Why Handels Messiah Endures
By Jennifer Marshall
Texas Insider Report: WASHINGTON D.C. It is 270 years since
George Frideric Handel composed his classic Messiah for Lent yet crowds continue to gather and listen once again for hours.
Handel intended the oratorio for and it was first performed just after Easter 1742. Yet what explains the enduring attraction of Handels Messiah?
Its one of the most famous and widely shared pieces of music in history.
Todays audiences typically reserve that kind of time for a
Lady Gaga concert or the opening of a new
Mission: Impossible movie. But over the centuries public performances of the masterwork became a rite of Christmas.
For one thing the sheer beauty of the music. For another the incredible skill of the composer. In one of historys most astounding creative feats Handel produced the 260-page score in just 24 days.
Ludwig van Beethoven - whose Ninth Symphonys final movement (Ode to Joy) rivals the Hallelujah Chorus of Messiah for widespread emotional appeal - is said to have revered Handel as the greatest of composers.
The lasting popularity also owes to the works moving text drawn from the Bible. From prophecy to incarnation to death and resurrection the life of
Jesus Christ has been called the greatest story ever told. Indeed
Leland Ryken and other Christian literary scholars have noted how the narrative qualities of biblical revelation are finely tuned to the way were made as humans.
Together the music and subject of Handels Messiah reach the sublime status of great art that speaks to what is permanent in the human soul as the 19th-century poet and cultural critic
Matthew Arnold wrote. No wonder we love to hear it at Christmas the time of year that calls us back to the permanent things.
Master artists and authors create a unity and profoundness of moral impression Arnold wrote which constitutes the grandeur of their works and which makes them immortal.
That kind of moral impression is grounded in the conviction that human nature persists truth exists and life has meaning and purpose. Such courage of conviction has
been waning for some time.
Todays radical postmodernist academics teach young people there is no universal human condition or transcendent morality. Reality is culturally determined they say a mere social construct erected by personal background and identity. This relativism leaves some philosophers skeptical about the nature of rationality and truth altogether.
Wise voices across generations have urged a perennial return to classic works to gain perspective on our age and experience.
Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes C.S. Lewis explained. We need to read old books he said to correct the blind spots of our day.
Lewis didnt idealize the past though. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes he wrote. Two heads are better than one not because either is infallible but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction.
The well-aged insights of great works of art literature and music help us sift todays culture as Arnold explained to identify what will cultivate what is best and noblest in us as human beings.
Plenty of entertainment will lose its popularity long before the end of the century - if not the decade. But great works endure because they appeal to universal longings of the human spirit.
Nearly three centuries since its debut crowds continue to gather for Handels Messiah because the stunning crescendos and familiar choruses draw us toward answers to the
hopes and fears of all the years.
Jennifer Marshall is Director of Domestic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation where she oversees research in areas that determine the character of our culture: education marriage family religion & civil society.
