To Stand or Not to Stand

To Stand or Not to Stand?

(and other performance traditions in Messiah)

by David Schildkret

Text © 2008 David Schildkret. If this content is used to prepare a concert program or other published/presented work please credit David Schildkret, ASU School of Music, and Music Director, Mount Desert Summer Chorale (also include the URL of this web page).

Messiah has been performed continuously since Handel premiered it in 1742. In this respect, it is unique in Western music: no other work has such a long and consistent performance history. Each generation tends to adapt the work to its own aesthetics, making many changes. Some of these are minor, some quite substantial. Over time, it is only natural that habits and traditions have sprung up, not all of which serve the work very well.

Perhaps the most familiar tradition is that of standing for the “Hallelujah!” Chorus at the end of Part Two. Exactly how this came about is a bit of a mystery. The earliest attempt at an explanation came in 1780, 21 years after Handel’s death: “...When Messiah was first performed in London [1743], when the chorus struck up, ‘For the Lord God omnipotent reigneth’, reportedly the audience and King [George II] stood and remained standing untill the chorus had ended...” (Biographica Dramatica: “On the authority of the Earl of Kinnoul”; quoted in G. Hogarth: Musical History, Biography and Criticism (1838) and James Beattie (1780)) Whether George II was even present at this performance cannot be established. And if he was, why did he stand? Did he think it was the national hymn (a common speculation)? Did he simply need to stretch his legs? Had he arrived late? By tradition, if the king stood, so would the whole audience, so it’s entirely possible that this is how the practice got started.

Should we stand today? What relevance has it in a performance of Messiah? In fact the issue is one that can lead to hot debates. (Here’s a summary of one: http://www.festival-singers.org.nz/haleluia.htm) Some conductors actually print in the program a request that the audience remain seated. At one time, I would have been inclined to do the same: after all, there is no intrinsic musical reason why the audience should stand up there. Lately, though, I’m less prepared to be dogmatic about this. Standing for the “Hallelujah!” connects today’s listeners to a long line of audiences who have done the same. It is a little moment of communion with the generations of people who have heard and loved the piece. It’s also kind of fun to be among the knowing—those who realize that there is such a tradition. If you’re a purist, you’ll probably want to stay in your seat. If you’re feeling a little weary of sitting in the pews, you might want to take the opportunity to stand and stretch your legs. Either way is OK by us.

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What of other traditions in Messiah? Well, for the ones that actually affect how the piece sounds, I’m a little more intent on doing what I think is right. Here are a few of them:

Size of the chorus. Not long after Handel’s death, it became fashionable to put on performances of Messiah with enormous forces, sometimes numbering into the thousands. Well into the twentieth century, Messiah was treated like a grand nineteenth-century work, sung by a huge symphonic chorus, accompanied by a full-sized orchestra. The problem with this approach is that it slows everything down. What ought to be dancelike and fleet becomes ponderous and stodgy. So I favor the use of a smaller chorus. We’re using about 60 singers, which is probably the largest choir I’d feel comfortable with in this music. In the spring of 2008, I’ll conduct it again with the ASU Chamber Singers, a group of 25-30 singers, which is about the size of Handel’s typical chorus.
Harpsichord or organ? There is pretty solid evidence that Handel used both kinds of instruments together in his performances. The harpsichord was the support player (continuo instrument) for the orchestra, and the organ supported the choir. We will use both.

Recitatives. Those short little bits of narrative for the soloists can actually present a heap of problems: what instruments should accompany? How long do they hold the notes? How strict is the singer’s rhythm? When does the accompaniment play the cadences? So here’s what we’re doing:

Following an eighteenth-century account, we are using only the harpsichord and one cello to accompany the “secco” recitatives—no double bass.
The same source says that the cellist didn’t hold the notes out in the bass line, so we’re playing them short.
The singer’s rhythm should be natural and speechlike.
Cadences will occur as Handel wrote them, usually overlapping the last notes of the singer. A tradition arose of “delaying” them—waiting until after the singer finished to play the final cadence. Bach writes almost all of his recitatives this way, and I suspect it’s a slight prejudice for the supremacy of Bach that leads some performers to think that Handel wanted them to sound the same, even though he didn’t write them that way. I figure you can’t go wrong doing what the composer wrote.

Ornamentation and improvisation. There is some belief that Handel’s oratorio singers, especially the English ones, were not as adept at ornamentation as were the opera singers of the day, and that may be why there are fewer da capo arias (which more or less require ornamentation) in the oratorios. That said, we have a group of very experienced Messiah singers for this performance, and if they engage in flights of vocal fancy, I won’t try to stop them! Good Baroque ornamentation takes into account the way that the composers portray the words in the music, so it’s better to put a decoration on the word “crooked” than it is to put one on the word “straight,” for example. We are adding trills at the cadences (and elsewhere), and of course the harpsichord and organ players have to fill in their parts from just the bass line, so there’s at least some ornamentation and improvisation, as is appropriate in Baroque style.
Original instruments vs. modern instruments. I’d love to conduct an original instrument performance of Messiah someday, but then I’d want a choir of men and boys to go with the early instrument orchestra—that would be most authentic. We’ve learned a great deal about how Baroque music should sound from the historical performance movement. But I firmly believe we can apply those lessons without using early instruments or replicas of them. We are using Baroque-style bowings and articulations, and we are also using what I think of as Baroque tempos (clearly a subjective judgment). We’re also trying to make the sound as transparent as possible so that you can hear the moving lines. That’s the spirit of what we’ve learned from the early music movement.
Altered rhythms. At one time, it was taken for granted that Baroque music didn’t sound the way it was written, and you were almost like a member of a secret society if you knew how to do not what was on the page, but what you were “supposed” to do. There was a complicated “code” of altering the written rhythms, and especially of lengthening dotted notes. In the late 1970s, however, musicologist Frederick Neumann began to question this practice. He found very little credible evidence for consistent rhythmic alteration. I must say, I found Professor Neumann’s arguments (and he made them strenuously) far more convincing than those of the other side. So I don’t alter rhythms in Handel’s music or that of any other Baroque composer. We do what’s on the page. You’re most likely to notice it in the overture, in “Behold the Lamb of God,” and in “Surely he hath borne our griefs,” where we do no double-dotted rhythms.

The main task of the performers, it seems to me, is to look at the music with fresh eyes and listen with fresh ears. We need to ask ourselves the same questions of this very familiar music that we would ask of a work we didn’t know: what is the composer trying to do here? Why? How do the choices in the music make the drama and the text more vivid? Anything that allows us to focus on those things makes for a better performance. When possible, we ought to do it within the confines of the piece that Handel wrote and the ways he would have performed it. But we can allow ourselves a little latitude without leaving the realm of good taste. That’s the goal. The first task is often to put aside the way we think it goes from years of hearing it a particular way and looking at what Jennens and Handel composed. Reproducing that clearly and faithfully, but not mechanically, is likely to yield a lively and engaging performance. We hope that you will agree.