Kim Beazley

Handel’s “Messiah”, A Prophetic Masterwork – Part 6: The Prophesied Sacrificial Lamb

You would think that a musical representation of the Crucifixion would use the Gospel accounts as the primary source. But Charles Jennens did not use even a single verse from those accounts. Instead, the bulk of his presentation of the event comes from Isaiah and Psalms.

We come now in our study of the prophetic nature of Handel’s “Messiah” to the central part of the whole work, as well as the core theme of the Gospel. That is the sacrificial death of the Messiah on the cross. (The previous part can be found here.)
Recently, while looking online for more information on “Messiah”, I came across a site with the heading, “A Guide to the Original Source Texts for Handel’s Messiah”, which highlighted the libretto from within the scriptural sources. It also informed me that headings used in the document come from a wordbook published for a 1743 performance of “Messiah”.
For the portion I am covering here, which is the account of the Crucifixion, the heading reads, “The redemptive sacrifice, the scourging and the agony on the cross”.
You would think that a musical representation of the Crucifixion would use the Gospel accounts as the primary source. But Charles Jennens did not use even a single verse from those accounts. Instead, the bulk of his presentation of the event comes from Isaiah and Psalms.
But this is in line with the point I’ve been making all along. “Messiah” is a prophetic meditation on the events it portrays, and so here Jennens takes us back to those prophecies which the Messiah fulfilled on the cross.
But this section does actually begin with a verse from the Gospels, but from the very beginning of His ministry, where the choir sing the prophetic words of John the Baptist in John 1:29, “Behold the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world”.
When you think about those words, you think of that revelation of Jesus as the Messiah, but John is prophesying the horrid truth which cut right through the Jewish belief that the Messiah was coming back as an all-conquering King to restore Israel. And so the music Handel set those words reflects the shock of that by sounding like a funeral dirge.
We then come to an aria which is the heart of this section, and which takes almost as long to perform as the rest of the Crucifixion account. The text is from two verses in Isaiah, 53:3 and 50:6:
“He was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.
He gave His back to the smiters, and His cheeks to them that plucked off His hair: He hid not His face from shame and spitting.”
On a musical note, as I’ve mentioned in previous articles, I prefer performances which seek to recreate what Handel had in mind, with the instrumentation he was familiar with, instead of modern interpretations. Also, it’s believed that it was the custom to play at a quicker tempo than is the norm today. I committed to using those in the accompanying videos wherever possible.
But in this case I go back to the recording in my own CD collection, which when it was recorded nearly 60 years ago, though it used modern instruments, was a pioneering effort in the field of historical performance practice. Yet it is not quicker than recordings with modern orchestras, but much slower. Yet for that I find the intensity gained from a more measured tempo is at times almost unbearable! This can only be achieved by a singer and conductor of the highest calibre!
Next, there are two consecutive pieces for the choir, taken from Isaiah 53:4-5:
“Surely He hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows! He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace was upon Him.
And with His stripes we are healed.”
Hear the emphasis Handel places on the word “Surely”.
Next comes another choral number, taken from Isaiah 53:6.
Read More
Related Posts:

Handel’s “Messiah,” A Prophetic Masterwork—An Introduction

When you think of a work that has Jesus the Messiah as its sole subject, you would reasonably assume that the text is heavily dependent on the New Testament, and primarily the Gospels. But when you look through the text, roughly two-thirds of the passages used are Old Testament. That alone suggests its prophetic nature.

We [The Daily Declaration] present the first of a series on the prophetic voice inherent in Handel’s musical masterpiece, Messiah. This piece of sacred music presents God’s word to listeners, speaking of comfort, strength and ultimate victory for those engaging in spiritual battle.
A few months ago, Warwick Marsh asked me if I would write an article on Messiah, the Sacred Oratorio composed by George Frederick Handel (1685-1759), as we both felt that it was relevant to Daily Declaration readers, not merely as a celebration of one of the greatest musical masterworks in history, but primarily for the fact that we both felt it possesses a powerful prophetic anointing, which I’m not sure that the man who compiled the text entirely from Scripture, a rather vain and pompous aristocrat, Charles Jennens, was at all aware of.
But I realised very quickly that the subject simply couldn’t be covered in just one article, that the whole piece is so steeped in prophetic power. So, this will be the first in a series.
Reverberations Through the Ages
Before I get started, I want to appeal to those of you whose eyes just began glazing over when you saw this is about classical music, as though it’s just so stuffy and boring, especially when you compare it to the wonderful and inspiring contemporary worship music we’re blessed with today, or the secular music you may listen to. How can you possibly compare such out-of-date stuff to that?
The fact is that, without the music of Handel, and every great composer before and since, modern rock and other contemporary genres simply wouldn’t exist, and to listen to the masterworks of classical music with fresh ears will reveal why that is the case.
If any evidence were required, I can even go to the extreme of Heavy Metal, which my son loves in all its variants. He once loaned me a DVD series on its history, and the director of the documentary, who was also the “talking head”, first charted its origins to three particular classical composers: J. S. Bach (a direct contemporary of Handel — 1685-1750), Richard Wagner (1813-1883) and Niccolò Paganini (1782-1840), the first two being the inspiration for Hard Rock and Metal’s modal “Gothic” sound, and Paganini the violin virtuoso, whose showmanship is the model for every Rock guitarist, and whose style is a distinct influence for virtually every rock guitar solo.
If any proof were needed, here it is. First, compare the first three minutes of the Bach Toccata and Fugue for Organ with this clip for rock guitar.
Then listen to Wagner’s famous Ride of the Valkyries followed by its rock adaptation.
And finally to Paganini: (1) (2)
So much for “stuffy and boring”!
So, if you listen to the music clips from Messiah in this series of articles in the same way as you do the latest worship songs you will find that music is music, that there are many similarities, but they’re using different instrumentation and vocal techniques. To draw an analogy with speech, it’s not a different language, like English and French, but merely a different accent, like Aussie and American.
That’s because great music, of whatever genre or time period, has a paradoxical effect: it is both anchored in its own time, and yet timeless, all at the same time (actually, the same thing can be said in relation to the Bible).
So, in one sense, it is identifiable as belonging to the time and place it was composed; yet it can still profoundly impact us today — and that in a powerful way, body, soul and spirit (actually, the same thing can be said in relation to the Bible).
That fact holds whether it’s the secular music of Beethoven, Mozart or Schubert (my favourites), or in my own era growing up: The Beatles, Paul Simon, James Taylor, Pink Floyd, Yes, Cat Stevens, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, The Moody Blues (also my favourites), or a hundred and one other great singer/songwriter/composers/bands of that time right up to the present.
The same holds for the sacred works of the past four centuries, the traditional hymns of Wesley and Watts and so many others, and those modern worship songs, some of which we’ve been singing for a few decades, and more that we’ll be singing for decades to come.
As Bill Muehlenberg noted in his recent article,
When it comes to things like the arts (painting, sculpture, music, poetry, literature, and so on), there can be ungodly and immoral art, and there can be godly and moral art. The answer to the dark side of culture and the arts is not to say no to all these things, but to create good and godly versions of these things…
We can glorify God just as much in enjoying one of His beautiful sunsets, or by being enraptured by Handel’s Messiah, as by sharing our faith with others or by singing worship songs in church.
In short, the same Holy Spirit who inspires our contemporary worship songs equally inspired the works of the past. This is all worship music! That’s why Handel, at the end of Messiah, wrote the letters “SDG” for the Latin phrase “Soli Deo Gloria”, which means, “To God Alone be the Glory”.
My plea, therefore, is that you will listen to be inspired in the same way as you do when you listen to hymns or contemporary worship songs.
So, now that I have your attention, a little background is required on Messiah as a whole.
Inspired
Handel composed the music for Messiah in a feverish burst of inspiration in just 24 days in August and September 1741, after Jennens had compiled the text during July of that year.
When you realise that the whole work takes around two and a half hours to perform, and Handel was writing with a pen which had to be regularly dipped in ink, and that he had to compose separate music for vocal soloists, a four-part choir, five-part strings, trumpets, horns, oboes, bassoons, organ and harpsichord, you can understand how enormous a task this is.
As music commentator Miles Hoffman estimates, there are roughly a quarter of a million notes in Messiah. At a little more than three weeks of 10-hour days, Hoffman said that means Handel would have had to keep a continuous pace writing 15 notes a minute!
Read More
Related Posts:

Scroll to top