Sektion VII/3

Graydon Beeks, Claremont, USA

Sir George Smart’s Advice to Jenny Lind on Performing Messiah

In 1855 the composer, conductor and pianist Otto Goldschmidt (1829–1907) asked Sir George Smart (1776–1867) to provide instruction for his wife, the famed soprano Jenny Lind (1820–1887), in how to sing the soprano role in Handel’s Messiah. Smart, who was considered an expert in the “traditional way” of singing Handel’s music, took a copy of the piano/vocal score recently published by Robert Cocks and Co., and notated alterations to the soprano solo part in ink. He presented this score “To Made: Goldschmidt, with Sir George T. Smart’s Kind regards, London, Xtmas 1855.” This score is preserved in the British Library with the shelfmark K.11.e.11. Its contents have not been studied, presumably because it is not included in the library’s integrated catalogue.

This paper will examine the nature of Smart’s annotations, which include the addition of dynamics, appogiaturas and trills; indications of phrasing and breath marks; and suggestions for vocal cadenzas. It will also consider the extent to which such indications may reflect the practices of Handel’s own singers, and to what extent Smart’s conservative suggestions for ornamentation may also reflect the new image of Jenny Lind as an oratorio singer rather than an opera singer that her husband was planning to promote upon their move to England from the Continent. Finally, it will examine the question of what Smart’s annotations can reveal about the tempo employed in his own performances of Messiah.

Sektion VII/2

Florian Csizmadia, Stralsund

Zur Rezeption des Messiah im Viktorianischen Zeitalter

War die Aufführungstradition des Messiah in England eine durchgehende von Georg Friedrich Händels Lebzeiten bis ins 21. Jahrhundert, so war sie doch insbesondere im 19. Jahrhundert stark verfälscht. Im Viktorianischen Zeitalter sind dabei mehrere miteinander verbundene Themenkreise auszumachen:

In der Aufführungspraxis ist eine beispiellose Monumentalisierung (besonders im Rahmen der Londoner Handel Festivals) auszumachen, die sich zwar in Ansätzen auf die Handel Commemoration 1784 berufen konnte, nun aber Dimensionen erreicht hatte, bei denen sich die Aufführungen von Händels originaler Werkgestalt weit entfernt hatten. In diesem Zusammenhang spielen auch die dezidiert als Verbesserungen von Händels Original angesehenen Neu-Orchestrierungen (seinerzeit bekannt als additional accompaniments) eine Rolle. Besetzungszahlen sind dabei aus historischen Konzertprogrammen und Zeitungsberichten recht zuverlässig rekonstruierbar.

Der Stellenwert des Messiah als meist aufgeführtes Chorwerk des damaligen Repertoires brachte es mit sich, dass sich eine starke Institutionalisierung ausprägte: Im Sinne eines (aus heutiger Sicht problematischen oder doch zu hinterfragenden) Traditionsbewusstseins wurden Aufführungen in der Regel nicht geprobt, erhielten dadurch aber einen gleichsam rituellen oder liturgischen Charakter und galten nach zeitgenössischen Berichten gleichsam als eine Art ‚Gottesdienst-Surrogat‘ und „service in itself“ (Henry Lunn 1870). So gab es Perioden im Londoner Musikleben, in denen es täglich (!) eine Aufführung des Messiah gab, wie das Werk auch bei den Chorfestivals in der englischen Provinz die feste Konstante eines ansonsten variablen Programms war.

Eine inhaltliche Akzentverschiebung fand zudem statt, weil sich der ursprünglich von Charles Jennens und Händel intendierte theologische Aspekt zunehmend überlagerte mit einer unreflektiert auf den Messiah übertragenen Händel-Verehrung im Sinne eines Händel-Kults, in dessen Rahmen sich die Verehrung Gottes und die Händels vermischten. So wurde 1885 die Tradition, das „Halleluja“ im Stehen anzuhören, damit ‚erklärt‘, dass sich das Publikum zu Ehren von Händels „divine inspiration“ erhebe.

Auch wenn es anachronistisch erscheinen mag, so kann man konstatieren, dass auf dem Höhepunkt des britischen Imperialismus der Messiah zeitweise das Äquivalent zu den Nationalopern der anderen europäischen Nationalschulen darstellte (so bereits Hanslick 1862).

In das spätviktorianische Zeitalter fallen jedoch auch erste Anzeichen einer substanziellen Kritik an der zeitgenössischen Aufführungspraxis und Werksicht des Messiah, die zunehmend als „Handelomania“ und „Handel Fetish“ beargwöhnt wurden. Zu erwähnen sind insbesondere die musikjournalistischen Arbeiten von George Bernard Shaw: Er hat nicht nur die Defizite der zeitgenössischen Messiah-Rezeption erkannt und benannt, sondern lässt in seinen brillant formulierten Rezensionen und Essays Alternativen anklingen, die auf die noch weit in der Zukunft liegende historisch informierte Aufführungspraxis verweisen.

Sektion VII/1

Luke Howard, Provo, UT, USA

Handel’s Messiah in London and the Provinces, 1840–1857: Setting the Stage for the Handel Festivals

The establishment of the regular Handel Festivals in London, beginning with the preliminary “practice” festival in 1857, consolidated the dominant performative context for Handel’s Messiah in both the United Kingdom and the United States for the remainder of the 19^th century. While many of the earlier performance practices continued with the introduction of the Festivals, the location and intent of the Handel Festival Messiah performances fundamentally inflected both the physical experience of the musical work and attitudes about its spiritual meaning and social import.

This development represents a nexus in Messiah reception. Major Messiah performances outside of London in the first half of the 19^th century typically took place in churches or cathedrals, including the annual Three Choirs Festival. These largely amateur performances were focused on charitable fundraising and the general improvement (both spiritual and cultural) of all classes of society. In London, however, regular professional performances typically took place in the Hanover Square Rooms or, later, Exeter Hall, and were focused on maintaining an older repertoire as a living tradition. Spiritual improvement, charitable fundraising, and amateur involvement were lower priorities. And London performers simply didn’t have the same degree of access to large sacred spaces such as St. Paul’s Cathedral or Westminster Abbey in which to perform.

This paper examines these parallel and competing performance traditions – centered respectively in London and the English provinces—in the years immediately prior to the establishment of the Handel Festivals, in order to more clearly understand the way in which the Festivals altered the reputation of Messiah for the remainder of its reception history. The Handel Festival concerts ultimately relied on a synthesis of both traditions, but with significant recontextualization. The Festivals engaged amateur singers principally from areas outside of London, lending the enterprise a decidedly nationalistic flavor, but the concerts were a for-profit enterprise designed to honor the composer of Messiah rather than its subject. With even larger choruses and orchestras, in an immense performance space of remarkable engineering, the Handel Festival Messiah could aspire to the sublime in the Crystal Palace, but in the process sacrificed some of the sense of the numinous that had typically attended the work’s performances outside of London. While in one respect the Handel Festivals marked a high-point in Messiah’s public reception, it came at a cost. This paper concludes that the impact of the Handel Festivals, while granting unprecedented public exposure to the composer and his works, almost irreversibly compromised Messiah’s reputation, firmly established in earlier performance traditions outside of London, as a sacred work and an instrument of spiritual and social good.

Sektion VI/2

Colin Timms, Birmingham, UK

Words, Music and Irony in Handel

In Handel’s vocal compositions the music usually reflects the words to which it is set, and in his operas and oratorios it normally responds also to the emotional state of the character who sings it and to the dramatic situation in which the character is placed. This is not always the case, however, and the chance of one of these statements being untrue is increased if the music is based on a borrowing from another work. One of the movements in Messiah is modelled on a work of which the music had been composed to a very different text, making it hard to explain why that particular movement was borrowed. Other oratorios by Handel provide further examples of this and of a related phenomenon – music that is clearly at odds with the sentiment expressed in the words. It would be difficult to argue that such examples were casual or unintentional. It seems, on the contrary, that some examples, notably in Theodora, are quite deliberate and that, in them, Handel is consciously voicing his personal reaction to the words or interpreting them for the benefit of the audience. In these cases, his settings can properly be described as ironic. The few existing studies of irony in isolated works by Handel indicate that the subject would repay investigation. It is not suggested in this paper that the movement in Messiah is ironic, but that Handel’s use of irony in his operas and oratorios deserves more attention than it has hitherto received.

Sektion VI/1

Malcolm Bruno, Glasfryn, Cwmcarvan, UK

MESSIAS=MESSIAH 1789–1803

In preparation for Breitkopf’s new critical edition of Mozart’s orchestration of Messiah many questions have arisen in a fresh examination of the primary source material. This paper takes Mozart’s 1789 completion of van Swieten’s ‘Grundpartitur’ as a starting point and assesses the subsequent editorial processes – during the 1790s up to first publication in 1803 – and offers suggestions for a reconstruction of Mozart’s pre-edited original work.

From the start of the nineteenth century Mozart’s newly‐orchestrated Messiah provided a unique ‘orchestral’ entrée for Messiah performance in a new era, effortlessly transporting Handel’s masterpiece from the conventions of the baroque opera‐house to the symphonic stage. Messiah thereby gained access into the large-scale Anglo-German choral repertory that included Schöpfung/Creation, Elias/Elijah and eventually Bach and Brahms. The increasing acceptance of (versions of) Mozart’s orchestration as a ‘standard’ Messiah text, however, created a musical amalgam of a Handelian/Mozartean Messiah, masking unwittingly – as much as Handel’s original – the musical significance of Mozart’s work in its own right. This state of affairs came to light abruptly with Chrysander’s definitive ‘Mozart-free’ edition in 1901, the shock waves of which continued editorially into the half-century following.

But what is – or what was – Mozart’s earliest 1789‐Messias? Despite numerous widely disseminated editions of Mozart’s ‘Messiah’, this question eluded both Handel and Mozart ‘Gesamt‐Ausgabe’ editors (Chrysander, et al.), who in principal eschewed this kind of hybrid Messiah (as neither-Handel‐nor‐Mozart). Not until the NMA volume prepared by Andreas Holschneider in 1959/60 would the ‘Mozart Messiah’ receive its first critical assessment. Using the primary sources (a partial autograph score and a large portion of original performance material now in the Lobkowicz archive along with the fair copies made in the van Swieten scriptorium), the NMA edition gives a view of the work’s transformation from the wet ink of Mozart’s pen to first publication. It pays appropriate tribute, too, to the stature of the Mozart orchestration in itself, as indeed for more than a century and a half Mozart’s ‘Messiah’ had effectively been ‘The (only) Messiah’.

Though an important milestone at the time, a critical weakness of Holschneider’s scholarship may now be seen in its unintentional conflation of portions of the primary source material. From Mozart’s original orchestration completed in 1789, on to van Swieten’s significant cuts, and then, after van Swieten’s death, to Johann Adam Hiller’s final editorial revision, Mozart’s orchestration reached first publication in the 1803 Breitkopf edition. Mozart’s “Urmessias” of 1789, however, vanished in the process and has since evaded definitive description. The pre‐van Swieten primary sources in the Lobkowicz archive remain tantalisingly incomplete: original vocal and orchestral parts only existing for Parts 1 and 2 along with the autograph (Mozart’s completed Grundpartitur) for Part 3 only. Conversely no autograph score for Parts 1 and 2 exists nor any original orchestral parts for Part 3. That this state of ‘complementary incompleteness’ is historic (going back to the Lobkowicz acquisition of significant portions of the van Swieten library in 1803) is attested by contemporaneous auction details held in Nelahozeves.

Taken as a whole, van Swieten’s substantial cutting and brutal crossings-out of Mozart’s original as can be seen in Part 3, along with much further trimming in the individual parts of Parts 1 and 2, raises significant questions when considered apart from either van Swieten’s fair copy of score and parts or from Hiller’s final 1803 publication for Breitkopf. The ‘complementary incompleteness’ of the material, however, also opens up the possibility of using van Swieten’s ‘editorial praxis’ in Part 3, to analyse and then reconstruct a true Mozartean ‘Urmessias 1789’ from the original parts of Parts 1 and 2 as well as a repair of Part 3.

Sektion V/2

Stefan Walcott, Barbados

Handel’s Caribbean Messiah: The Global Handel

Handel’s Caribbean Messiah is a two-hour interpretation of the canonical Messiah by George Frideric Handel. The work features the syncretisation of folk and popular music from the Anglo, Hispanic and Franco Caribbean with the traditional oratorio of Handel.

This paper will look at the creation of the music of Handel’s Caribbean Messiah from the initial idea to performance by examining two pieces: “And he shall purify the sons of Levi” and “For unto us a child is born”. It will examine the importance of the rhythmic binary, antiphonal singing, polyrhythmic deep structure and harmonic extensions to the process of re-imagining Messiah. It will also look briefly at issues of authenticity which arise with a contemporary repositioning of a work from the Western European canon.