Understanding Messiah, Connecting with the Messiah
At ATCECM’s inaugural music worship in 1983, a mass choir was formed under the direction of the late Dr. Richard Rhen Yang Lin (1925–2015) to sing G.F. Handel’s oratorio Messiah. Since then, the work has topped the Choir’s repertoire across forty annual worship services. This year carries a threefold significance: it marks the 10th Messiah in the history of ATCECM, the centenary of Dr. Lin’s birth, and the 10th anniversary of his passing. We are especially privileged to have a protégé of Dr. Lin and long-time associate of ATCECM, Dr. Vicky Tan Warkentien, leading the worship for this meaningful occasion.
But why return to Messiah? Why is it, as Oxford History of Western Music (2005) claims, “the first ‘classic’ in our contemporary repertoire” at all? While the music of Handel’s contemporary J.S. Bach fell into obscurity for decades before its revival, Messiah has enjoyed an unbroken history of performance since its premiere. Explanations for such historical and artistic phenomena can never be thorough, even if knowledge about this classic is abundant, and this program note simply seeks to stimulate our understanding of Messiah—and, ultimately, our personal connection with the Messiah.
Born just weeks apart in 1685 in neighboring provinces, Handel and Bach both anticipated the “mixed taste” aesthetics, first formalized in the mid-18th century. Yet their trajectories diverged sharply. Bach demonstrated his competence in works such as the English and French Suites and Italian Concerto, while spending his entire life within roughly 200 km of his birthplace. Handel, by contrast, pursued his early career in the operatic capitals of Florence and Rome, before being employed back to the north by the Elector of Hanover. When his patron became King George I of England in 1714, Handel also moved to London—far larger and more cosmopolitan than Bach’s Leipzig—and remained there for life.
By the time he composed Messiah, Handel’s stylistic palette seamlessly blended Italian elegance (for instance, the coloratura of “For Unto Us a Child Is Born”), French grandeur (such as the dotted rhythms of the Overture; a style he mastered while serving Francophile German nobility), and his native German rigor (as in the fugue “And with His Stripes We Are Healed”). Fusing these with the English choral anthem tradition, he restrained from operatic excess, aiming to communicate with both the “learned and unlearned,” and results in a work of comparatively modest scale for the High Baroque. Even the “Hallelujah” Chorus and the closing sequence of “Worthy is the Lamb–Blessing and Honour–Amen” are roughly half the length of the opening choruses in Bach’s St Matthew Passion and Mass in B minor.
When Handel died in 1759, Mozart was only three years old, yet forty years later—just two years before his own death—Mozart was commissioned for a Viennese “remake” of Messiah. Significantly, he retained Handel’s accessible proportions and resisted the contemporary London vogue for gargantuan performances featuring up to a thousand musicians.
The work’s enduring power rests as well on the libretto compiled by Charles Jennens, an aristocratic scholar and art patron who also prepared several critical editions of Shakespeare’s plays. The anonymous librettist of several other Handel oratorios, Jennens here avoided conventional character-based drama and instead builds Messiah through the juxtaposition of scripture—primarily from the Prophets, Psalms, and Revelation—giving familiar texts new meanings through their new contexts.
This theological craftsmanship is matched by musical finesse: for example, when Isaiah’s “He Shall Feed His Flock like a Shepherd” is followed by Matthew’s “Come Unto Him, All Ye That Labour and Are Heavy Laden,” Handel sets both to the same melody, but lifts the latter from Alto to the brighter Soprano and transposes it to a warmer key.
By systematically presenting the fulfillment of prophecy through Jesus Christ, Jennens affirms the necessity of divine intervention and implicitly counters the rising Deism of the Enlightenment, which sought to rely on natural reason alone.
By Handel’s bicentenary in 1885, imperial patriotism, religious triumphalism, and musical romanticism had converged to produce a colossal Messiah with 4,500 performers at London’s Crystal Palace. Its iron-and-glass structure showcased the technological advances of the Industrial Revolution, yet contemporary thinkers such as Fyodor Dostoevsky saw the Palace as a symbol of dehumanizing material progress. It was not until the early music revival and historical (or “historically informed”) performance movement of the 20th century that Handel’s original conception began to be reappraised.
Beyond performance issues, the work’s history has been entangled with elitism and colonial power structures since its 1742 premiere in Dublin—the second city of the British Empire. That first audience consisted largely of Protestant Anglo-Irish nobility and elites with strong cultural ties to London, a minority class dominant over Ireland’s Catholic majority. This social dynamic resembled a typical colonial configuration and set the tone for the work’s global dissemination.
However, a “redemptive” strand has always run alongside these social complexities: charity. The Dublin premiere was explicitly dedicated to the benefit of prisoners and the sick. Later in London, Handel established Messiah as his “special humanitarian offering” through annual charity performances for the Foundling Hospital. He further supported the institution by donating a chapel organ and bequeathing his invaluable Messiah performance materials, prompting historian Charles Burney to remark that Messiah “has fed the hungry, clothed the naked, fostered the orphan.”
If historically-informed performance practice has revitalized how we hear Messiah, historically-informed music appreciation should revitalize how we understand Messiah. Being informed of the work’s complicated past does not mean being historically imprisoned. One can “throw the baby out with the bathwater,” or choose to look beyond historical pomp to discover the core of the work that could still connect with us today. Consider the question of “to stand or not to stand” during the “Hallelujah” Chorus. One might freely stand to honor tradition or yield to social pressure; or remain seated, skeptical of the custom’s apocryphal roots—or, even if true, doubtful whether an 18th-century monarch should dictate anyone’s behavior now. Yet there remains the free choice of standing up out of genuine reverence when one feels personally moved.
Stefan Zweig understood that encounter with an artwork lies not merely in historical facts but in the personal and existential realm. In his Shining Moments of Humanity, a collection of fourteen historical vignettes, Handel’s composition of Messiah is the only musical episode. Though fictionalizing certain details, Zweig depicts a physically and mentally exhausted Handel as himself “resurrected” through the very act of setting Christ’s resurrection to music.
After the collective proclamation of the “Hallelujah” Chorus, the work’s power for personal transformation comes to fore when the libretto breaks its pattern of altering scripture to the third-person voice, retaining instead a first-person declaration from the Book of Job. Despite all his suffering, Job confesses his faith that God will ultimately resurrect him, for “I Know That My Redeemer Liveth,” which Handel sets in E Major—a radiant key elevated from the oratorio’s D-major center. It thereby realized tonally and theologically a long-range connection with the oratorio’s opening aria, “Comfort Ye My People,” so that the promise at the beginning is fulfilled structurally and spiritually near the end.
As we listen, therefore, may each of us understand Messiah more fully, and connect with the Messiah more deeply. May our contemplation extend to Job’s continuing words beyond the libretto: “I myself will see him with my own eyes—I, and not another. How my heart yearns within me!”
With gratitude and warm remembrance of Dr. Lin.
Lap Kwan KAM, 2025