Bickering at the birth of 'Messiah'

It wasn't only Handel who created Messiah, but the argumentative librettist Charles Jennens gets little credit, writes Liam McAuley

The collaboration between George Frideric Handel and Charles Jennens must stand as one of the most successful in the history of music, given that it produced one of the world's supreme masterpieces. Yet in the normal sense of the word, it was hardly a collaboration at all.

Jennens was a wealthy country gentleman with an estate at Gopsall in Leicestershire and a house in London. He was also a biblical and literary scholar, well versed in the classics, a collector of fine art, and an editor of Shakespeare's plays. But despite his wealth and his education at Balliol College, Oxford, he was something of an outsider. As a "non-juror", he refused to swear allegiance to the Hanoverian dynasty, rejecting its right - and therefore that of the reigning King George II - to the throne of England.

This meant he was debarred from office in politics, the law, or the church. But as a staunch Protestant, neither could he support the Jacobite cause for the restoration of the deposed Catholic Stuarts. This uneasy social position, and the sense of resentment that it engendered, may partly account for his well-documented arrogance, high-handedness and scornful tongue.

Jennens was a regular patron of Handel's operas and had been friendly with the composer for several years. In 1738 he had provided Handel with the libretto for his oratorio Saul and probably also, in the same year, Israel in Egypt - the only Handel oratorio, apart from Messiah, based entirely on Biblical texts. The first known mention of Messiah comes in a letter from Jennens to his friend Edward Holdsworth dated July 10th, 1741: "Handel says he will do nothing next Winter, but I hope I shall persuade him to set another Scripture Collection I have made for him, & perform it for his own Benefit in Passion Week. I hope he 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."

Jennens's "scripture collection" arrived with Handel at a fortuitous moment. He was 57 years old (15 years older than Jennens) and his once-glittering career as Europe's foremost composer was in a troubled period of transition. The spectacular operas in Italian at which he had excelled for more than three decades had gone out of fashion, and he had been trying his hand, with mixed success, at oratorios in English - basically operas without sets or costumes, but based on biblical stories, and incorporating the kind of grand choruses which had featured in his earlier church music.

He was burdened with debt and ill health; but on the brighter side, he had received an invitation from the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, on behalf of several charities, to come to Dublin and give a series of concerts. The prospect of a new public, a change of scene, and an escape from his worries in London seems to have galvanised him. He set to work on Messiah on August 22nd and completed it on September 14th, just 24 days in all.

This feat has often been regarded, especially in Victorian times, as evidence that the composer was in the grip of a miraculous fever of pious inspiration, but it is now generally accepted that Handel regularly composed at headlong speed.

Indeed, only days after completing Messiah, he composed the draft score for another oratorio, Samson, before setting off for Ireland at the end of October. Nonetheless, the fact that Handel had no communication with Jennens while writing the score is proof that the composer found ready inspiration in the text.

WHEN JENNENS came up to London in late November for the winter season, he was surprised and rather miffed at Handel's sudden departure, as is shown by a letter to Holdsworth: "I heard with great pleasure at my arrival in Town, that Handel had set the Oratorio of Messiah; but it was some mortification to me to hear that instead of performing it here he was gone to Ireland with it."

Meanwhile in Dublin, Handel was presenting the series of concerts that would culminate, on April 13th, 1742, in Messiah's first performance. The circumstances of that afternoon at the Musick Hall on Fishamble Street - the fever of publicity that preceded it, the packed public rehearsal, the requests that, to make more room at the "grand performance", ladies should come "without hoops" (in their skirts) and gentlemen should come without their swords, the delight of the 700-strong audience - are rightly famous. At "the particular desire of several of the Nobility and Gentry", a second performance was held on June 3rd.

The enthusiastic response of Dublin audiences to Messiah is conveyed in a memorandum by Dr Edward Synge, Bishop of Elphin: "They seem'd indeed thoroughly engag'd from one end to the other" - including, he noted, "the young & gay of both Sexes". As for the work itself, Synge wrote: "As Mr Handel in his oratorios greatly excells all other Composers I am acquainted with, so in the famous one, called The Messiah, he seems to have excell'd himself."

Around the time of his return to London in September 1742, Handel wrote to Jennens, enclosing Synge's critique, and this probably was the basis for Jennens's remark in a letter to Holdsworth the following month that "Messiah is by all accounts his masterpiece." But his view had soured by January: "His Messiah has disappointed me, being set in great hast, tho' he said he would be a year about it, & make it the best of all his Compositions. I shall put no more Sacred Words into his hands, to be thus abus'd."

By this time Jennens had probably met Handel in London and may have seen a score. He also seems to have been enraged by errors in the word-book printed for the Dublin performances: "As to the Messiah, 'tis still in his power by retouching the weak parts to make it fit for a publick performance; & I have said a great deal to him on the Subject; but he is so lazy & obstinate, that I doubt much the Effect. I have a copy, as it was printed in Ireland, full of Bulls; & if he does not print a correct one here, I shall do it my Self, & perhaps tell him a piece of my mind by way of Preface. I am a little out of humour, as you may perceive, & want to vent my Spleen for ease." One can easily imagine the hectoring to which poor Handel had been subjected.

In another letter written after hearing a performance in London that March, Jennens is a little kinder: " 'Tis after all, in the main, a fine Composition, notwithstanding some weak parts, which he was too idle & too obstinate to retouch."

But in September 1743, when Handel was recovering from a serious "Paralytick Disorder", Jennens wrote, again to Holdsworth: "I don't yet despair of making him retouch the Messiah, or at least he shall suffer for his negligence; nay I am inform'd that he has suffer'd, for he told Lord Guernsey, that a letter I wrote him about it contributed to the bringing of his last illness upon him . . ."

Two years later, in a letter dated August 30th, 1745, Jennens is still carping: "I have with great difficulty made him correct some of the grossest faults in the composition, but he retain'd his Overture obstinately, in which there are some passages far unworthy of Handel, but much more unworthy of the Messiah."

It is impossible to know exactly why Jennens was so irked at Handel's setting of Messiah. His irritation clearly extended beyond omissions and errors in the Dublin wordbook to include the musical treatment of the text, and even the work's overture. At the root of it is his enduring pique that Handel dashed off the work so quickly, without consulting him, and then disappeared to Ireland to present it. But it is probably also fair to surmise that Handel produced something a lot less didactic, and much more dramatic, than Jennens had in mind. In short, he added the human dimension which makes the work so appealing.

But while the communicative power of the music justifies the common appellation "Handel's Messiah", it is of course Jennens's Messiah as well. His skilful selection of a handful of Biblical passages to state the central truths of Christian theology "has its own right to exist as a work of art", in the words of the theologian Roger A Bullard (Messiah: The Gospel According to Handel's Oratorio, 1993). And it is Jennens's libretto that is at the heart of a central irony about Messiah: it is by far Handel's most famous work, but it is many ways untypical of its composer.

For although Handel wrote a number of oratorios based on biblical themes, Messiah is the only truly "sacred" one, with a clear religious message. Moreover, unlike the other biblical oratorios, such as Solomon, Judas Maccabeus, and Esther, it does not tell a story in conventional terms; instead, it explores, contemplates, dramatises and explains a story which the audience is assumed already to know.

MESSIAH WOULD make little sense to anyone ignorant of the life of Jesus. The singers do not represent characters in the drama, with the occasional exception of the chorus (the angelic choir in Glory to God, the jeering onlookers in He Trusted in God, earthly rulers in Let Us Break Their Bonds). There is very little direct narrative. Remarkably, the central character is not portrayed and does not speak. Given the sensitivities of Handel's day, it would have been blasphemous to depict or impersonate Christ on the theatrical stage. Such a course would probably not even have been considered by Handel, much less Jennens. Yet to a modern-day audience, this dramatic reticence, whether enforced or not, carries its own artistic power by heightening the sense of awe and mystery that pervades the work.

Its subject is not the life of Jesus, as is often supposed by people who have not heard the work - and even by some who have. Its "story" is that of the salvation of mankind through the Redeemer, the Messiah. It is conceived on a truly cosmic scale. The libretto is divided into three parts, corresponding to the three acts of an opera. Part One deals with the prophecy of God's plan to save mankind by sending the Messiah, and with the actual birth of Jesus. Part Two portrays the fulfilment of the plan through Christ's suffering, death and resurrection, and the defeat of earthly powers which try to resist the Gospel. Part Three explains the meaning of Christ's victory over death for the individual believer and ends with a hymn of thanks and worship.

Remarkably, throughout Part One and Part Two, Jennens employs texts from the Old Testament even when describing or alluding to events in the life of Christ. It is as if he is constantly saying to the audience: "You know what happened: see how it was all foretold, and is therefore part of the divine plan."

Handel's treatment of the text deploys all the characteristic elements of his unique style: the contrapuntal skill of his early training in Germany; the melodic grace and dramatic expressiveness he had absorbed during his years in Italy and displayed repeatedly during his long operatic career; the English choral splendour derived from Purcell.

Yet more impressive than any technical details is the deep humanity with which Handel dramatises the text, the sense of personal witness and testimony, the conviction carried in every bar. Although Handel was not a notably pious man, his secure religious faith shines out - notably in the sublime sincerity of: "I know that my redeemer liveth".

After Messiah, Handel and Jennens collaborated just once more - on the oratorio Belshazzar in 1745. Thereafter Handel seems to have preferred working with more amiable, if less gifted, librettists, but their mutual esteem persisted. In 1746 Jennens commissioned a portrait of the elderly Handel seated before a table on which is resting a score of Messiah. And after Handel's death on April 14th, 1759, his will was found to include the bequest of two paintings to Charles Jennens - perhaps in gratitude for providing the inspiration of the work that would ensure the immortality of his name.

Liam McAuley is an assistant editor of The Irish Times. He has sung as a chorister in more than 60 performances of Messiah. He is a member of the Lassus Scholars