Canter Bridge

Why is it at once surprising and unsurprising to learn that George Frideric Handel wrote Messiah in one of the lowest moments of his life. England’s debtors’ prisons beckoned and all seemed bleak.

This is but one of the details that Patrick Kavanaugh’s lovingly written introduction to the Handel-Jennens libretto of this most majestic and enduring musical, human, and spiritual accomplishment brings to light. I am listening to yet another rendition of Messiah as I tap out these observations. Solti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s work is adorned in this case by Kiri te Kanawa, Anne Gjevang, Keith Lewis, and Gwynne Howell. But this is just one of a dozen offerings of Messiah that I might have chosen from Apple’s iTunes offerings on his cold Connecticut evening, proof perhaps that civilization has not ended just yet.

As the author of Spiritual Lives of the Great Composers and Spiritual Moments of the Great Composers, Kavanaugh treats seriously Handel’s religious motivation as indeed the overwhelming spiritual experience of writing Messiah over a period of weeks that the composer himself described in the moment.

We are reminded that King George II of England spontaneously rose when ‘the first notes of the triumphant “Hallelujah Chorus” rang out …” Audiences have been rising ever since.

Hearts too, accompanied sometimes in the life of this listener and of many others by irresistible tears before the sheer force of such a beautiful telling of what Christians believe to be the largest and best story of history.