear it to-day is emphatically not the work that Handel wrote in three weeks, but one to which he gave many months of labour and deep thought. We may go farther, and suggest that the orchestral accompaniments usually played are not even Hanlel’s revised version, but the product of other brains. It was found as time went on that the original orchestration could be greatly improved to suit more modern conditions —no less a musician than Mozart being the first to try his hand. Then Professor E. Prout, elaborated Mozart’s ideas, and finally, in 1926, the late Sir Henry Wood rescored the whole work for an orchestra of 250 and choir of 3000 for the Handel .Festival at the Crystal Palace that year. Whether “Messiah” will be subjected to any more evolutionary experiments remains to be seen. It may yet fall a victim to the “swing” fiends, to whom no sort of music is sacred.”