800 Words: I Don't Hate Messiah Part 2 - The Long Performing Tradition

I wanted to rant about Messiah, but now I realize that any dislike I have of the ‘Messiah epidemic’ is indicative of a much larger problem. We’re a full half-century removed from classical music’s original ‘Early Music’ craze, yet Early Music is still subject to an enormous dose of over-reverence. Whether the undue reverence is for 19th century gigantism or for the composer’s original intentions, neither is particularly deserved - and both probably have led to centuries of extremely boring performances. Let’s just take the example of Handel’s Messiah, the Christmas nightmare, as perhaps the clearest example of this phenomenon. Few pieces of music seem to attract stodgy reverence to it like Messiah - the result being thousands of performances that sound almost exactly alike. Most Messiah performances sound either bloated and tired after the manner of 19th century pomp, or brittle and arthritic after the manner of the 20th century’s obsession with recapturing the past. Neither does justice to the Handelean fire which the greatness of this piece requires. So here is a quick history of how this came to be (with enormous help from wikipedia, so any resemblance to scholarship is purely accidental):

Handel’s Messiah was premiered in Dublin, 1742 with a chorus of 32 and soloists mostly drawn from the ranks of the chorus. One journalist immediately hailed it as the greatest oratorio ever written: ‘far surpass[ing] anything of that Nature which has been performed in this or any other Kingdom.’ Another declared "...The best Judges allowed it to be the most finished work of Musick. Words are wanting to express the exquisite Delight it afforded to the admiring crowded Audience. The Sublime, the Grand, and the Tender, adapted to the most elevated, majestic, and moving Words, conspired to transport and charm the ravished Heart and Ear..." Yet even this piece, already hailed as the greatest music(k) ever written, was subject to endless re-tinkering by Handel. Handel very much aspired to great art, but he was also a showman and businessman, probably the best combination of those qualities among great composers until Verdi. And as a businessman, he always had one eye upon what was feasible, and as a showman, he always had an ear on how best to achieve effects. When the oratorio had a repeat performance in Dublin two months later, there were substantial revisions made to accommodate different soloists and passages thoroughly recomposed to better tailor to his own satisfaction. For every subsequent performance in Handel’s lifetime, Handel made new emendations, additions and deletions, some of which he made after he went blind, and seem to keep occurring until a performance eight days before his death.

Thirty years after Handel’s death, it was common in London to hear performances of Messiah at Westminster Abbey with an orchestra alone of two-hundred-fifty musicians, including twelve horns, twelve trumpets, six trombones, and three pairs of timpani (that were made larger than average for just such an event). In fact, there is an advertisement from 1787 for a performance at the Abbey which promises "The Band will consist of Eight Hundred Performers."

Messiah performances were still stranger in Europe. In 1788, Johann Adam Hiller conducted a performance in the Berlin Cathedral consisting of 287 performers. Compared to Westminster Abbey, this probably sounds downright reasonable. But if you look at the instrumental composition, it gets still stranger: 87 strings, 10 bassoons, 11 oboes, 8 flutes, 8 horns, 4 clarinets, 4 trombones, 7 trumpets, timpani, harpsichord and organ. By the rules of modern acoustics, an orchestra of 142 could easily drown out a chorus of the same number, especially one with 7 trumpets and 8 natural horns. But even in Handel’s time, it was common to have more instrumentalists than singers. At at least one performance, Handel conducted an orchestra of 37 and a chorus of only 19.

In 1789, none other than Mozart made an arrangement for performance in Vienna. He eliminated the organ continuo, added parts for flutes, clarinets, trombones and horns, simplified the trumpet parts, reorchestrated much of the piece to accommodate larger forces, and thoroughly recomposed some passages. And yet Mozart’s performance used a chorus of twelve.

To make matters still more confusing, many of Mozarts changes were worked back into the standard editions which the English speaking peoples used in the 19th century for their ever larger performances of Messiah. In 1853, New York heard performance of Messiah was given with a chorus of 300. In 1865, Boston heard one with a chorus of 600. In 1857, London heard (or sang) a performance with 2,000 singers and an orchestra of 500. These mass performances became more and more frequent, with choruses numbering 3,000, 4,000, even 5,000 singers.

But fashions always change, and lots of music lovers were getting tired of the musical gigantism which Messiah seemed to always ensure. George Bernard Shaw wrote: "The stale wonderment which the great chorus never fails to elicit has already been exhausted" he later wrote, "Why, instead of wasting huge sums on the multitudinous dullness of a Handel Festival does not somebody set up a thoroughly rehearsed and exhaustively studied performance of the Messiah in St. James Hall with a chorus of twenty capable artists? Most of us would be glad to hear the work seriously performed once before we die."

Even in 1902, when one of the first scholarly edtions that consulted Handel’s manuscripts was printed, it was taken as a given that Messiah could never again be presented with Handel’s original scoring. Even for a scholarly edition, many of the accumulated changes made by Mozart, Hiller and others were deliberately left in. Its editor, Ebenezer Prout wrote:

“[T]he attempts made from time to time by our musical societies to give Handel's music as he meant it to be given must, however earnest the intention, and however careful the preparation, be foredoomed to failure from the very nature of the case. With our large choral societies, additional accompaniments of some kind are a necessity for an effective performance; and the question is not so much whether, as how they are to be written.”


(From 1926, Let Us Break Their Bonds Asunder, with a chorus and orchestra of 3,300. Probably a lot louder in person, no less messy though.)

But even as scholarly performances became more frequent, the “Massiah” was still the norm. One of the first recording of Messiah excerpts comes from 1926 at the Chrystal Palace Handel Festival with an orchestra and chorus numbering 3,300. Recordings from that period can’t possibly give us the full effect of an orchestra and chorus numbering 3,300 and the results were predictably sloppy.


(probably the most dramatic rendering of the Hallelujah chorus I’ve ever heard … save Beecham’s later recording. But this one doesn’t strike you as bizarre.)

The forces with which Messiah was performed were gradually dwindling. A 1922 performance in Handel’s hometown of Halle caused a bit of a a choir of 163 and 64 instrumentalists. In 1927, Sir Thomas Beecham conducted the first virtually complete recording of Messiah. For it’s time, it was considered quite controversial. Beecham aimed closer to the style of Handel’s period, with tempos far faster than what was once the norm. The result was an orchestra, chorus and style that would sound completely at home in a Mendelssohn oratorio. The result is far lither than his infamously exciting but bloated 1959 recording (more on that later). And apparently Beecham made a 1947 recording that is even more musicologically correct. I wish I could find it. In Thomas Beecham’s chosen repertoire, he was absolutely unbeatable, and I can only surmise that both those two recordings must number among the greatest ever set down.



While Sir Thomas was showing us a new vision of Handel’s Messiah, his friend and rival Sir Malcolm Sargent clung obstreperously to the old traditions. Between the 20’s and 50’s, Sargent released four different recordings of Messiah, and at least the last two with the Huddersfield Choral Society - a choir of well over 200 voices. I’m familiar with what I can only guess are their last two recordings. Their 1940’s recording is far better than the stereo remake. There are a few magnificent moments, which almost completely result of good soloists (in the 40’s recording) and from Sargeant preparing his own edition of Messiah for a traditional 19th century orchestra of proportions that probably would have been recognizable to Berlioz. Unfortunately, the chorus is cumbersome and not accomplished technically, which drags both performances down to another iteration of Messiah’s bloated 19th century presentation.


(Go to 4:00. This Amen section must be the slowest performance of the finale on record)

It wasn’t until 1954 that listeners heard Handel’s Messiah in its original orchestration from the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus conducted by the always fascinating Hermann Scherchen. Scherchen’s performance is typically eccentric, not always convincing but fantastically provocative. By the standards of today, it’s still quite a large-scale performance, and the ensemble is certainly ragged throughout, but Scherchen channels his own personal vision which makes this a performance that sounds utterly unlike any other. You can also find a performance on youtube of Scherchen performing the Hallelujah Chorus in which he accomplishes a gradual acceleration through the whole piece. What we hear in this recording is the thoughts of a very great (and still underrated) conductor.


(ew)

Far less interesting is the second recording to be done according to the original orchestration. Adrian Boult’s 1961 recording with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus is far better played than Scherchen’s. It’s also one of the most predictable performances, with no new insights, thoroughly Victorian-era tempos, a well-trained chorus that sounds far too large. What’s the point of using Handel’s orchestration if you’re just going to create a Victorian performance exactly like every other?


(The Hallelujah Chorus, as you’ve never heard it.)

And then,... there's The Beecham Messiah. There are three Beecham Messiah recordings, but when you say 'The Beecham Messiah' to a music lover, they always know about which you're speaking. The Beecham Messiah has got to be one of the most bizarre recordings ever made. For this recording, Beecham got composer/conductor Sir Eugene Goossens to reorchestrate the piece for a 130 piece orchestra that dwarfs anything in Richard Strauss. The chorus alone must have easily numbered 400-strong. In some ways, this may still be the most modern Messiah ever performed - closer to the spirit of the 19th century than virtually any 19th century performance. So far as we know, no 19th century performance had the audacity to reorchestrate Handel with the express intention of making his music sound resemble Elgar. This is Messiah heard through the lenses of William Walton's Belshazzar's Feast and Mahler's Symphony of a Thousand. Passages that once were done with a few singers, strings, and winds are now heard with the full weight of 530 musicians with an overflowing complement of brass and percussion at full volume. Yet what comes through most clearly is the ebullience with which all the players obviously threw themselves into this venture. It comes down to us almost like a statement of defiance against a prevailing fashion, as though they knew that they would never participate in an event quite like this one ever again. Musicological scholarship was already making performances like this one entirely verboten. In no way is this recognizable as Handel in any form we know from today, and it's certainly an acquired taste. The other day, I badmouthed this recording on the excellent Boulezian blog. I immediately regretted writing it, and went back to listen. This is Handel as an Elgar oratorio, with all the pomp and loftiness that implies. Yes, it can make for dreary listening. So can just about every Messiah recording. But when met on its own terms it works more magnificently than nearly any other recording.

800 Words: I Don't Hate Messiah Part 1 - A Baroque Music Rant

(a good deal of this is reworked from a piece about Monteverdi I wrote three-and-a-half years ago.)


(24 oboes, 12 bassoons, nine trumpets, nine french horns, six kettledrums, as many snare drums as can be afforded.....and if you’re feeling more conventional you can add some strings. Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks.)

When Haydn heard Messiah in London, he was said to be in tears and exclaimed “He is the greatest of us all.” Beethoven said of Handel “He is the greatest composer that ever lived. I would uncover my head and kneel before his tomb.” Mozart was nearly as effusive: “Handel understands effects better than any of us -- when he chooses, he strikes like a thunderbolt.”

Before the beatification of Mozart, and Beethoven (and Bach), it was taken for granted Handel was the greatest of all composers. When Beethoven needed a sound to challenge the world, he needed look no further than Handel’s example to show what music can do. While Bach was a mere local cantor, Handel was considered the very apex of music’s ability to entertain, challenge and move audiences.


(If the opening to Zadok the Priest doesn’t thrill you. You have no pulse....give it a second...)

So now, with 2011 drawing to a close, I’m ready to ask a question that should have been asked hundreds of years ago. Why are most performances of Handel such unbearable snoozers? For fifteen years, I've tried to convince myself that I like this music enough to sit through countless hours of it surrounded by other sophisticated people, basking in the self-congratulation of being too sophisticated to go merely to concerts containing the Three B's.

And if this scenario rings true for anybody else, it's because, like me, you really do like a great deal of baroque music. You've heard things - moments, arias, even whole hours and acts of this stuff - that you really quite love. But in order to reach those moments, you force yourself to sit through hour upon hour of untold tedium. One aria after duet after trio after aria...for over three hours, every one of which becomes indistinguishable from one another. Don't tell me you haven't had this experience because I know you're lying. We classical music lovers have all gone to our share of Messiahs, seen at least one or two operas by Handel, those of you who are lucky (ie the Europeans) probably got to a few runs of Monteverdi and Rameau, maybe even one by Vivaldi. We all know and love our Bach and have seen dozens of concerts of his music. But regardless of the composer, most of these experiences involve approximately fifteen minutes of truly involving music, and then sitting through another three hours of excruciating dullness. If you weren't sitting in an opera house or concert hall, you could swear you were listening to a CD entitled 'vocal music for narcoleptics.'


(Monteverdi, writing and performed at his best.)

And because the music making is so staid, it is ripe to be subsumed by the very worst excesses of the more vibrant theatrical world that moves parallel to us. How many articles do we have to read about Orfeo ed Euridice as lesbians misunderstood by a homophobic Cupid do we have to sit through before the invisible hand begins to show its disapproval? How many reviews should we read about Giulio Cesare done in Nazi uniforms? How many will we see L'Incoronazione di Poppea done with nude court dancers? And how many more productions will involve trench coats and dark glasses? When will people stop thinking that these productions are original? Nobody should be opposed on principle to rethinking classic texts, even to radical rethinkings. But if a director brings different ideas to the productions, they damn well better be every bit as good as the original concept. But how many are?

The problem is never the competence of the ensembles: everything is always well-sculpted, well-manicured, nary a note out of place and nary a note out of tune. The problem is that Baroque opera performances are so lacking in any inspiration, involvement or inner life that there is scarcely a point in sitting through it unless you value the ability to say that you did.


(How Monteverdi used to be done. Very pretty, right? Now imagine four hours of exactly this....)

It doesn't take much of a brain to figure out that Baroque opera is not bereft of interest on account of its music being naturally boring. There had to be something within this music that excited audiences or else no one would think to preserve it. But what was it about these operas that were so incredible that they became at least as integral to their era as movies are to ours? I've heard estimates that in the early part of the eighteenth century, there were 18,000 operas written, and those were only the ones based on librettos by a single poet named Metastasio! Why was Baroque opera such a craze for no less than a hundred years? What are we not hearing?

You can only guess as to the answer, but I think it should be fairly obvious. What's missing from Baroque Opera is everything missing from our performances of every era of music before and since, only even more. In our finally ending era of Urtext, critical editions, authentic performance, and comme e scritto, we have lots sight of music's most fundamental aim - to give pleasure. We can follow the text of the composers as closely as we want. But if the results are dull, no amount of hiding behind the composer’s markings will sell more tickets.


(It's now more than half a century after Nikolaus Harnoncourt became the leader of the authentic performance revolution. They used to seem completely revolutionary, his performances now seem a near-ideal marriage of tradition and revolution. Nowhere more so than in Bach.)

Opera companies, even court ones, were never so firmly established as they have been since the age of conductors like Mahler and Toscanini. The era was one of makeshift performances, recomposed for each singer's abilities, each concert space, each available instrumentation, and each audience proclivity. Singers were expected to interpret with the score as a blueprint, but not as the Holy Writ. Over-acting was no doubt encouraged. No doubt this meant that there were at least as many awful opera performances in their day as there are awful movies in ours. But in exchange, the best performances were as of the moment, as live and as spontaneous in their way as a Coltrane solo. In the hands of the best performers, opera was probably an experience unlike nearly any we have today.

Is there any artform in which tradition dies harder than classical music? For reasons I could never understand, there are many classical music lovers who insist that this music be well-mannered, civilized, tamed. For these music-lovers, classical music is simply a refuge from the chaos and barbarity of everyday life. They listen for a tamed experience of calm, balance, and stability - and would like to hear the exactly the same performance they heard fifty years ago. If they heard Bach's B-Minor Mass in college with a chorus of 300 and a full orchestra, that will be the way they want to hear it for the rest of their lives. And if these music lovers heard the work with a chorus of 18 and just as many instruments, they will shut themselves off to any other way. Even now, early music is still a battleground between two equally closed-minded dogmas. There is no shame in subscribing to one or the other. If you don't like your music-making to come with revelations and challenges, that's your right. It's just that I could scream...and so probably would any decent composer.


(Rene Jacobs. He started out as a countertenor, he then became the HIP movement's second truly great conductor.)

It should at least be said that we've come a long way in the fifty years since the Raymond Leppard editions. Who can deny that Baroque opera is becoming less and less of a chore. One day soon, it might even be a joy. The realizations are getting more diverse and occasionally even more imaginative. Conductors like Rene Jacobs, Jordi Savall, and Marc Minkowski are able to buck accepted notions of what's 'correct' in favor of what works (and let's be fair, Harnoncourt always did that too). Soon-to-be-legendary singers like Cecilia Bartoli and Sandrine Piau (and the already legendary Lorraine Hunt Liebersen) built their careers around these virtually unknown masterpieces, endowing them with a visceral depth of expression that is sometimes unattainable in the 19th century operas we know so well.

But this is precisely the problem. I can so easily name these figures because they are exceptions to the dangerous rule of law pervading the authentic performance movement. The authentic performance cannot exist merely to force musicians to play in any given style. Authentic performance exists to make performers aware of the stunning diversity of interpretive choices available to them. The best performers of the HIP movement are always conscious of the fact that the only true authenticity is great music-making. If this means doubling the winds or halving the tempo, they have no qualms about doing so joyfully. The ultimate irony of the authentic performance movement is that it set out to restrict the way interpreters perform music, but ended up endowing our music scene with more diversity than ever. It’s just a shame that most performers choose not to exploit it.


(Cecilia Bartoli...amazing)

And this is why performances of Baroque music that are any less than good become ever more inexcusable. If you're going to perform a piece as important to the history of music as L'Incoronazione di Poppea completely uncut (which I would be surprised to read that Monteverdi ever did, particularly because he probably didn't even write the famous ending...), you had better make a performance vital enough to sustain interest over four hours of music.

What we currently think of as classical music is still very much a 19th century phenomenon. The rest of music has moved into the 21st century, but classical music - by the definition of its very name - is a preservation of the music of an era that is no longer with us. Perhaps in 2111, the English speaking world will still be hung up on The Beatles and Bob Dylan while new and vibrant musical cultures spring up Spanish and Mandarian speaking worlds that have completely new definitions of what music is.


(The only Biber (sic) that matters. Heinrich, conducted by the great Jordi Savall)

In the meantime, the past is past. Neither the 17th, 18th, 19th nor even the 20th centuries can ever be recaptured. Authenticity doesn’t matter, quality does. No amount of boredom can justify taking the tempo you think Monteverdi/Handel/Beethoven wanted. Sometimes, a traditional 19th century approach can make music from other periods even more interesting, (re: Bach, Stravinsky - it works backwards too), more often, it kills most of the things that are interesting about the music (Monteverdi, Handel, Shostakovich) of other times....or at least that’s what I think.

Blogging...

Will happen when it can in the next few days. I'm in Maine currently for 'the season.' I have planned still my top ten 'cultural stuffs' for the year (in addition to #'s 18-24), and I wanted to do a piece about someone who hates the Messiah epidemic (a sentiment almost as ubiquitous as the performances themselves). Hopefully this is all stuff I can get to before the first of the year.



In the meantime, enjoy...

The Beecham Messiah

(Worthy is the Lamb)

The Beecham Messiah is playing right now on the Baltimore Classical station, the wonderful WBJC 91.5. Every time I hear this recording, I can't escape the feeling that Sir Thomas got away with something.

It's very difficult to imagine now, but the glut of Messiahs that occur every Christmas season is nothing compared to the way it used to be. A hundred years ago, a sing-along Messiah in an Anglican cathedral with 3,000 singers in the pews was a common occurrence. England was known to the Germans as 'Das Land Ohne Musik' (the land without music), but they loved their oratorios. Whether Handel, Haydn, Mendelssohn or Elgar, the Victorians and Edwardians reserved a special enthusiasm for large-scale choral works that no other civilization has ever come close to matching.


(For Unto Us A Child Is Born)

But the Beecham Messiah is something still weirder. For this recording, Beecham got composer/conductor Sir Eugene Goossens to reorchestrate the piece for a 130 piece Mahlerian orchestra and the chorus must have easily numbered 400-strong. But what comes down to us more clearly is the ebullience with which all the players obviously threw themselves into this venture. It comes down to us almost like a statement of defiance against a prevailing fashionm, as though they knew that they would never participate in an event quite like this one ever again. Musicological scholarship was already making performances like this one entirely verboten. Gone forever would be the age when Baroque masterpieces would be rearranged for huge orchestras. Raymond Leppard was already making his editions of Baroque operas, Harnoncourt and Leonhardt were already making their first forays into authentic performance practice, and soon afterward David Munrow and Christopher Hogwood would found the Early Music Consort. The writing was on the wall, and soon the idea that Bach and Handel should be performed like later composers would disappear altogether from the concert hall.


(Thou shalt break them! and the Hallelujah Chorus - the latter must be heard to be believed. That accelerando at the end....sheesh...)

Let there be no doubt, it was a great development. Anybody who is afraid of what authentic performance practice does to music is probably afraid of music too. Rather than constrict the ways in which pieces can be performed (as so many thought it would), it diversified music-making to a level unseen since before the age of recording. But in every historical metamorphosis, something valuable always gets lost to us. And you have to wonder about just how awesome it would be to sing in those 'Big Band Messiahs' in which all of your friends knew the music and we could all show up (probably after a few glasses of sherry) to belt out the same Messiah songs that not only we grew up singing, but that our parents and grandparents did too.


(Ev'ry Valley as sung by the magnificent Jon Vickers with a 130 piece orchestra at his back. Only a great heldentenor could do it.)