The most iconic work of the English choral tradition, and the most famous, with its rousing 'Hallelujah' chorus, is surely Handel’s Messiah (1741), the subject of Jonathan Keates’s new and excellent brief study ... Keates, a distinguished biographer of Handel, sets out to examine the origin and afterlife of the piece, and to establish what an eighteenth-century critic might have called its 'sublimity.' Keates celebrates its 'emotional range, the ways in which it embraces the multiplicity of existence, the directness of its engagement with our longing, our fears, our sorrows, our ecstasy and exaltation, giv[ing] the whole achievement an incomparable universality.' Keates recognizes that Handel was as spiritual a composer as J.S. Bach, his Messiah as rooted in that spirituality as Bach’s Passions were in his; Keates will have no truck with the tradition that 'pigeonhole[s] Handel as a cynical opportunist, a shrewd entertainer with an eye on the market.'
Biographer Jonathan Keates enlightens readers to this fact and so much more in his new work, 'Messiah': The Composition and Afterlife of Handel’s Masterpiece ...a quick, delightful read for any season. The book is amply illustrated with portraits and presentations of historic letters, scores, settings and concert brochures. Mr. Keates deftly introduces the reader to a George Frideric Handel with whom the reader may not be familiar, a cosmopolitan man 'who in his younger days once fought a duel with a fellow composer' ... Mr. Keates portrays the man as opposed to the myth behind the popular masterpiece.
Keates would like his readers to believe that although the 'Messiah,' and indeed Handel, was never entirely forgotten — particularly in his adopted home, England — his immense output, and especially his operas, suffered neglect ... Keates constructs a history of two centuries of misuse and misinterpretation from which we have now, thankfully, been rescued ... This makes for a neat and tidy story, but it is based on a prejudice. Keates is all too persuaded by the objective correctness of the 20th-century effort to define original, authentic Baroque performance practices ... Jonathan Keates’s short book is designed to give the general reader a succinct introduction to the 'Messiah' and to illuminate why it has retained its hold over us.
This richly illustrated book is like a lively performance of the piece itself. At 130 pages, it is not a word too long and manages to capture the essence of Handel’s magic. Mr. Keates celebrates the 'emotional range' and 'incomparable universality' of 'Messiah' and writes of 'the directness of its engagement with our longing, our fears, our sorrows, our ecstasy and exaltation' ... In the book’s only weakness, Mr. Keates approaches Bach defensively on Handel’s behalf in an attempt to forestall criticism of his man as the lesser artist ... But reasonable minds can differ, and in Mr. Keates Handel has an able champion. He has dusted off 'Messiah' and reminded us of all it can be.
Keates is an enthusiastic, serious and careful writer, and this delightful book, though designed up to the hilt, contains a lot to muse over. I shake my head over the absence of music examples – the picturesque reproductions of Handel’s manuscripts are barely readable. Still, the author clearly knows what he is talking about, and illuminates what we thought we knew. No readers will get beyond the fifth page without finding themselves humming a very familiar tune or two.
While Keates’s book lacks the detail of Michael Marissen’s Tainted Glory in Handel’s Messiah, it is nevertheless an illuminating, succinct introduction to Handel’s best-known work.
