Messiah: The Composition and Afterlife of Handel's Masterpiece by Jonathan Keates (review)

Of the making many books about Messiah there is no end. (I admit my own participation.) According to the promotional material, this is 'the story of the composition, first performances and afterlife of one of the best-loved and most widely-performed works in the history of music', in the Landmark Library series, 'a testament to the achievements of mankind from the late stone age to the present day'. The author is engagingly devoted to his subject, and the intended place of this book in the literature about Messiah is summed up by a recommendation on the dust jacket as 'a book that both the general reader and scholar will treasure'. Of moderate length, requiring no previous knowledge of the subject (unless that is assumed by the images of musical notation), handsomely produced and beautifully illustrated, this is in the style set by Julian Herbage's Messiah (London: Max Parrish, 1948 [The World of Music, 1]), a book also still worth treasuring. Small-format pages and large font size are at odds (for the general reader) with some of the author's long and complex sentences. There is a particularly breathless effect in the attempt to cover the history of the oratorio genre and thirty years of Handel's career in the seven text pages of Chapter 2; the compression of the descriptions of Roubiliac's images of Handel (p. 141) and the instrumentation of Messiah (pp. 112–13) do not make easy reading. Some of the illustrations seem to be there for the sake of the picture: one may wonder about the relevance of the Elegy from Saul to the surrounding text, or Ricci's picture of an opera rehearsal ca.1709 as an adjunct to a synopsis of the Messiah libretto. Reproductions of some engravings hint at 'penny plain, twopence coloured', and there is a discord about the title page to Walsh's edition of Alcina, which is correctly captioned to the publication in 1735, but the edition illustrated is a later one and Walsh's original imprint is covered by a bookseller's label from the 1850s.

To tell the story of the various complex aspects to Messiah within the given word-span is a very difficult (possibly impossible) task: even the factual pitfalls are frequent and sometimes deep. Keates correctly refers to the 'mythistorica Handeliana' surrounding Messiah, and with some of the well-known tales an author has to make choices: whether to include, include with a caution, or exclude without explanation. Nor are the 'mythistorica' elements purely the product of later ages. I would have been more cautious over (for example) the description of Handel's social life (p. 19), the evidence for a social relationship between Handel and Swift ca. 1714, or the hint that the visit to Dublin was initiated by an invitation from the Lord Lieutenant (it was more likely to have come from the manager of the new music room). The famous anecdote about Dr Delany's response to Mrs Cibber's singing is plausible, but it would have been useful to remind the reader that at the time of Handel's Dublin performances, Delaney had not yet married Mary Granville/Pendarves. The statement that 'Messiah, like much else that he [Handel] wrote, was part of an ongoing commercial venture' (p. 46) seems to be belied by Handel's actions: he probably never intended to perform it as part of his regular concert series in Dublin (p. 55), and he needed to be cautious about the time and manner of its introduction to London. I would regard the explanation of Handel's career during the 1730s to lie in the circumstances of operatic and theatrical politics among performers and managers, to which the taste of 'the Town' (?London or Westminster) was rather tangential.

The strongest sections of the book are on the subjects of Charles Jennens and the text of...