Okay, I'm a Christmas geek, so it's probably not surprising that I am also a Messiah dork. A scratchy old LP recording of Handel's oratorio with Eugene Ormandy, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir was played over and over again in our house every December. That was the beginning of my dorkdom, but it wasn't the end of it. Not by a long shot.
I'm such a huge dork that as a music major in college, I did a comparative study of various Messiah recordings then available. This was before the age of CDs, personal computers or the internet, and (as best I can recall — it's going on 40 years ago now) the cumbersome process entailed submitting a call slip to the university library's desk in exchange for a set of clunky headphones and an assigned channel at a box-like audio carrel. The desk attendant would then put the record on a turntable and you could plug in and listen away. (I offer this digression as part of the historical record for those too young to remember that primitive era.) :-)
Anyway ... I'm also a theatre dork (which is likewise relevant to this post), and a couple of years ago I discovered a fascinating performance on YouTube, an unusual staged production of Messiah done in Vienna in 2009 — unusual both because of its stark 21st-century setting, and because
Strictly speaking, Messiah has no plot; unlike Passion plays or Bach’s Christmas Oratorio it does not tell any particular story. The eponymous hero – the Messiah – does not appear. There is little specific information about his life, passion, death and resurrection.
Reviews were mixed — and remind me of the long-running feud between the Ancients and the Moderns that was still going strong in Handel's day: in this case, the "Ancients" are especially upset at the secular, rather existentialist slant given a beloved piece of music, while the "Moderns" have praised it for its fresh take on what has, too often, become a Christmas cliché.
It almost pains me to say it (I love early music done the old way), but I think I'm on the side of the Moderns here. As one reviewer put it,
When performed in concert halls the work can easily be reduced to a devotional and edifying solemnity, bereft of real content. But played out on stage, the scenes portray specific situations dealing with the circumstance that the world is yet to be saved.
The "plot" supplied by this staging tells the story of a family; it is rather dark, but there's plenty of ambiguity which permits the audience to draw its own conclusions as to meaning. In my opinion, it's not an unqualified success, but I find it oddly riveting and profoundly moving, and I've returned to it again and again. Have a look at these excerpts and see for yourself.
The first clip is from the "Nativity" section; it begins with "For Unto Us a Child is Born," but I've cued it up to start at 4:44, the so-called Pastoral Symphony (or "Pifa").
I can't end without including this clip of "Lift Up Your Heads, O Ye Gates," which to my mind nearly equals the more famous "Hallelujah Chorus" as an expression of serenely triumphant joy, given here a subtext both distressing and, ultimately, hopeful.