Messiah, HWV 56: Part II, no. 44. “Hallelujah” (Chorus)

Those always pop up.

So it's like in your podcast, you've used piano concerto from Handel's Messiah.

I'm going to stop you there because we have people in the green room.

Oh.

Those always pop up.

So it's like in your podcast, you've used piano concerto from Handel's Messiah.

I'm going to stop you there because we have people in the green room.

Oh.

The so-called opera of the nobility opened at a playhouse in Lincoln's inn fields, lured his singers away from him by fair means or foul, and by securing the great Farinelli obtained a trump card.

Handel, who in time parted company with Heidegger, would burn his fingers the moment his fortune seemed on the upgrade even the weather was against him what with the thames freezing over in one of the years that he obstinately returned to opera and cutting down his audiences he lost money ruinously he went into bankruptcy he wore himself out to such a degree that he had a mental and physical breakdown and had to go to the continent to aix-la-chapelle for a cure his amazing resilience of spirit and body helped him back to health and actually encouraged him to make another attempt at an operatic season with his egregious associate heidegger at the king's theatre early in seventeen thirty eight for which he composed his comedy a few months earlier his royal friend queen caroline had died and handel gave voice to his genuine grief in the great funeral anthem the ways of zion do mourn and despite his misfortunes he busied himself with a charitable enterprise the promotion of a society for the support of decayed musicians which enlisted his active sympathies for the rest of his life not even benefactions of the sort could mollify the legions of his implacable enemies his aristocratic foes to hasten his complete downfall actually hired hoodlums to tear down his posters and precipitate noisy disturbances whenever they thought trouble-making could in some way or other harm him yet a few friends stood unshakably by his side none more faithfully than the loyal mrs just when his creditors had seized him and threatened him with imprisonment the news of his tribulations gave rise to a popular movement of sympathy in 1735 he had delighted the english public by his alexander's feast composed on dryden's ode to saint cecilia produced triumphantly at the covent garden theater it had been written in twenty days as the years passed handel's composing activity seemed incredibly accelerated in the freezing winter of seventeen thirty nine he wrote to keep myself warm as rowland says the little cecilia cantata in a week the version of milton's poem under the title l'allegro il penseroso ed il mederato in just under a fortnight and the glorious concerti grossi opus six in a month distracted by his last operatic cares incidentally handel had received about this time a testimonial of public admiration in the form of a marble statue by the sculptor which a manager of musical entertainment named tyers had caused to be erected in vauxhall gardens a meeting-place of london society where handel's works made up the best-liked musical features still by the spring of seventeen forty one handel in a moment of profoundest disheartenment prepared to throw up the sponge and leave for good and all his home for the past thirty years at long last he was fed up on the struggle and announced one last concert for april eighth seventeen forty one and then when the darkness before dawn seemed blackest he sat down to create his masterpiece the most universally beloved choral work ever composed that summer charles jenyns gave handel a compilation of scriptural texts which he called messiah jenyns was a literary amateur born at gopsle hall in leicestershire and educated at balliol college oxford rich and bizarre he was vastly conceited and especially proud of the manner in which he had assembled the various biblical texts used in this case handel had been associated with him before in the oratorial saul seventeen thirty nine and in l'allegro ed il penseroso a year later as a supplement to which he had added some poor verses of his own to the lines of milton and called the product il moderato robert manson myers thinks it extraordinary that handel turned to this eccentric millionaire for his libretto of messiah jenyns was of another mind and even later wrote to an acquaintance i shall show you a collection i gave handel called messiah which i value highly he has made a fine entertainment of it though not near so good as he might and ought to have done There are some passages far unworthy of Händel, but even more unworthy of Messiah.

And deploring Händel's maggots, he added that he had with great difficulty made him correct some of the grossest faults in the composition.

Doubtless Händel, had he so chosen, could have picked his text himself.

He compiled the Book of Israel in Egypt unaided in 1738, and when a good deal earlier the Bishop of London wanted to help him with the words for the coronation anthems, he retorted, I have read my Bible very well, and I shall choose for myself.

Mr. Myers, in his encyclopedic study of Messiah, feels certain that Hendel must have controlled the choice of passages selected.

Like Bach, haydn mozart schubert and other supreme musicians handel could create with a rapidity which ignominiously shames composers of our supposedly speedy age even bearing that fact in mind the composition of messiah between saturday august twenty two seventeen forty one and monday september fourteen following remains one of the miracles of music shut up in a little room on the first floor of his home on lower brook street hanover square none can say exactly what went on handel is supposed to have uttered afterwards the words of st paul whether i was in my body or out of my body as i wrote it i know not nobody seems to have dared intrude upon this mystic concentration food was left near him but usually found untouched when the servant came to remove it he sat at his desk like a stone figure and stared into space sometimes his man stood in awe to see his master's tears drop on the music paper and mingle with the ink when he was composing he was despised a visitor is reported to have found the trembling composer sobbing with intense emotion and after the hallelujah chorus he uttered those historic words i did think i did see all heaven before me and the great god himself the autograph score with its blocks its angry erasures and general untidiness offers fierce evidence of his tumultuous feelings and flaming ecstasies possibly between april and late august of seventeen forty one he was shut up in his four walls planning the work for we have no clear idea just what he did during this period Sketches and fragments do not clear up what mystery there may be, for the composer destroyed all but some fugitive scraps.

winning

The first half is going to be a work by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a British, Afro-British composer who wrote Danse Negre, which is from his African suite, in the turn of the century, in the early 1900s.

He historically was an amazing composer who at one time, his Oratorio Hiawatha was only second in line to Handel's Messiah as the most popular and most performed work in this country at the turn of the century.

He was actually invited to Theodore Roosevelt, to the White House by Theodore Roosevelt, President Roosevelt, when he toured the US in 1901.

He's not a household name.