How old is handel messiah

With winds and brass doubling the choral parts, hundreds of amateur choristers could better hear their notes in the orchestra, and the additional instruments contributed greater weight and timbral variety than could be achieved merely by adding more strings. By the middle of the 19th century, Messiah performances occasionally reached gargantuan proportions.

Most musicians of the day understood perfectly well the disadvantages of trying to perform on such an exaggerated Romantic scale a work conceived in baroque style. The more spectacular the performance, and the more people involved in it, the better the chances that those two goals would be met.

By the end of the 19th century, some music critics began to issue very public calls for a return to an authentically Handel-styled Messiah , indicating an imminent sea-change in tastes.

Chamber-sized performances of Messiah did start to appear again in the early 20th century, though the larger ensembles still dominated. Ebenezer Prout produced a much-used and later, much-maligned edition of Messiah in that was intended to facilitate festival performances by these massed amateur choirs and orchestras.

During the 20th century, this growing interest in baroque performance practices, with the explicit goal of producing sounds that Handel himself may have recognized, fundamentally inflected performances of Messiah. But these new versions by professional early-music specialists sometimes wanted for the kind of straightforward lay humanity that had attended Messiah throughout most of its history.

Over the course of its history, the work has revealed a variety of potent strengths through each of its distinct performance traditions. The exhilarating palette of the Early Music movement is now an integral part of the Messiah soundscape. From the age of 11 to the time he was 16 or 17, Handel composed church cantatas and chamber music that, being written for a small audience, failed to garner much attention and have since been lost to time. Not surprisingly, he did not remain enrolled for long.

His passion for music would not be suppressed. During this time, he supplemented his income by teaching private music lessons in his free time, passing on what he had learned from Zachow. Though working as a violinist, it was Handel's skill on the organ and harpsichord that began to earn him attention and landed him more opportunities to perform in operas. Handel also began to compose operas, making his debut in early with Almira. The opera was instantly successful and achieved a performance run.

After composing several more popular operas, in Handel decided to try his luck in Italy. While in there, Handel composed the operas Rodrigo and Agrippina , which were produced in and respectively.

He also managed to write more than a few dramatic chamber works during this period. Enticed to experiment with a freelance music career there, in Handel left Venice and set out for London.

Within just two weeks, Handel composed Rinaldo. His most critically acclaimed work up to that date, it gained him the widespread recognition that he would maintain throughout the rest of his musical career. Handel eagerly accepted. He produced several operas with the Royal Academy of Music that, while well-liked, were not especially lucrative for the struggling academy.

In , Handel decided to make London his home permanently and became a British citizen. He also Anglicized his name at this time, to George Frideric. Under the New Royal Academy of Music, Handel produced two operas a year for the next decade, but Italian opera fell increasingly out of style in London. Handel composed two more Italian operas before finally deciding to abandon the failing genre.

Laurence Cummings, conductor of the London Handel Orchestra, told Smithsonian Magazine that the Christmas performance custom may have partly come out of necessity. Matthew Passion, most especially — and so little great sacral music written for Christmas," he said. Handel wrote the original version of Messiah in three to four weeks. Most historic accounts estimate the composer spent only 24 days writing the oratorio.

What makes this even more astounding is the sheer scale of the page score. NPR music commentator Miles Hoffman estimates there are roughly a quarter of a million notes in Messiah. At a little more than three weeks of hour days, Hoffman said that means Handel would have had to keep a continuous pace writing 15 notes a minute. All of this has led to numerous debates and countless passive-aggressive battles between sitters and standers.

Matthew Passion, there is little great sacral music written for Christmas. Some accounts estimate just 24 days. In , Mozart re-orchestrated it to give it a more modern sound. The time it took Handel to write the work is amazingly short when you consider the score is pages.