August 6
The Shepherds and the Angel, 1879 (oil on copper) by Carl Bloch. Wikimedia Commons.
Handel’s Testament in Music:
Messiah at Altitude
By Thomas May
George Friederic Handel was born on February 23, 1685, in Halle, Prussia, and died on April 14, 1759, at his home on Brook Street in London. The oratorio Messiah was composed in a burst of creativity between August 27 and September 14, 1741, to a libretto by Charles Jennens, and received its premiere at the New Music Hall, Fishamble Street, in Dublin, Ireland, on April 13, 1742. In addition to a quartet of vocal soloists and chorus, the work is scored for a flexible ensemble consisting of at least two trumpets, two oboes, timpani, strings, and continuo.
In his 1910 treatise Concerning the Spiritual in Art, the pioneering painter and theorist Wassily Kandinsky posited “inner necessity” as the authentic source of the artist’s creative impulse. Great works of art, he wrote, can transmit this spiritual energy to the spectator or listener, “tuning” the soul as one might tune “the strings of a musical instrument.”
While Kandinsky championed abstraction as a vehicle for spiritual expression suited to the early modern era, few works embody that principle of “inner necessity” more fully than George Frideric Handel’s Messiah. Composed in only twenty-four days in the summer of 1741, Messiah has served as a kind of tuning fork for countless audiences, resonating across time and belief to inspire profound reflection.
For all its ubiquity, this evening marks Messiah’s first-ever appearance on the Aspen Music Festival and School’s program. Vast in scope, Handel’s oratorio charts the arc from humanity’s suspension in darkness to the fulfillment of its longing for redemption, framed through the narrative of the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus. “Most people do it at Christmas, while Handel always did it at Easter. We’re doing it in August,” says Dame Jane Glover. “Messiah tells the whole story: the beginning, the middle, and then the end, and beyond the end. So it’s relevant whenever you do it.”
Messiah is also an extraordinarily flexible work of art, capable of being adapted to a wide spectrum of performance forces, venues, and interpretations. Few conductors are more deeply acquainted with its inexhaustible potential than Glover, for whom Messiah has been a lifelong companion—ever since her first, still vividly-remembered encounter with the work at Lincoln Cathedral when she was nine years old. In her career to date, Glover has led more than 120 performances of Messiah in varying configurations and settings, “from choirs of sixteen to 450, in churches, cathedrals, and concert halls—and, now, at 8,000 feet up. And I look forward to every single time.”
Since the premiere of Rinaldo in 1711, opera had been the key to the early fame Handel achieved as a German immigrant in London. Royal and aristocratic support bolstered his standing, allowing him to flourish as both composer and impresario. But by the early 1740s, Handel was at a crossroads. The decline of Italian opera in London, coupled with financial strain and bouts of ill health, forced him to rethink his career.
By the time he composed Messiah in 1741, Handel had already written his last opera in Italian and was focusing his energies on English-language oratorios—dramatic in structure but intended for concert performance, without costumes or staging. Though many drew on Biblical texts and moral themes, these oratorios were not liturgical works; rather, they were created for the theater, designed to engage both the public’s appetite for drama and the individual’s capacity for reflection.
During his ten-month residency in Dublin, beginning in November 1741, Handel experienced enormous success—culminating in the rapturous reception of Messiah at its world premiere just before Easter 1742. The new oratorio was praised by one reviewer for its “sublime, grand, and tender” effect on all who heard it. Yet when Handel brought Messiah to London the following year, it met with a tepid response, and was criticized for presenting sacred scripture in a theatrical context. In Georgian London, Messiah “was but indifferently relish’d,” as one of the composer’s patrons, the Earl of Shaftesbury, famously recalled.
“The opinion then was: We’ll have the word of God in a church, and we’ll have the word of the playwright in a theater—and never the twain shall meet,” Glover explains. It was only when annual benefit performances for London’s newly established Foundling Hospital began in 1750 that Messiah gained steady and widespread popularity. The association with this charity for abandoned and orphaned children helped solidify the work’s place in English musical life. Handel continued to adapt the score, tailoring it for the available soloists, and remained deeply involved in these annual revivals until his death in 1759.
Even for the Dublin premiere, Handel had adjusted parts of his still unperformed score, shaping it around the strengths of the cast at hand. This practice of reworking a composition reflects a view of music as contingent on circumstance. Handel may even have expected the piece “to go out of date after a few years,” Glover notes. As an example of the era’s attitude toward musical mutability, she cites Mozart’s re-orchestration of Messiah in 1789 to modernize the work for a Viennese audience.
Yet Messiah not only lies at the heart of the Western classical tradition; it helped establish the very concept of a musical canon—a repertoire of indispensable works to which we return again and again in performance. Handel himself would have been astonished by the afterlife of his creation. Messiah, writes Glover in her splendid 2018 book Handel in London: The Making of a Genius, has changed “the whole nature of music-making and, to an extent, also that of concert-going”—in the process “uplifting countless millions of performers and listeners.” She adds: “Even for the confident, resilient, and optimistic Handel,” such an outcome “would have been utterly unimaginable.”
All the more so given how much of a gamble Messiah was—something its distinctly unenthusiastic reception during the first London performances made painfully clear. The idea for the oratorio came from Charles Jennens, a wealthy member of the gentry and devout Anglican known as a literary scholar, art collector, and staunch traditionalist. A “Nonjuror” who refused to swear allegiance to the Hanoverian monarchy, Jennens had something of a political and religious outsider status in Enlightenment London. He was also an ardent admirer of Handel, with whom he had first collaborated to great success on the 1738 oratorio Saul.
For Messiah, Jennens proposed an unconventional concept: a musical meditation on the divine mystery of Christ’s role as Redeemer, told entirely through selected passages from Scripture (primarily the King James Bible, with a few drawn from the Book of Common Prayer). “We’re so familiar with the libretto now that it’s tempting to take it for granted,” Glover observes. Much as we already know the outcome of a favorite novel or film we repeatedly enjoy, “we know what happens in Messiah, because everybody does it again and again. But it was Jennens who chose these texts to tell these stories, with the brilliance of an academic poet and also of a dramatist. We should never take that for granted. He was the best librettist for Handel.”
Through his dramaturgically astute gathering and arrangement of scriptural excerpts, Jennens shaped a libretto whose technique of juxtaposition and implied narrative anticipates the collage aesthetic later embraced by directors like Peter Sellars. Rather than dramatize a single Biblical episode in a linear narrative, Jennens suggests the universal—even cosmological—significance of the story through indirect narration. Its central figure—Christ—is never personified but only evoked through prophecy, reflection, and collective response. This absence of obvious dramatis personae allows the audience to inhabit the narrative from within. “Both the narrative and the reflective are maintained at the same time with absolutely no loss of momentum, even when events are frozen,” writes Glover.
Jennens divides the libretto into three acts—he calls them “parts”—much like the organization of a Baroque opera. Part One centers around prophecy and the Nativity of Jesus, culminating in a choral outpouring of praise at his birth and meditations on the peace and hope it brings. This is the part of Messiah that is most closely tied to the Christmas season.
Part Two presents a taut version of the Passion story, at the heart of which comes the longest aria in the oratorio, “He was despised.” This part is “where humanity at its ugliest,” notes Glover, but the story turns toward hope at “Lift up your heads,” ascending from the abyss “until we see the trumpets of the ‘Hallelujah’ on the horizon.” The glory Handel depicts so indelibly here is often mistakenly associated with the moment of Christ’s resurrection, but it actually celebrates the triumph of divine kingship and the fulfillment of redemption.
“I’ve found that often people think it’s over at this point—but far from it,” Glover says. Handel has prepared us for the final ascent that occurs in Part Three, which will complete our journey out of the darkness where the Overture began. It’s a spiritual trajectory that anticipates the redemptive arcs of Beethoven’s Fifth and Ninth Symphonies—Beethoven being a profound admirer of his predecessor. Handel reserves the trumpet’s timbre for moments of heightened revelation: it first announces the angelic proclamation in the Nativity scene, underscores the exaltation of the Hallelujah Chorus, and returns as a sign of resurrection and transfiguration in “The trumpet shall sound.”
“I know that my Redeemer liveth,” another pivotal number, is “such a personal statement for Handel, radiant with Christian belief,” according to Glover. That “the affirmative rising fourth in the opening phrase” is an inversion of the descending fourth in “Comfort Ye” at the beginning of the piece may not have been a conscious design, she observes. Yet such examples of “symmetry in the overall structure,” for Glover, “offer compelling insight into Handel’s own faith.” As Messiah’s capstone, Handel provides “the finest choral Amen ever written—tranquil and reverential at its beginning, and building through ingenious controlled counterpoint to a thrilling climax.” — © Thomas May
Jennifer Robinson, a twenty-two-year-old soprano, is thrilled to be joining the AMFS roster for the 2025 year. Jennifer has recently gained recognition from the Opera Index Foundation, receiving an Emerging Artist Award and a generous sponsorship for extended studies in France this upcoming year. Her voice, praised for its tone and emotional depth, has been described as a true artist’s instrument capable of conveying extensive emotion and nuance. Her repertoire is wide-ranging and versatile. Jennifer Robinson is a 2025 recipient of the New Horizons Fellowship funded by Kay and Matthew Bucksbaum.
Ashlyn Brown, Fleming Artist, sings Dorabella (Così fan Tutte) and the alto solos in Handel’s Messiah. A lyric mezzo-soprano, Ashlyn recently joined Palm Beach Opera as a Young Artist. There she sang Stéphano (Roméo et Juliette) and Flora (La traviata), and covered Cherubino (Le nozze di Figaro). Last summer Ashlyn made her mainstage professional debut in Der Rosenkavalier and The Righteous at Santa Fe Opera. Prior engagements include apprenticeships with Santa Fe Opera, Palm Beach Opera, and Sarasota Opera. Among her recent achievements is a win at the 2024 Florida District auditions of the Metropolitan Opera’s Laffont Competition. Brown’s fellowship at AMFS is supported by the Gordon and Lillian Hardy Scholarship and by Joy and Chris Dinsdale.
In the 2024–25 season Korean tenor Jonghyun Park returned to the Metropolitan Opera for his second year in the Lindemann Young Artist Development Program, singing the Sergeant in Il barbiere di Siviglia and the First Prisoner in Fidelio while covering the role of Jaquino. He also sang the roles of the Shepherd and the Sailor in a concert production of Tristan und Isolde with the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin. He made his Met debut in the 2023–24 season as the First Guard in The Magic Flute and covered the role of Tybalt in Roméo et Juliette. This summer Jonghyun Park is the recipient of an Aspen Opera Center Fellowship in honor of Asadour Santourian, given by Mrs. Mercedes T. Bass.
Bass-baritone Jared Werlein of California is a recipient of the American Opera Foundation scholarship, which allowed him to join Deutsche Oper Berlin this past season. While there he performed in over a dozen supporting roles including Harasta in The Cunning Little Vixen, Zuniga in Carmen, and the Mandarin in Turandot. He also made his Korean debut with the Korean National Opera as Ashby in La fanciulla del West. Mr. Werlein has attended several young artist programs including Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, where he covered the roles of Don Basilio in Il barbiere di Siviglia and Achilla in Julius Caesar. Jared Werlein is a 2025 recipient of the Wall Family Foundation Fellowship.
The Music of the Baroque Chorus was founded in 1972 by conductor, organist, and voice teacher Thomas S. Wikman at Chicago’s Church of St. Paul and the Redeemer, where he served as choirmaster. From these early church choir roots, the ensemble grew into one of the leading ensembles devoted to music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the country, drawing particular praise for its performances of the major choral works of J. S. Bach, Handel, Mozart, and Haydn. Since Dame Jane Glover was named music director in 2002 following Wikman’s retirement and Andrew Megill was appointed chorus director in 2022, the Music of the Baroque Chorus has reached even greater artistic heights. Available recordings include Handel’s Jephtha (Reference Recordings), recorded live in 2022; three of the four live recordings in the ensemble’s planned “Bach’s Set”—Bach’s St. John Passion (2024), St. Matthew Passion (2023), and Mass in B Minor (2019); Handel’s Messiah (2021); and On This Night, a live recording of Music of the Baroque’s 2017 Holiday Brass & Choral Concert directed by William Jon Gray. For complete information about Music of the Baroque, visit www.baroque.org.
Acclaimed British conductor Jane Glover, named dame commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2021 New Year’s Honours, is music director of Chicago’s Music of the Baroque and principal guest conductor of the Fort Worth Symphony. Recent and future engagements include the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, Helsinki Philharmonic, Florence’s Maggio Musicale, and Camerata Salzburg, as well as the symphonies of Chicago, Houston, San Francisco, Cincinnati, and Baltimore. Recent opera productions include The Magic Flute at the Metropolitan Opera, the Houston Grand Opera, and the Aspen Music Festival; Xerxes with the Detroit Opera; Albert Herring at both Minnesota Opera and Chicago Opera Theater; Don Giovanni with the Houston Grand Opera and Cincinnati Opera; and the North American premiere of Ferdinando Paër’s Leonora with Chicago Opera Theater. Jane Glover’s discography includes a series of Mozart and Haydn symphonies with the London Mozart Players, as well as recordings of Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Britten, and Walton with the London Philharmonic, the Royal Philharmonic, and the BBC Singers. She is the author of the critically acclaimed books Mozart’s Women, Handel in London, and Mozart in Italy. In 2020 she was awarded the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Gamechanger Award for her work in breaking new ground for female conductors.
