“I was one continued shudder from the beginning to the end of the performance.” So said Abigail Adams in 1784 about the first mass-scale performance of Handel’s Messiah, written in 1741. Singers, players and audiences have continued to shudder ever since as the oratorio has become probably the most performed piece in the repertoire. The power of the Messiah, as Charles King says in his fascinating history of the work, is something of an oddity, given that the text – by Charles Jennens – is a compilation of biblical snippets that laud the redeeming Christ. Nevertheless, Handel’s great achievement was, in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s estimation, to turn singers and musicians into “conductors of his electricity” and audiences into its recipients.
King’s narrative is wide-ranging, taking in not just the ailing composer and his circle –such as Thomas Coram, instigator of London’s Foundling Hospital –
but the uncomfortable realities of 18th-century musical performance, how the Messiah coincided with the birth of the Enlightenment, and why the Jacobite rising of 1745 gave the work a nationalistic fervour. In King’s telling, the “Hallelujah Chorus” is just one rousing highlight among many.
By Michael Prodger
Bodley Head, 352pp, £25
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