This is a lengthy post but worth reading if you don't know the story behind the masterpiece known as the Hallelujah Chorus and the Messiah by Handel.
The following is taken from www.messiahcd.com on the page titled Handel's Messiah.
Handel retained his sense of humor through virtually any hardship. Once, just as an oratorio of his was about to begin, several of his friends gathered to console him about the extremely sparse audience attracted to the performance. “Never mind,” Handel joked to his friends. “The music will sound the better due to the acoustics of the nearly empty hall!
Like his fellow composer Bach, Handel was also renowned as a virtuoso organist. One Sunday, after attending a worship service at a country church, Handel asked the organist if he could play a postlude. As the congregation was leaving the church, Handel played with such expertise that the people reclaimed there seats and refused to leave. The regular organist stopped him, and said that he had better not play the postlude after all if the people were ever to go home.
Audiences for Handel’s compositions were unpredictable, and, even the Church of England attacked him for what they considered his notorious practice of writing biblical dramas such as Ether and Israel in Egypt to be performed in secular theaters. His occasional commercial success soon met with financial disaster as rival opera companies competed for the ticket holders of London. He drove himself relentless to recover from one failure after another, and finally his health began to fail. By 1741 he was swimming in debt. It seemed certain he would land in debtor’s prison.
On April 8 of that year, he gave what he considered his farewell concert. Miserably discouraged, he felt forced to retire from public activities at the age of fifty-six. Then two unforeseen events converged to change his life. A wealthy friend, Charles Jensen, gave Handel a libretto based on the life of Christ, taken entirely from the bible. He also received a commission from Dublin charity to compose work for a benefit performance.
Handel set to work composing on August 22 in his little house on Brook Street in London. He grew absorbed in the work that he rarely left his room, hardly stopping to eat. Within six days part one was complete. In nine days more he had finished part two, and in another six, part three. The orchestration was completed in another two days. In all 260 pages of manuscript were filled in the remarkable short time of 24 days.
Sir Newman Flower, one of Handel’s many biographers, summed up the consensus of history: Consdering the immensity of the world, and the short time involved, it will remain, perhaps forever, the greatest feat in the whole history of music composition.” Handel’s title for the commissioned work was simply Messiah.
Handel never left his house for those three weeks. A friend who visited him as he composed found him sobbing with intense emotions. Later, as Handel groped for words to describe what he had experienced, he quoted St. Paul, saying “whether I was in the body or out of my body when I wrote it I know not”
"In a small London house on Brook Street, a servant sighs with resignation as he arranges a tray full of food he assumes will not be eaten. For more than a week, he has faithfully continued to wait on his employer, an eccentric composer, who spends hour after hour isolated in his own room. Morning, noon, and evening the servant delivers appealing meals to the composer and returns later to find the bowls and platters largely untouched.
Once again, he steels himself to go through the same routine, muttering under his breath about how oddly temperamental musicians can be. As he swings open the door to the composer’s room, the servant stops in his tracks.
The startled composer, tears streaming down his face, turns to his servant and cries out, “I did think I did see all Heaven before me, and the great God Himself.” George Frederic Handel had just finished writing a movement that would take its place in history as the Hallelujah Chorus."
Soon after this, Handel’s began to increase dramatically, and his hard-won popularity remained constant until his death. By the end of his long life, Messiah was firmly established in the standard repertoire. Its influence on the other composers would be extraordinary. When Haydn later heard Hallelujah Chorus he wept like a child, and exclaimed, “He is the master of us all!”
Handel personally conducted more than thirty performances of Messiah. Many of these concerts were benefits for the foundling hospital, of which handle was a major benefactor. The thousands of pounds that Handel’s performances of Messiahs raised for charity led one biographer to note:” Messiah as fed the hungry, clothed the naked, fostered the orphan… more than any other single musical production. In this or any country.” Another wrote, ”Perhaps the works of no other composer have so largely contributed to the relief of human suffering.”
This work has had an uncanny spiritual impact on the lives of its listeners. One writer has stated that Messiahs music and message “Has probably done more to convince thousands of man kind that there is a God about us than all the theological works ever written.”
The composer’s own assessment more than any other, may best capture his personal aspirations for his well-loved work. Following the first London performance of Messiah, Lord Kinnoul congratulated Handel on the excellent “Entertainment.” Handel replied, “My lord, I should be sorry that I only entertained them. I wish to make them better.”
The religious beliefs of the composer created the world’s most popular religious masterpiece have puzzled many musicologists. In an era when Christian musicians typically worked for local churches, this composer of secular opera and chamber and orchestral music did not fit the usual pattern. Yet he was a devout follower of Christ and widely known for his concern for others. Handel’s morals where above reproach. At church he was often on his knees, expressing by his looks and gesticulations the utmost fervor of devotion.
Yet the very persistence that kept Handel going through the worst of times made him obstinate and temperamental when he encountered opposition. A conformed bachelor, Handel was reputed to swear in several languages when moved to wrath (usually by singers). At the same time, he was equally quick to admit his own fault and apologize.
Handel was known for his modest and strait forward opinion of himself and his talent. When a friend unwittingly commented on the dreariness of some music he had heard at the Vauxhall gardens, Handel rejoined, “You are right, sir, it is pretty poor stuff. I thought so myself when I wrote it.”
His friend Sir John Hawkins recorded that Handel “Through out this life manifested a deep sense of religion. In conversations he would frequently declare the pleasure in setting the scriptures to music, and how contemplating the many sublime passages in the Psalms had contributed to his edification.” In one of his few surviving letters, Handel comforts his brother-in-law on the death of Handel’s mother: “It pleased the almighty, to who’s Holy Will I submit myself with Christian submissions.”
Known universally for his generosity and concern for those who suffered, Handel donated freely to charities even in times when he faced personal financial ruin. He was relentless optimist whose faith in God sustained him through every difficulty. Raised as a sincere Lutheran, he harbored no sectarian animosities and steered clear of denominational disagreements. Once, defending himself before a quarrelsome archbishop, Handel simply replied, “I have read my Bible very well, and will choose for myself.”
A few days before Handel died, he expressed his desire to die on Good Friday, “in the hopes of meeting his good God, his sweet Lord and Savior, on the day of his Resurrection.” He lived until the morning of Good Saturday, April 14, 1759. His death came only eight days after his final performance, at which he had conducted his masterpiece, Messiah.
His close friend James Smyth wrote, “He died as he lived—a good Christian, with a true sense of his duty to God and to man, and in perfect charity with all the world.” Handel was buried in Westminster Abbey, with over three thousand in attendance at his funeral. A statue erected there shows him holding the manuscript for the solo that opens part three of Mesiah, “I know than my Redeemer liveth.”
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