The other day I went to see the new and much-hyped Mel Gibson film, the Passion of the Christ. Perhaps the most striking thing about the film is how graphic and ‘fleshy’ it is – of course there is a level on which Gibson is interpreting the passion narrative, but he seems to have wanted to do so in a way that is as close as he could get to filming the events as they occurred. Gibson has been quoted as saying ‘it is as it was’.
In Messiah, what we get is a long way from this, and a long way from a gospel-like rehearsing of the facts of the life, death and resurrection of Christ. Handel and his librettist, Charles Jennens, assume that we already know the facts, so their aim is to flesh out these bare bones with spiritual meaning and human emotion. The way they do this is frequently to turn again to the prophet Isaiah.
THE SUFFERING SERVANT
Today’s texts are both from Isaiah, chapters 53 and 50 respectively. They are both from passages in which Isaiah talks about what is usually the termed the ‘suffering servant’. Just exactly who the suffering servant is in Isaiah has vexed scholars for centuries. Some think Isaiah may have been talking about himself – it’s well known that the prophets often came to sticky ends, and suffered rejection at the hands of the people they were trying to help. In a very real sense they ‘stood for’ all of Israel, standing in the breach between the disobedient people and the anger of God.
Others see the suffering servant as the whole people of Israel, the servants of God who have suffered so greatly at the hands of the rest of humanity.
The conventional Christian reading is that the suffering servant refers forwards, to the coming of Jesus Christ. In the gospel accounts of the passion of Christ that we will hear this week we will see how the evangelists refer to Isaiah’s prophecies in their descriptions of what happened to Jesus in the days and hours just before his death. It is through this lens that we see Handel’s Messiah.
But to my mind, the ambiguity about whether the suffering servant stands for Jesus or for God’s people simply tells us something about the incarnation: that Jesus stood with us and for us and took on everything about being human, even sharing our death, so that humanity could then be raised, and restored to new life. Because Jesus was obedient to suffering, came through it, and was raised to glory, so also can we be.
AN INCARNATIONAL VIEW
In this light we can see that this aria is particularly focused on the incarnation.
A ‘man of sorrows’ here isn’t just a sorrowful man. This is a statement of the fullness of the incarnation, that Jesus experienced the very depths to which humanity can sink, the very worst that human beings are capable of inflicting on each other. And it is all this that makes him the complete saviour, someone who, as the letter to the Hebrews says ‘in every respect has been tested as we are’, and is therefore able to understand and be alongside us in our weaknesses. Today’s new testament reading says that Jesus:
who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited7 but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death - even death on a cross.
Handel sets this line – a man of sorrows – in several ways, but in none of them is the word man glossed over: even when the word sorrows is made the focal point by a melisma, man precedes it on the highest note of the phrase, and at several points, Handel even sets the word man on an appoggiatura, a special musical way of creating weight, emphasis and expression. Handel makes it clear that Jesus is indeed a man, a real human being, and as the text goes on to say, it is men – fellow human beings - that have rejected him. Jesus came into the world as a human being, and humanity rejected him. St John says that Jesus ‘came to his own, but his own did not accept him’. In a way this rejection is the cruelest blow of all.
How else does Handel set about writing the incarnation into the music? It seems he does it in several ways.
Bear in mind that the immediate context for this aria is that it follows the chorus ‘Behold the Lamb of God who takest away the sin of the world.’ This chorus is deliberately formalised language: the words are formal and liturgical, and the emphasis is on the Lamb of God. The music responds to this by the use of formalised ‘sacred-sounding’ imitative writing. It is a complete contrast with this aria, which is personalised – the singer is the teller of the story, and the focus is on Jesus the man.
In the A section of the aria, Handel give us a pietistic lament, the kind of thing we would expect to find in the passion oratorios. It is inward looking, reflective. Actually, if you listen to it carefully, it is almost completely static, like a tableaux, full of long sustained pedal notes.
The second thing that you notice, particularly as you sing it, is that, the phrases are very broken up, often separated by echoes in the orchestra. It gives space for thought and reflection, almost the impression that the singer is talking to herself. It was a common device in 18th century opera for the orchestra to stand for the inner thoughts of the singer. We think ‘despised’ and ‘rejected’ when we hear these phrases, wordless, in the orchestra.
Finally in the A section, we have these characteristic flattened inflections – sighs of pain at grief and sorrow. The harmonies become the inner grief experienced by the singer.
Quite a lot of the music in the aria is actually less like an aria and more like a recitative. Recitative is what composers usually write when they want to move the story on. Since this is, I suppose, half way between aria and recitative it is both telling and reflecting: the aria both tells the story and forms a personal reflection upon it.
In the whole of the A section, what Handel seems to be doing is taking the formalised language of the previous chorus and putting it in personal terms, putting it in the mouth of an individual singer.
And in the aria as a whole, what I think is going on is that in the A section we experience the effect on the mind, the soul, and the heart, and in the B section, as we’ll go on to see now, we experience the effect on the body.
The B section
The word-painting in the B section isn’t hard to understand: the dotted rhythm represents the smiting, the scourging. On baroque string instruments this effect is very percussive, very physical, even when played quietly. The players almost have to throw their bows onto the string.
Half way through when the text changes to ‘them that pluckèd out the hair’ the chord changes become more regular and the vocal line more sequential – in Handel’s visualisation there is a difference between smiting and plucking.
The word painting is overt and physical - and the final recitative-like cadence from the orchestra is clearly a graphic musical depiction of the spitting.
SCENES
Hearing such dramatic writing reminds us constantly that Handel was an opera composer.
Scholars have pointed out that what happens in Messiah is that Handel creates extended scenes, rather like in an opera. We can see the way that this scene fits together:
As I’ve pointed out already, the scene starts with the chorus ‘Behold the Lamb of God’, its austerity providing a formalised backdrop to the very personal aria that follows it. In the aria we get both the effect on the soul and mind – grief, sorrow, rejection – and the effect on the body – smiting, spitting. It’s interesting to notice that the chorus ends in G minor, so that the aria – in E flat major – sounds like a complete change of mood, and that the B section of the aria also ends in G minor. This means that when we return to the first section we get exactly the same kind of change of mood as we did when we first heard it.
It’s also worth noting that Da Capo arias (ones that just repeat the A section exactly) are pretty rare by this time. Generally it was thought to be undramatic, and so for Handel to use this form here, he must have dramatic reasons for it. It’s like Handel knows we need to be taken out of time, to look at the scene as a ‘still’ instead of constantly being caught up in the drama.
The scene continues with another chorus, ‘Surely he has born our griefs’. By using the same figuration in the orchestra, Handel makes sure that we immediately remember the scourging, and hear the chorus as our own comment on it.
In each of these parts of the scene, we get a slightly different point of view, each clearly distinct from the others, yet linked together by common figurations, key structures and text. And Handel announces that a new point of view is to be explored in a very particular way: almost every number in Messiah begins with the tonic chord being placed, even if musically it seems a bit clumsy or unnecessary. He does this at the beginning of ‘behold the Lamb of God’. He does it at the start of ‘he was despisèd’,
and he continues to do it throughout the work. It’s as if he wants to tell us that although we are looking at the same thing, we are doing it from a new angle, from new point of view.
This made me think that perhaps a better comparison than opera would be film.
In the Mel Gibson film there is a very long and gruesome scene portraying the scourging of Jesus. The cameras frequently cut from shots of Jesus himself to views of his mother and Mary Magdalene weeping in the crowd. I wonder if perhaps something similar is going on here?
But it’s not as simple as that. Handel actually does much more than Mel Gibson. As I’ve said, the film is very fleshy, very graphic, but what it lacks is really any sense of meaning or purpose to the violence. On the other hand, Messiah places the violence within a context of interpretation. This is firstly within the prophetic context of Isaiah – through Isaiah we gain insight into the meaning of the suffering. But secondly, it is within the context of the ongoing interpretation of the community of faith – that’s us. The oratorio tradition was not only for entertainment, but also for reflection – singing and reflecting on Messiah during Lent is absolutely a valid way of performing it.
I believe that if we can learn to hear the drama in Handel’s Messiah, and hear it within these contexts of interpretation, it can prepare us very well for the drama of Holy Week. In these eight days we are required to throw ourselves from the exuberance of the Palm Sunday procession, through the bitterness of betrayal, the pain of suffering, the anguish of death, and eventually the almost incredible joy of resurrection. It is an emotional and spiritual roller coaster, and, if you come to everything, it’s physically gruelling too.
What Handel gives us in Messiah is a reflection of the incarnation and what it means for us: it is an exploration of Jesus’ humanity (not only physical, but spiritual and emotional as well). But it is not just a theological point, about God becoming man. It is also about our own humanity in response to the incarnation. In engaging with Handel’s Messiah we have a chance to see how far our faith is incarnate. As such it is part of an ongoing process of holistic encounter with Jesus: there is no better time in the Christian year to make sure that it really is our whole selves – body, mind and spirit - that are engaged in the re-enactment of the passion, so that we can genuinely walk the way of the cross this holy week.