Messiah (Handel) - Background

Background

George Frideric Handel (German: Georg Friedrich Händel; pronounced ) (born in Germany, 1685), became a prominent German-British Baroque composer, famous for his operas, oratorios, anthems and organ concertos. Handel received critical musical training in Halle, Hamburg and Italy before settling in London in 1712. He became a naturalised British subject in 1727. The great composers of the Italian Baroque and the middle-German polyphonic choral tradition significantly influenced Handel in his approaches to composition.

By 1741, Handel's pre-eminence in British music was evident from the honours he had accumulated, including: a pension from the court of King George II, the office of Composer of Musick for the Chapel Royal and—most unusually for a living person—a statue erected in his honour, in Vauxhall Gardens. Within a large and varied musical output, Handel was a vigorous champion of Italian opera, which he had introduced to London in 1711 with Rinaldo. He had subsequently written and presented more than 40 such operas in London's theatres. However, by the early 1730s public taste was beginning to change, and the popular success of John Gay and Johann Christoph Pepusch's The Beggar's Opera (first performed in 1728) had heralded a spate of English-language ballad-operas that mocked the pretensions of Italian opera. With box-office receipts falling, Handel's productions were increasingly reliant on private subsidies from the nobility, and such funding became harder to obtain after the launch in 1730 of the "Opera of the Nobility"—a rival company to his own. Handel overcame this challenge, but in order to do so he spent large sums of his own money.

Although future prospects for Italian operas in London declined during the 1730s, Handel remained committed to the genre; however he began to introduce English-language oratorios as occasional alternatives to his staged works. As a young man in Rome in 1707–08 he had written two Italian oratorios at a time when opera performances in the city were temporarily forbidden under papal decree. His first venture into English oratorio had been Esther which was written and performed for a private patron in about 1718. In 1732 Handel brought a revised and expanded version of Esther to the King's Theatre, Haymarket, where members of the royal family attended a glittering premiere on 6 May. Its success encouraged Handel to write two more oratorios (Deborah and Athalia), and all three oratorios were performed to large and appreciative audiences at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford in the summer of 1733. Undergraduates reportedly sold their furniture to raise the money for the five-shilling tickets.

In 1735 Handel received the text for a new oratorio named Saul from its librettist Charles Jennens, a wealthy landowner with musical and literary interests. Because Handel's main creative concern was still with opera, he did not write the music for Saul until 1738, in preparation for his 1738–39 theatrical season. The work opened at the King's Theatre in January 1739 to a warm reception, and was quickly followed by the less successful oratorio Israel in Egypt (which may also have come from Jennens). Although Handel continued to write and present operas, the trend towards English-language productions became irresistible as the decade ended, and after three performances of his last Italian opera Deidamia in January and February 1741, he abandoned the genre. In July 1741 Jennens sent him a new libretto for an oratorio, and in a letter dated 10 July to his friend Edward Holdsworth, Jennens wrote: "I hope will lay out his whole Genius & Skill upon it, that the Composition may excell all his former Compositions, as the Subject excells every other subject. The Subject is Messiah".