Handel, the oratorio, and music for the multitudes

The man who came in from the cold

Georg Friedrich Handel was born in 1685 in Halle, the same German town where Bach was born that same year. The coincidence is irresistible: two giants of the Baroque, born in the same country, in the same year, who never met in person. Yet their lives followed radically different paths, and that difference says a great deal about the two possible models for a musician in the eighteenth century.

Bach spent almost his entire life in Germany, serving local churches and courts, composing for communities that knew him, in a language that was his own. Handel, by contrast, was a man of the world. He studied in Hamburg, spent several years in Italy — where he absorbed Italian musical theatre with a voracity that would mark him forever — worked at the court of Hanover, and eventually settled in London, where he would spend most of his adult life and where he found the stage his ambition required: a wealthy, cosmopolitan city hungry for spectacle.

That difference in scale is fundamental. Bach thought in voices and counterpoint; Handel thought in packed theatres, in audiences who had never studied music, in the effect a choir of a hundred voices produces in the body before it reaches the mind.

Italian opera: the first great project

Before the oratorio, Handel was an opera composer — and not just any opera composer. He was the impresario, the artistic director, the producer, and the principal composer of Italian opera in London for decades. He founded companies, hired Italian singers, filled theatres, and emptied them again when fashion shifted or the competition overtook him.

Italian opera in the eighteenth century was the luxury entertainment par excellence: expensive spectacles featuring internationally renowned castratos, extravagant costumes, stage machinery for storms and descending gods, and arias that singers adorned with improvised ornaments that could last minutes. In many ways it was the equivalent of its age to Broadway mega-musicals or stadium concerts today: high-budget commercial art aimed at a public that paid to be moved.

Handel composed more than forty operas. Giulio Cesare, Rinaldo, Rodelinda: works of extraordinary melodic richness that today occupy a relative niche but in their time filled theatres. The problem was that London audiences were fickle. In 1728, The Beggar's Opera — a satirical opera in English that directly parodied the Italian genre — swept the box office and plunged opera seria into a crisis of credibility. Handel held on and tried to reinvent himself, but the operatic market was wounded.

It was that crisis that drove him, almost out of necessity, toward a new form. Or rather, toward an old form that he would transform into something never seen before.

The oratorio: when the Bible becomes theatre

The oratorio was not Handel's invention. As a musical form, it had existed since the seventeenth century: it was, in essence, a sacred opera without sets or costumes, designed to be heard in churches or concert halls during Lent, when theatres were closed by religious decree.

What Handel did with the oratorio was transform it into a mass spectacle with a dramatic dimension the form had never possessed. And he did so, crucially, in English — not in Latin or Italian — drawing on scriptural texts that his Anglican audience knew by heart.

That decision changed everything. An ordinary Londoner who would not have understood a word of an Italian opera could follow the drama of Israel in Egypt, of Saul, of Joshua, of Samson. The protagonists were not distant mythological heroes but biblical figures who were part of the religious education of any English Protestant. Handel's oratorio turned the audience into a participant: the public knew the story, knew what was coming, and yet what Handel did with the music surprised them every time.

The chorus was the instrument of that miracle. In Italian opera, the chorus was a decorative, almost marginal element. In Handel's oratorios, the chorus is the collective protagonist: the people of Israel who suffer, celebrate, wait, and exult. Handel wrote choruses of a dramatic power that no composer of his time had achieved, and which the London public recognized immediately as something unlike anything they had heard before.

Messiah: the work that stopped time

Of all Handel's oratorios, one has transcended the history of music to become a cultural phenomenon in its own right: Messiah, composed in 1741 in the extraordinary span of twenty-four days.

Messiah does not tell a story in the conventional sense. It has no dramatic characters, no linear plot. It is, rather, a meditation in three parts on the figure of Christ: the prophecy and Nativity, the Passion and Redemption, the Resurrection and the Last Judgment. The text, compiled by Charles Jennens from the Old and New Testaments, gives Handel material from which to build something halfway between drama, contemplation, and proclamation.

Its first public performance took place in Dublin in 1742, not London, and was an immediate success. When it premiered in the English capital the following year, the reception was cooler — Handel had to navigate ecclesiastical resistance to the idea of using sacred texts in a theatre — but over time Messiah became the most performed choral work in Western history, and it remains so today.

From it come moments that have penetrated popular culture far beyond any musical context: the contralto aria He was despised, of a sorrow so contained it seems impossible; the duet He shall feed His flock, of a pastoral tenderness that contrasts with the surrounding drama; and above all, the Hallelujah Chorus. The Hallelujah Chorus is, quite possibly, the most recognizable minute and a half in all of Baroque music. Tradition holds — well documented, though not entirely verifiable in its details — that King George II, on hearing it for the first time, rose to his feet. And when the king stands, the entire hall stands. The custom of rising during the Hallelujah persists in concert halls around the world today, nearly three hundred years later. It is not a religious gesture: it is the instinctive recognition that something in that music surpasses the usual protocols of the concert hall.

Music for the open air: fireworks and the Thames

Handel was not only a composer for enclosed theatres. Two of his most celebrated works were commissioned as music for open spaces and outdoor crowds, making them unique documents of the public function of music in the eighteenth century.

The Water Music was composed around 1717 to accompany a procession of barges along the River Thames organized by King George I. Legend — almost certainly exaggerated — has it that the king enjoyed it so much he asked for it to be played three times during the journey. It is a festive, bright, extroverted suite, written for an orchestra that had to project its sound outdoors and over water: prominent brass, danceable rhythms, an energy that works even without the refinements a concert hall would require.

The Music for the Royal Fireworks of 1749 was the most ambitious commission of its kind: a work to celebrate the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, performed in Green Park in London before an estimated audience of twelve thousand. Handel wrote for an orchestra of over a hundred musicians, with a predominance of winds and percussion to guarantee outdoor projection. The premiere was a logistical disaster — the fireworks misfired and part of the structure caught fire — but the music worked perfectly. It is extroverted, martial, jubilant: music designed to be heard by a crowd that needs no knowledge of music theory to understand that something great is taking place. These works matter not only for their quality but for what they represent: the idea that music can — and should — occupy public space, address ordinary citizens, function as collective celebration. It is an idea the nineteenth century would develop in the great choral festivals, and that the twentieth century would carry all the way to the rock stadium.

The impresario who failed and triumphed

Handel's life in London was not a straight road to success. He went bankrupt twice. He competed with rival opera companies that bested him commercially. He suffered a stroke in 1737 that affected the use of his right hand for months. He faced critics who considered him excessive, aristocrats who funded his competitors, and a public that sometimes ignored him entirely.

What makes his story remarkable is that every time the market abandoned him, Handel found a way to reinvent himself. When Italian opera ceased to be a going concern, he invented the English oratorio. When the oratorio was slow to be accepted in London, he traveled to Dublin and found a more receptive public. When he lost his sight almost completely in his final years — as Bach also went blind toward the end of his life — he continued composing by dictating to an amanuensis and conducting from the harpsichord with a prodigious musical memory.

He died in 1759, wealthy, celebrated, and buried in Westminster Abbey, the pantheon of England's greats. Three thousand people attended his funeral.

The legacy: music as collective event

What Handel contributed to the history of music was not a technical revolution — like Bach's in counterpoint or Schoenberg's in atonalism — but something harder to define and perhaps more enduring: the understanding that music can be, at one and the same time, serious art and an experience shared by multitudes.

Bach wrote for God and for the initiated. Handel wrote for London, for Dublin, for any audience that had ears and was willing to feel. He did not sacrifice quality in the name of accessibility — his finest pages are as complex and crafted as anything else in his century — but he understood that musical greatness does not require exclusivity. That a chorus singing about the liberation of Israel can move a London merchant in precisely the same way as a learned clergyman.

That intuition is why Messiah is still sung at Christmas in concert halls around the world, why the Water Music sounds at weddings and ceremonies, why the Hallelujah Chorus makes people rise to their feet without quite knowing why. Handel's music does not age because it was not written for a closed circle: it was written so that anyone could walk in. Can artistic greatness and popular accessibility coexist without one destroying the other? Handel answers yes — but the debate did not end with him. The Classicism that follows, with Haydn building the symphony, Mozart perfecting the opera, and Beethoven transforming both, will ask the same question again, with different answers and consequences we are still living with.

It would be a pity, my lord, if His Majesty did not rise. The Hallelujah is the house of God, and all must stand within it.

Listening suggestions

• Hallelujah Chorus from Messiah, HWV 56 — John Eliot Gardiner with the English Baroque Soloists: listen to it standing up, if you can
• «He was despised», contralto aria from Messiah — Janet Baker's recording: one of the most overwhelming moments in all Baroque music
• Suite in D major, HWV 349, from the Water Music — the most festive of the three suites; picture twelve musicians playing from a barge on the Thames
• Overture from Music for the Royal Fireworks, HWV 351 — original wind version: feel the difference between music designed for the open air and music for the concert hall