Handel’s Messiah at the Barbican

Before Christmas disappears entirely over the horizon, a note on a concert I attended in late Advent.  This is the time of year for Handel’s Messiah, so it was a treat to go to the Barbican Hall in London on Wednesday (20 December 2017) to hear it performed by the Academy of Ancient Music under Richard Egarr.  This glorious evening had an unsettling beginning, though — partly as intended but partly unintended — for the concert began not with old music but with new, the première of a short cantata.  Those of us who had attended a talk before the concert had had some warning of this.  ‘A Young Known Voice’ is the result of a collaboration between the composer Hannah Conway and a group of about twenty-five pupils, all aged between eleven and fifteen, from various schools in London.

The talk preceding the concert had given Hannah Conway an opportunity to explain her approach to the project.  She had wanted to find out how young people would react to the famous oratorio.  Was Handel’s Messiah still relevant today?  The participants had been presented with the libretto and asked to create a work that responded to it in some way; then the composer wove the resulting material into a single piece of music, which they performed for us on the night.  Here is a recording of the performance itself (and its libretto can be read here):

My instinct is always to encourage and wish success to any project like this that involves young people and calls on their creative powers, not least if it brings them into the company of the great works of our musical inheritance.  And indeed I thought the music itself was powerful and well-scored, and the young people’s performance, made to a full house of nearly two thousand, was startlingly confident and vivid; their voices were clear and fearless over the microphones. Yet it was a perturbing piece to listen to.

Of course, to a large extent, this was the intended effect.  Since Hannah Conway gave her collaborators the freedom to react as they wished to the Messiah, there should be no surprise in meeting the righteous anger typical of energetic, uncynical youth.  They are rightly alive to the world’s injustices; they are understandably alert to the perils of the Internet age; they are justifiably angered by the unpleasant speech we hear around us, and so on.  They know what they are against, and to some extent what they are for.  Twice the credo is sung,  ‘Discrimination, persecution, judgement!  Broken by the power to unite’  I suppose it was also to be expected that much of the anger expressed was acutely topical and openly political, rubbing the sores of some of the rawest preoccupations of our time.  I am sure the reader can guess what they were.

Thus, in the libretto: ‘People have free will, but their choices [a]ffect our whole nation.  We chose to leave the E.U.  They elected Trump.  One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.’  All of a sudden, we have politics in the concert hall; words are uttered that stop barely short of explicit criticism of those who voted for Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union in our referendum the other year, implying that a word as uncompromising as ‘trash’ could be applied to their position, and furthermore lumping them in with the electorate of an entirely different country who were the authors of an unrelated political decision.  Even as the cantata declared war on ostracism, it undermined itself by a general defensiveness against ‘a cynical audience with cynical stares’ (who, us?) and ‘an unjust system breeding frustration,’ and risked conjuring in our minds precisely the thing it cried out against: the spectre of an anonymous and indistinct mass of people, possibly including parents, to be held in suspicion rather than tolerated or understood. This text should surely have undergone some editing, as any other libretto might have done, so that the young people’s ideas could have been expressed in a more measured, more precise and more coherent way without necessarily being watered down.  As it was, we were confronted with the sort of utterance from which many in the audience had presumably hoped to find, in this very concert, momentary escape.  At a time when the national conversation is so bitter, must we taint even a musical concert with political agitation?  Alexander van Ingen, the Chief Executive of the Academy of Ancient Music, explains here that the project ‘allowed self-expression amongst those participating in it’, adding that he is ‘proud that we presented it at the Barbican without self-censor, or telling the participants that they couldn’t say this or that.’  So it was the paying audience that had to put up with the rougher edges of that self-expression.  It might be unreasonable to expect the young people to perceive how weary of such things their listeners might be already, but the organisers certainly had a responsibility to take greater care in this regard.

Yet the cantata was also unsettling in other ways that were not, I think, intended by its creators, and which became plain only when we came to the Messiah itself, to the great oratorio’s old known dawn in the strings, and those familiar words, ‘Comfort ye, my people’… only then did the uneasiness gradually crystallise.  It was suddenly clear that problem lies not so much in the substance of the political views expressed in the cantata, but in the fact that politics appear at all in a composition supposedly inspired by such a work as Handel’s Messiah.  For in the Messiah we are breathing different air, the air of transcendence.  Both Handel’s music and Charles Jennens’ richly Scriptural libretto lift their hearers out of themselves, out of the narrowness of their contemporary preoccupations, however pressing they may seem, into the great drama of humanity; into the trajectory which rises from the Old Testament, culminates in the New, and then turns to look out towards the end of the world with Heaven waiting beyond.  That is how it would have been understood by the people of Handel’s time.  Are we so different to them?  We too hunger for transcendence, even if we would not care to admit it.

We will not find in the Messiah a political solution to the problems of our age.  Neither would Handel’s audience have found any for theirs, though they were equally afflicted by their own social antagonists, crises and difficulties (what is a Foundling Hospital for if not the marginalised and downtrodden?).  This was not Handel’s purpose.  The lesson that great works of art like this teach young and old alike is that, however justifiable our anger at the current state of things, our experience is not unique and there is a higher, a greater picture to be apprehended.  We treasure music like this precisely because it is timeless.

Seen in this light, this question of ‘whether the Messiah is relevant today’ seems a severe distraction.  Yet the organisers of the youth project seem to have made it the chief yardstick by which to measure their success.  The participants ‘debated gender inequality, gender discrimination, racial discrimination, social exclusion and communities rejected by society.’  Poor Handel: I am sure he would have had sensible things to say about these matters, but his oratorio was never intended to address them directly.  Thus I fear the young people were put into a frame of mind by which they would see the Messiah not as their heirloom but as an inanimate artefact, an ancient text that might as well have been written in cuneiform, useful to us only to the extent that we can scour it for the slightest glimmer of a bearing on the problems of the present moment, much as the stones of a ruined medieval monastery might be picked over for some immediate use.

The concert programme goes on to report that the project ‘reflected upon the idea of hope, exploring why and how generations have used various metaphors, images and stories to galvanise “coming together” with strength and direction’.  This is more like it, and far closer to the right order of magnitude, yet this statement, too, with its detached tone, misses the world-encompassing meaning that we are meant to find in the narrative and the figure of the Messiah.  The idea that by the words ‘thy rebuke hath broken his heart’ might indeed be meant my rebuke, or that he hath borne our grief, carried our sorrow or was bruisèd for our transgressions, would have been understood by Handel’s contemporaries.  For them, van Ingen’s assertion that ‘the central themes of the Messiah story’ are ‘persecution, isolation, rejection; but ultimately a positive message of hope’ would have seemed inexplicably watery and vague, if not missing the mark altogether; they would have described it, perhaps, as a musical exposition of the means of their redemption.  Even someone who does not hold the Christian creed can try to imagine how Handel’s Messiah would sound to someone who does, and any intelligent young person could put their mind to it.  Yet the whole work seems to have been presented to the young collaborators in brackets, as something to pick over, rather than lose oneself in.  Who can blame them, then, for going through it forensically rather than imaginatively?  The pursuit of relevance drains away transcendence.  The libretto is reduced to a string of text that sounds just poetic enough to be ‘relevant today’, as is evident from the fragmented quotations from the original which sound good but whose full meaning, out of context, is impoverished.  The vision of humanity’s origin and redemption is reduced to a symbolic yarn by which those long-ago people in olden days figured out their problems; The Messiah, Christ, is of value to us merely as another example in our collection of an individual discriminated against ‘because he believed something different’.  An opera with a religious theme can be called an oratorio just as we can buy cheese-and-onion crisps as well as ready-salted.  Thus was the heart of the Messiah’s meaning missed.

Even to ask whether the Messiah is relevant was to admit defeat.  The very question belies a fundamental lack of confidence in our cultural inheritance.  Never mind that every generation since 1742 has considered the work valuable enough to hand down to the next; let the possibility simply be raised that it might be irrelevant, and that it is how it will be considered.  It would surely have been better to begin by asking, ‘Why has the Messiah been considered so valuable for so long?’, approaching with humility if the reason is not immediately obvious.  Then we can study the composer’s craft, the matching of the music to the words, especially the word painting by which Handel actually illustrates, in his melodies, the valleys exalted, the mountains and hills made low, and the crooked made straight, and the magnitude of the work itself will gradually become real to us.  One of the difficulties of being young is that so many things simply have to be learnt, and there is no way around it.  With Handel’s Messiah it is no different: we have to go up to meet it, and cannot expect it to come down to us.  Still, Handel does give us plenty of assistance; nobody could accuse his music of inaccessibility or aloofness.

For all that so many opportunities seem to have been missed in this project, it is important to mention some of its aspects, perhaps easily-missed, that were evidently quite deeply thought through.  Certain details of the conversation before the concert revealed this.  For instance, Hannah Conway is very alert to the dignity and situation of her collaborators, whom she was careful to refer to as ‘young people’ and not as children; in other words, I think she wanted to give them some responsibility, raise their self-esteem and test their mettle.  Some pupils who were invited on stage spoke well, too.   One girl made the point that young people were not generally listened to; Conway wonders elsewhere ‘why so little trust seems to be placed in the instinctive younger generation’.   It may be an eternal truth that young people have much to learn about the world, but they often have sound instincts which are a reproach to their elders, ‘for,’ as G. K. Chesterton said, ‘children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.’  This is indeed an age in which fairly scant attention is paid to the spiritual and moral welfare of young people.

The composer said that she thought our hearing of the Messiah would be changed by having heard A Young Known Voice beforehand.  This was certainly true in my case, not least since the young people had been invited to sit on the stage, next to the orchestra, in plain view of the audience.  I found myself wondering what would become of them and hoping that the reality of the Messiah, delight in Handel’s art and authentic beauty and truth would find their way into their hearts and spirits, to be treasured always.