Episodes
Sunday Dec 08, 2019
Homily for December 8, 2019
Sunday Dec 08, 2019
Sunday Dec 08, 2019
One of the great musical treasures of the Christmas season is Handel’s Messiah, with its soaring Hallelujah Chorus. The story of how the work came to be is as inspiring as the music itself.
The German-born George Frederick Handel was the most famous musician of his time. After enjoying great success writing and staging operas in Germany and Italy, Handel, not yet 30, was appointed the director of London’s Royal Academy of Music. A huge man with an explosive ego, he churned out more than 40 lively operas in 25 years. But, as happens, the public eventually grew tired of opera and sought other diversions. One after another, his operas failed. At the age of 52, deeply in debt and exhausted, Handel suffered a paralyzing stroke.
At this lowest point in his life and career, Handel was asked to write an oratorio for a charity concert in Dublin. Though the commission paid a pittance, Handel accepted. A friend had written a libretto for a meditation on the life of Christ, based on verses from the Old and New Testaments. Always a prodigious worker, Handel found in the project new energy and vision. He completed the work in only 24 days. Handel himself was surprised at what he had written. “I think,” he said, “that God has visited me.” The composer refused the small token commission he was offered.
Messiah was performed for the first time on April 13, 1742, to great acclaim. When Handel tried to stage a performance in London, the clergy denounced it as a sacrilege and blasphemy. So, Handel decided to give Messiah away again. He staged the oratorio as a charity concert for London’s Foundling Hospital. It was so well received that Handel staged it again the next year, and the next, and the next. Every year, until his death at the age of 74, Handel would rehearse and conduct Messiah for the hospital. Twenty-five years after his death, Messiah was finally performed in a church: Westminster Abbey, where the clergy had once raged against it.
The oratorio’s popularity grew — but Handel never realized a penny’s profit from it. Handel’s greatest work was the one he gave away.
In his skill as a musician and his generosity of heart, George Frederick Handel and Messiah mirror the conversion that St. John the Baptist proclaims each Advent with his cries of straightening out crooked paths and making rough ways smooth for our Messiah.
The many elements of our Christmas celebration mean little unless they point to the Christ who comes to reconcile us to God and to one another; the Christ who illuminates our spirits with the light of God’s love and compassion; the Christ who teaches us the ways of the Father’s justice and peace. May our rituals and music, our gifts and kindnesses this Christmas be the road that we build to welcome the Messiah into our homes and into our hearts. +
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