It is a gorgeous, contemplative moment in the centre of George Frideric Handel’s beloved oratorio Messiah. After a lively B section with dotted rhythms ends on the defiant phrase “He hid not his face from shame and spitting”, the audience hears once more in the two familiar drooping chords, like a head dropping in resignation, before the strings bow the sad, lonely introduction of the alto aria “He was despised”. It is a passage as beautiful as it is haunting.
Yet, if at that moment you look past the conductor and orchestra to the ranks of singers in the back row, you may catch several yawns, perhaps even an eye roll or two. For many of the professionals who sing some or all of the 20 choruses in Messiah, this could be their tenth listen of the season with perhaps their third or even fourth different orchestra. The long, brooding aria “He was despised” is for them a stark reminder of the work’s length – three hours without cuts – and the plodding da capo can elicit a feeling perhaps a little too close to the anguished subject matter. For professional choristers, Messiah is as much marathon as masterwork.
Even so, few know and – yes – love Handel’s oratorio better than the paid singers who make a tidy sum every November and December trekking across town (and sometimes nations, even continents), learning and unlearning various interpretations, erasing chicken scratch score markings while madly inserting and removing paper clips to mark various cuts, shifting between different baroque pitches depending on whether it is a “period performance”.
I know this in part because I have sung the choruses (and sometimes arias) of Messiah almost every Christmas (and at least one Easter) going back to 1999, as a countertenor. In that time I have come to learn a lot about Handel’s oratorio.
I know that Handel kindly relegated the most difficult 16th-note runs for the chorus to Part the First. I know that a slim majority of solo tenors are unable to hit the A on “dash” “Thou shalt break them,” and a slim minority of solo sopranos are able to take on the original, 4/4 version of “Rejoice greatly”.
I know that a slightly slower tempo can drastically heighten the mystery of “The people that walked in darkness”. I know that, generally speaking, most singers’ favourite number is the heart-rending “Surely he hath borne” in Part II, and I know that while it’s de rigueur to loudly claim boredom at singing the key-chain chorus “Hallelujah” to a standing (and often humming) audience, it still never fails to raise goosebumps among even the most sour, jaded professionals.
I also know that Messiah is among my favourite works to perform each year. How could this be? Why doesn’t this extreme familiarity (I have memorized the entire thing note for note) breed contempt?
The academic answer is that Messiah is Handel at his most brilliant, a well-paced blend of aria and chorus that perfectly matches the arc of the Christian story, a liturgical calendar condensed into three hours.
But the real reason I and other singers love Messiah because we truly know it like no other work. Since it has become an annual Christmas tradition, most choristers have sung it in every venue, in every iteration, with every instrumentation and in every tempo, no matter how deranged or pseudo-experimental. And in that time they have come to know the strange miracle of Messiah: after years of the good and the bad and the ugly, there is always something new, something breathtaking, to be rediscovered in Handel’s writing and Charles Jennens’s libretto.
Even in “He was despised”, and its deadly dull da capo.
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