The Bloke Who Flew Off The Handel

I have a vivid ‘Crocodile Dundee’ moment locked in my memory that always makes me chuckle. Picture a young bush lad who’d grown up chasing cows on the frosty hills of Yackandandah, passing through the ornate entrance of the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, London. Kind friends have taken their colonial visitor Bill to hear George Frideric Handel’s famous Messiah – the whole works, full orchestra and choir.
 
Everyone is suitably dressed for a posh occasion - after all, this was where the most famous choral work in history had first been performed in England in 1743. When it crescendoed with the rousing Hallelujah Chorus, it was reported that Billy couldn’t contain himself. Sheer exhilaration swept him up into that mighty hymn and the young Aussie jumped up on his plush theatre seat and started punching the air in response to the thundering Hallelujah’s!
 
Mind you, Yackandandah Bill was not the first to rise to the occasion. It’s said that when King George I heard it, he too could not remain seated for the powerful Chorus and rose to his feet to honour the greater King. For over 250 years concert goers have followed suit. Composer Joseph Haydn is said to have heard it and "wept like a child" exclaiming, "He is the master of us all." Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart agreed. "Handel understands effect better than any of us – when he chooses, he strikes like a thunderbolt … ”

In his day, George Handel was a rock-star in Europe. His opera music was celebrated for its brilliance and power and he influenced the works of many later composers, who admired his dramatic flair. But he was in deep trouble when he sat down to write Messiah. His company had gone bankrupt and he himself suffered what appears to have been a mild stroke, paralysing his right side.
 
So, it’s no surprise that he helped establish the ‘Fund for the Support of Decayed Musicians!” By 1741, heavily in debt following a string of musical failures, it seemed that his career was over and he may even be forced to go to debtors’ prison. In April, at his lowest ebb, the brilliant musician gave what he believed to be his final concert. Two things rescued him.
 
First, proactive people in Dublin Ireland asked him to compose a new work for a benefit performance that would help free men from the debtors’ prison. Then his friend Charles Jennens gave him a set of lyrics tracking the biblical narrative of the arrival of the Messiah. He called it “the subject that excels every other subject.”
 
This mix of a compassionate cause with retelling the life-story of Jesus, sent George’s genius ballistic.

​Totally inspired, he went without sleep for days, often leaving his meals uneaten. People would find him in tears as he composed. In Messiah’s first third he described the birth of Jesus, in the second he painted his death and in the third he celebrated his climactic  resurrection. When he completed the “Hallelujah Chorus,” he reportedly told his servant, “I did think I did see all Heaven before me, and the great God Himself seated on His throne, with His company of Angels.”
 
His furious burst of creativity saw the orchestration done on September 14, 1741. He had finalised the dazzling 260-page oratorio in just 24 days!
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There’s something inspiring about the fact that this extraordinary effort sparked by kind Irish hearts dedicated to lift up the destitute, helped to reverse George’s own misfortune. In a rousing plea written in 1963, Martin Luther King Jnr stirred civil rights campaigners in the USA to persevere by pointing out that Handel’s musical masterpiece came from the darkest period of his life.
 
Although the first performance in Dublin on April 13, 1742, was a huge success, Messiah wasn’t met with the same excitement in London the following season. Handel cancelled six scheduled performances in 1743 and it wasn’t performed there again until 1749. It was a call to help young children abandoned on the city’s streets that turned things around.
 
To assist the London Foundling Hospital’s fundraising concert, Handel offered a mix of new music as well as older pieces, including the “Hallelujah” chorus. The concert was so well received that George was invited back the next year, where he performed the entire Messiah.  From the outset, his intention was to have it performed in theatres rather than churches, aiming to reach a wider, non-religious audience and share the biblical message in a more accessible format. 
 
This unique telling of Jesus’ story became an Eastertime tradition at the "Hospital for the Maintenance and Education of Exposed and Deserted Young Children” until the 1770s. It seems right that the earnings from many early performances of one of the world’s greatest musical masterpieces went to help the poor, needy, orphaned, widowed, and sick, just as the Messiah himself did.
 
A grateful Handel presented an organ and conducted annual benefit concerts of Messiah in the hospital's chapel, as well as trusting a copy of the priceless original manuscript to this sanctuary for the unwanted. A century later, Charles Dickens, whose novels championed London street-kids, could be seen leading his family there to worship.
 
Knowing this unlikely back story to George Frideric Handel’s Messiah, I reckon if I was seated next to my mate Bill from Yackandandah in the Royal Opera House, I’d be up on my seat beside him pumping my fist in gratitude to the Messiah - the Servant King, who alone could inspire the greatest choral music ever written.
 
All around our troubled globe this Easter and again at Christmas, choirs will make concert halls, marketplaces and shopping malls reverberate with Jennens’ and Handel’s powerful music and the hopeful words of St John’s Revelation.
 
The kingdom of this world;
is become the kingdom of our Lord,
and of His Christ
and of His Christ
And He shall reign forever and ever!
 
Hallelujah, Hallelujah!’

Footnote: William Hogarth's sketch of Gin Lane depicts the plight of people on the streets of London.
The girls in the painting are children rescued from the streets and brought to the Foundling Hospital. It’s a somewhat idealised image.
I recommend you watch the world's largest virtual choir singing the Hallelujah  Chorus at the following link. Keep an eye out for  the face of a young aboriginal man singing his heart out.
​https://ldsmissionaries.com/worlds-largest-virtual-hallelujah-chorus-released-by-the-mormon-tabernacle-choir/#google_vignette