How did Mozart "Handel" Messiah"?

How did Mozart “Handel” Messiah”?
                                     by
                             Dr. Vincent de Luise

"Mozart knew how to give new life to Handel’s noble inspirations by means of the
warmth of his own feeling, and through the magic of his own instrumental style to make
them enjoyable for our age."
                                  F.X. Nemetschek, Mozart's first biographer, 1808

                            George Frideric Handel (1685-1759)
                             by Balthasar Denner (c. 1728)

Transcriptions of musical compositions, especially famous ones, are a mixed bag. As
accomplished a pair of pianists as you and your friend might be, it should still be evident
that your four-hand piano transcriptions of Beethoven’s Eroica and Schubert’s
Unfinished symphonies are nowhere near as moving as the composers’ original
orchestrations. On the other hand, Ravel’s magisterial symphonic reworking of
Mussorgsky’s initial piano conception for Pictures at an Exhibition is a work of art far
richer and textured than the original, and more popular at that. Another enduring
transcription was the result of Wolfgang Mozart’s genius, when he was commissioned to
re-orchestrate a German text setting of Handel’s sublime and iconic Messiah.

The well-worn story of Handel’s life and the composition of his oratorio Messiah (HWV
56) are part of the fabric and lore of music history. Handel was born in Halle, Germany,
in that magical year of 1685, which also witnessed the birth of J.S. Bach and Domenico
Scarlatti. Handel sojourned for four years in Italy, from 1706 to 1710, during which time
he was informed by the operatic and oratorio styles prevalent there and also tried his

hand at them. He then returned to Germany to work for George, the Elector of Hanover,
who later became that George, King George I of England. Handel himself settled in
London in 1712, preceding his Hanoverian employer by two years (the King was miffed
but they worked it out), eventually obtained English citizenship in 1727, and never
looked back.

Although Handel had composed a few oratorios in his early years in England, he initially
made his name there by composing operas, the most successful of which were scored
with Italian libretti. Handel did not start seriously composing oratorios until the 1730s.
By that time, the public’s seemingly insatiable appetite for opera seria, which he more
than any other composer had made famous, had faded. Recognizing that his operatic
meal ticket was gone, Handel seamlessly switched gears and restarted composing
oratorios, twenty-seven in all, virtually all of which were set to English texts.

                              Charles Jennens (1700-1773)
                                The librettist of Messiah

In July of 1741, the librettist Charles Jennens (who had previously given Handel the text
for Saul) offered Handel a text of passages from the King James Bible as possible
material for a new oratorio. The selections were from both the Old Testament (Isaiah,
Malachi and Psalms), as well as from two of the canonical gospels of the New
Testament, Matthew and Luke, the book of Revelation, and the epistles of Paul. This
material seemed to have resonated with Handel, as he began to compose Messiah on
August 22 of that year and completed it in just 24 days. He signed the autograph “Solo
Deo Gloria” (“Only to God goes the Glory”), prompting a more than a few commentators
to suggest that Handel had had some form of divine inspiration, given the rapidity of its
composition and the beauty of its form.

Messiah (HWV 56) had its premiere not in London, where Handel’s many operas had
opened, but in Dublin, at the Great Music Hall on Fishamble Street, on April 13, 1742, to
700 attendees, and to the consternation of a great many back in England. Certainly,
Jennens was humiliated, as he commented to a friend that“it was some mortification to
me to hear that instead of performing Messiah here he has gone into Ireland with it." It

seemed to have been a big hit in Dublin, though. Handel biographer Donald Burrows
relates that "so that the largest possible audience could be admitted to the concert,
gentlemen were requested to remove their swords, and ladies were asked not to wear
hoops in their dresses." (ref.1)

                             Handel in rare repose in 1740
                                 by Phillip Mercier

There is another story, an essential part of Messiah lore, that goes that when King
George II first heard the work, in London in 1743, he was so taken by its now famous
"Hallelujah" Chorus, that he stood up during it, setting a precedent that is still adhered
to by audiences worldwide. With further performances, Messiah gained even more in
popularity. One early critic enthused that "words are wanting to express the exquisite
delight that it (Messiah) afforded the crowded and admiring audience. The Sublime,
the Grand, the Tender, adapted to the most elevated, majestic and moving words,
conspired to transport and charm the ravished ear."

In the years following his move from Salzburg to Vienna in 1781, Mozart developed a
fascination for Baroque music, especially the compositions of J.S. Bach and Handel.
Baron Gottfried von Swieten had encouraged Mozart to study the manuscript copies of
these Baroque masters, and had been arranging regular private performances of
Baroque music in libraries and private residences in Vienna, eventually asking Mozart to
curate and direct these events. The baron had earlier founded the Geselschafft der
Associerten (The Society of Associates), an exclusive club that offered oratorios at
Lenten and Easter. By the time von Swieten offered a copy of Messiah and a German
text to Mozart in 1789, he (Mozart) had already transcribed Handel’s Acis and Galatea,
and would go on in the following year to transcribe Handel’s Ode to St Cecilia and
Alexander’s Feast.

Mozart set his transcription of Messiah, entitled Der Messias (KV 572), to a German
translation of the oratorio by Christoph Ebeling in 1775, which Ebeling had adapted
from an earlier eponymous epic poem by Friedrich Klopstock. The premiere of Der
Messias was on March 6th, 1789, at the palatial residence of Count Johann Esterhazy,
with Mozart conducting.

Der Messias is neither a radical rethinking of Handel’s original work, nor a cavalier
rescoring done simply as a lark. Although only 48 years separated Messiah’s premiere
and Mozart’s 1789 transcription, an enormous change had occurred in musical style.
Handel lived and wrote squarely within the idiom and constraints of the Baroque era,
whereas Mozart composed in the conventions of Classical Style. By Mozart’s time,
symphonic orchestras were populated by many different instruments, each lending its
own tonal color, together giving a more textured sound than that of the simpler
“symphonic bands” of strings and continuo, with occasional trumpets, of Handel’s time.
In addition, Mozart lived in the Age of the Enlightenment, when diversity of ideas was
being accepted.

One of the many aspects of Messiah that is emblematic of Handel's genius is that he
purposely wrote a relatively spare orchestral part to the work, wisely and correctly
foreseeing that future composers would tinker with the orchestration, adding
instrumental forces here and tonal color there. It was upon this splendid palimpsest that
Mozart went to work.

According to musicologist Teresa Frick, "(Baron) von Swieten wanted Mozart to
"modernize" the oratorio (Messiah). This was a perfectly normal demand - the original
work and its composer still commanded great respect, of course, but this was no
obstacle to updating something "old-fashioned" to bring it into line with modern taste.
Mozart based his arrangement on the first edition of Handel’s score. From this, two
copyists produced a working score. For the English libretto and the wind sections of the
original, they substituted blank lines so that Mozart could write his own accompaniment
and insert the text written by van Swieten. which was based on the German translation
done by Klopstock and Ebeling. "(ref 2)

Mozart introduced a significant amount of wind music to the score, adding parts for
clarinet, horn, flute, oboe and bassoon, which did not appear in Handel’s original work.
(The clarinet had only been invented in Handel’s time as an improvement over the
chalumeau pipe, around 1703, by J.C. Denner in Nuremberg, and it was not until the
latter half of the eighteenth century, in Mozart’s era, that composers were seriously
writing for the instrument). The bassoons, in Mozart’s adaptation, are freed of their
usual subterranean confinement as simply basso or buffo accompaniments. In Der
Messias, they are allowed to soar behind the tenor and bass soloists with lovely
obbligato filigrees. Frick tells us that a contemporary critic, Johann Friedrich Rochlitz,
reviewing Der Messias, said of Mozart that "He has exercised the greatest delicacy by
touching nothing that transcends the style of his time ... The choral sections are left as
Handel wrote them and are only amplified cautiously now and again by wind
instruments." (ref.3)

At the same time, Mozart minimized the role of the trumpets in his arrangement, giving
more of that responsibility to the trombones, especially in the doubling and support of
the SATB soloists. The reason was sheer practicality. By Mozart's time, the rare skill of
playing the high tessitura celebratory trumpet was long gone. In the aria, “The Trumpet
Shall Sound,” Mozart wrote out the obbligato part not for a natural valveless trumpet, as
Handel had done, but for french horn !

Although Mozart left the orchestration of most of the choral sections as Handel had
scored them, he did take take some sections from the chorus and gave them to the SATB
soloists, likely as a function of the number and talent of the forces he had at the time. It
is interesting to note that Mozart had only 12 singers in his Der Messias chorus, whereas
Handel likely employed many more for Messiah. Also, as there was no organ at Count
Esterhazy's palace, Mozart simply left Handel's organ part out of his transcription !
Eminent practicality.

                    A page from the autograph score of Handel's
                            Messiah in the British Library
                Note the composer's numerous inkblots and scratch-outs

 Mozart certainly had his own ideas in arranging Messiah. Mozart felt that Handel's
construction of the arias was often lacking in variety, so he sensitively changed the
tempi and harmonic structure in several of them. And in one instance, the somewhat dry
"If God be for us," Mozart changed it from aria recitative. As Frick relates, evidently von
Swieten was pleased about this, as he commented to Mozart that "Your idea of turning
the text of the cold air (aria) into a recitative is splendid... Anyone who is able to clothe
Handel with such solemnity and taste that he pleases the fashion-conscious fops on the
one hand, while on the other hand still continues to show himself superior, is a person
who senses Handel’s worth, who understands him, who has found the source of his
expression and who can and will draw inspiration from it." (ref 4)

Mozart added woodwind support to several of the solo lines, for example, to the
exquisite "Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion," and "Comfort ye," maintaining
Handel's genius in incorporating Italian bel canto style into these arias (a genre in which
he was so successful in his many operas) while adding his (Mozart's) own brilliance as a

painter of tonal atmospheric color. Another touching exemplar of this is in the Part
Three duet "O death, where is thy sting?" where Mozart added obbligato violas to the
orchestration, prefiguring some of the sonorities in the Recordare movement of his
Requiem of 1791.

Mozart changed the soprano aria "If God be for us" into a recitative, and also eliminated
one of the choral numbers "Let all the angels of God" as well as the aria "Thou art gone
up on high." He took the famous aria "Rejoice greatly" from the soprano and gave it to
the tenor. All of these Mozartean changes served not only to tighten up the oratorio, it
also made it over a half hour shorter, which may have mattered in a progressive and
busier Viennese society.

Upon first listening, Der Messias serves up so many new vistas, and not just in the new
orchestration; these insights also pertain to the German text. "Denn die herrlichkeit
Gottes" sounds a bit different from "And the Glory of the Lord," but even if hearing the
words "Alle Tale, mach Hoch Erhaben" instead of "Ev’ry Valley Shall be Exalted,” is a
bit jarring, it is also refreshing, especially as that same gorgeous and recognizable
supporting melody is still there, lovingly enriched by Mozart's nuanced orchestral
accompaniment.

Handel’s Messiah remains one of the monumental achievements of western civilization.
There is no "right" or "wrong" Messiah. There is simply Messiah. Whether it is the
original Handelian version, Mozart’s arrangement that you will hear this evening, or
perhaps another adaptation such as that of Ebenezer Prout in the nineteenth century,
Messiah will always remain the singular composition that was envisioned and created by
"Mister Handel" - a work of art that is ever sonorous, sacred, noble, uplifting and
sublime.

ref 1 Donald Burrows, Handel: Messiah, Cambridge University Press, 1991
ref2 Teresa Frick http://www.kuk-art.com/English/Maulbronn/S-Mozart-Messiah.html
ref 3 Frick, ibid.
ref 4 Frick, ibid.
©Vincent P. de Luise M.D. 2012.