The Messiah
An aesthetic essay on Händel's masterwork.
Händel is, for the English, the aesthetic composer par excellence. Whether or not, as a German, he can take on Bach for this title absolutely is another question, but as a devotee of JS Bach I maintain his supremacy. But his fellow Lutheran who wrote for the King of England attained a rare mastery of the aesthetic, employing it rightly in service of the deep mysteries contained in the words he set to music.
The Messiah is an epic oratorio comprised of three parts, consisting of between 9 and 19 scenes which take the hearer through the life of Christ, beginning with the prophecies concerning Him which are found in the books of the Prophets. Händel mostly takes these scenes from the Book of Isaiah. Part 2 takes us through the life and ministry of Christ, and contains words from the Gospels, more from Isaiah, and the Psalms. Finally, Part 3 begins with a refrain from Job’s final speech, before moving into a glorious image of the beatific vision with scenes taken from the Gospels, Epistles, and the Book of Revelation.
Before I get into discussing the genius of Händel’s aesthetic treatment of these texts, it is necessary first to observe with admiration with what wisdom these texts are selected and presented. The selections from Scripture are sewn together in such a way that the whole becomes one of the greatest sermons you will ever hear, an exposition of the Word of God, as each scene in the Oratorio interprets the other scenes, and as a result, the hearer is taught of Christ and the prophesies of Him are explained and clarified. But, and here is the genius, the prophesies are not actually explained in the way one might think of it. Nowhere do we hear a scene in which the vocalist sings us an expository sermon on the preceding text from the Prophets or Apostles. Rather, each scene follows the other in such a way that the words gradually build an image, or an icon, of who Christ is and what He came to do and say.
Händel ignites the imagination and puts it to the task of contemplating the Word of God, and through music the mind is enabled to see things which it would not otherwise through hearing the Word read, or reading the Word privately. These both are, of course, divinely commanded, but in Messiah we are treated to an incredible vision of the unique power of music in the contemplation of the holy mysteries. Each scene is just that, a mystery. It is as if Händel prefaced his work with the words of the Apostle, ‘I tell you a mystery’1. Händel tells us 49 mysteries, or rather, Händel enables us to approach rightly 49 mysteries which he has selected from Scripture. A proper enjoyment of Messiah can only come from listening to the whole thing, from beginning to end, and letting the words have their effect, delivered as they are through the medium of music, as we will discuss in a moment.
Händel also understands the right approach to the Old Testament. He knows that saying of Christ ‘[the Law and the Prophets] are those that testify of Me’, and he understands the Apostolic preaching of the Law and the Prophets. Before the Lord blessed us with His Holy Gospel in written form, His church heard the preaching of the Gospel solely from the Old Testament books, and understood the prophecies as fulfilled in Christ. To see this, read the Book of Acts, and the sermons of the very early Fathers. And so the wisdom in Händel’s presentation of the Gospel in his oratorio stands upon this Apostolic tradition, against the heresies of the Marcionites who see no meaningful continuity between the Old and New Testaments. Händel almost exclusively (except for the scenes taken from the Gospels, Epistles, and Revelation as aforementioned) invites the hearer to meditate upon the prophecies of the Old Testament, from which texts the Apostles declared unto the world that our Redeemer liveth. It is in the context of the Prophets that we then hear the proclamation of the Apostles, and the result is not only a full and rich and deep and long sermon on the central message of Scripture, but one which is absolutely musical in every sense.
This brings me to the aesthetic quality of Händel’s work. It is, in a phrase, absolutely beautiful. In our trite modern world, we might remark that one particular album of 12-15 songs is ‘unskippable’; every track hits the spot for us when we listen. An analogy can be drawn between this and the aesthetic quality of Händel’s Messiah, which in the same terms could be described as an unskippable album of 50 tracks, beginning with the one of the greatest Sinfonie you will ever hear, and proceeding through 49 further segments of divinely inspired artistry before concluding with the breathtaking refrain from Revelation 5:12. Before I go on, I would like to recommend that if you are listening to it as you read this (which I recommend you do, as I am listening to it as I write this), listen to the recording by the Gabrieli Consort and Players. It is the greatest performance of the greatest English oratorio, full of the liveliness and vigour of the lively and vigorous scenes, while remaining perfectly sensitive to the scenes of grief and anguish as the hearer follows Christ to the cross and beyond.
Firstly, a few words about the aesthetic in general. As an object of inquiry, the aesthetic has been a prominent category in philosophy2 for roughly the last 200 years, but philosophers have been thinking about the distinction between the appearance of things and whatever the reality of things may be, which is beyond the appearance, for a very long time prior. The aesthetic, then, generally means that which is concerned with appearance and interaction with said appearances, from which we form ideas. From an aesthetic perspective, beauty has to do with appearances, and our sensation of them. Beauty is not considered a sort of objective property of things, such that you could say that this landscape has in itself the quality of the beautiful, or that wildflower. Rather the beautiful is your particular interaction and relation to the landscape or the flower, aesthetically. Much can be said about life from an aesthetic perspective. Giving thought to the ways in which life is a fluid motion of sensations and interactions which we navigate by ideas, is an inexhaustible source of contemplation to which many modern philosophers have given much thought. Now, I think that what we might call the aesthetic can be called a quality of the musical in a certain sense, without having to deny that the beautiful is a kind of objective property. Whether it is in things, or whether things merely participate in it to various extents, is another question. I think an answer to that question is answered by Händel, in his particular expression of the aesthetics of the musical, but I won’t explicitly discuss that.
The musical can be generally described as the harmonious, the pleasantly ordered, that which pleases the soul by its order and harmony and prompts deep reflections on these qualities. These are all aesthetic considerations. Metaphysically, the musical (I believe) has to do with the divine order of the cosmos, and the musical is therefore a quality of all things, not simply the aesthetic relation of sound to our senses. But it remains true that the aesthetic is an aspect of the musical. Let us call the aesthetic in this context the prosopon3 of the musical. The prosopon contains, as mentioned, much food for thought. The appearance affects us directly. In musical terms, the prosopon has the immediate effect of either attraction or repulsion. When you hear a piece of music that you immediately dislike, or when you hear a piece of music that immediately captivates you and holds you fast, that is your interaction with the prosopon; the aesthetic relation of your senses to the music.
Aesthetically, it is ambiguous whether or not the musical is a property of all music as such, in which case your aesthetic relation to the music does not affect whether it is musical. There are good reasons for suggesting this, because the musical is then not simply a matter of our own personal reaction, and there is a distinction between the prosopon as dictated by the musical, and our interpretation of the piece as (in our opinion) musical or not given our reaction to its prosopon. On the other hand, it is plausible that the musical is solely a category that lies in our own relation to the piece, and it is only ever musical or not in our opinion, based on our own reaction to encountering the prosopon and the ideas we form about it.4 I take the former to be true, and this leads me into discussing the aesthetic aspect of Messiah, and we will see that Messiah in fact delivers its own doctrine of aesthetics which requires us to modify our thinking on what the musical is. Again, I will not explicitly discuss this, because I want the idea to spring for you, of itself, from deep within the art, instead of being defined by my own approach to thinking about it. I will discuss the aesthetics of the work itself, and how the musical throughout the work as a whole impacts us.
Händel shows, he does not tell. Recall what we discussed above, the selections from Scripture with which Händel sews together his magnificent magnus opus. His scenes are images, snapshots from Scripture. The simple brilliance of Messiah, which brilliance reveals itself in its simplicity to be incredibly complex, is that the musical is employed with Scripture in such a way that the contemplation of Scripture is inspired by the aesthetic, and we are invited into such contemplation by the aesthetic. Händel’s mastery of the aesthetic can be readily seen from the sheer number of people who have, over the last 200 years, heard the music and remained possessed by a lifelong adoration of it. I am by no means alone in such a great crowd of witnesses. The way Händel harnesses the aesthetic of the musical is truly astonishing.5 The way the music so deeply moves the soul to worship by the way the words of Scripture are set. This is why, by the way, the aesthetic quality of the Divine Service is incredibly important. Händel shows us that we simply cannot have ugly sacred music. And here is why.
Listen to the music closely, try to hear each word. Hear how the music rises, falls, climaxes, diminishes, dances with great vigour at one moment before being seated, deep in contemplation the next. Hear how the orchestra dances with the choir to show you the very harmony and order of God’s perfect will and love for man, which he communicates in Scripture. Hear how, after the glorious Sinfonia6 the music begins in a sombre mode, as Isaiah sings of God’s comfort for His people, the good news that her warfare is ended, and picks up into a lively chorus as Isaiah sings of the exaltation of every valley before the Lord’s coming. The music veritably shakes as the Lord promises that ‘yet but a little while, and He will shake the heavens and the earth’, and hear how the music leaps like the very flames as Isaiah sings of God’s ‘refiner’s fire’ with which ‘He shall purify the Sons of Levi’. The music dances thus as the oratorio continues through the prophesies of the virgin birth, diminishing again to sympathise with the lowliness of the Blessed Virgin, yet celebrating and adoring her for her blessedness in conceiving of the Almighty, from which the oratorio moves into the ‘good tidings’ that shall be told to Zion with a delightful dance once more. The music is lowly again with the shepherds, but rises again with the angelic chorus of ‘Glory to God in the highest’. Later, we enter into Christ’s passion, with the chorus ‘Behold the Lamb of God’, the greatest setting of the ancient Agnus Dei which first issued forth from the lips of John the Baptist, and we weep with the vocalist as she sings of Our Lord despised, rejected. But the music immediately leaps again, yet not into joy, but into the profoundest sense of our own sinfulness and despair over transgressions, led to weeping over the innocent and holy suffering of the Lamb of God as we hear those aweful words ‘for surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows, yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted’. We later hear the glorious Hallelujah chorus which concludes Part 2, and the fanfare which weaves its way into the music drives those precious words ‘For the Lord God omnipotent reigneth’ home with truly stunning effect. Part 2 ends with the consolation of the soul that her Lord reigns triumphant over death, before the oratorio moves on into Part 3 which describes the resurrection of the dead in Christ before finally concluding the oratorio with the grand conclusion ‘Worthy is the Lamb’ where profound joy which redeems and eucatastrophises sorrow seizes the soul and compels her to fall prostrate before her victorious Bridegroom. The feeling that arises in the soul from these scenes is something that cannot be described, certainly not aesthetically, but the aesthetic point (which by no means exhausts the meaning of the oratorio), is that this is a feeling aroused by the music, which draws the soul into a deep contemplation of the Words of Scripture. You have a physical reaction to the music, a deep emotional reaction, and an even deeper spiritual reaction. This is the effect of the whole oratorio, music takes you on a journey through the depths of despair through joyful climaxes, to the final epic joy of the Beatific Vision of God in Heaven.
I have not described all of Händel’s indescribably divine work. What I have described, I want to illustrate the aesthetic point I am trying to make, which is that the best music man has ever composed is that which firstly is fairfaced—its prosopon is beautiful to observe,7 but secondly beckons us onward, ‘further up and farther in’8 The function of the aesthetic in the musical is thus perfectly illustrated for us by Händel. All the qualities of his oratorio combine in perfection to firstly present an aesthetic piece of great worth and which causes great pleasure to hear. But this fairfacedness possessed by the work’s prosopon, leads the soul into a profound contemplation of the divine mysteries in its words, taken from Our Lord’s Holy Word. May you be blessed contemplating the aesthetics of this indefatigable work of divine artistry, and may Händel’s masterful understanding of both the aesthetic and metaphysical qualities of the musical both delight your senses and move your soul to deep contemplation of her Lord and Saviour, Christ Jesus the Lamb who takes away the sins of the world.
Sunday Evening
Lord God, Heavenly Father, there is nothing hidden from You. Even my secret thoughts You know from a distance. With You the darkness of night is like daylight. In the consciousness of my many sins and of Your all searching eye, I therefore come to You again this night, confessing my many shortcomings and faults. How far my mind wandered away from the green pastures of Your sacred Word this holy day! How feeble have been my meditations on the things that belong to my temporal and my everlasting peace! All this and more You know better than I can tell it. But You are gracious ever to forgive my sin. O Lord, I take refuge in Your fatherly goodness in Jesus' name. For His sake forgive and help me. Amen. (47)
1 Corinthians 15:51
Whether it is philosophy is debatable, but broadly speaking it inhabits that category.
The mask, or face. There is a deliberate ambiguity in whether it is a mask or a face, an ambiguity that invites the aesthetic contemplation we are discussing.
The latter seems to be the common view today, but I read Kierkegaard’s aesthetic explorations in Either/Or (for instance) as being more so the former view.
Astonishment is properly an aesthetic reaction
The Sinfonia is perhaps the prosopon of the piece as a whole, its cover art, which invites you to keep listening.
Here we may permit the subjective sense of the term ‘beauty’
To quote Aslan from Lewis’ The Last Battle