Opinion | Handel’s ‘Messiah,’ an Anthem of Hope, Was Born of a Contentious Friendship

When Charles Jennens, a wealthy art collector, first heard the work we now refer to as Handel’s “Messiah” in 1743, a year after it premiered, he came away thoroughly miffed. “I don’t yet despair of making him retouch the ‘Messiah,’” Jennens wrote to a friend, imagining his own suggestions for revisions to a work that is now inseparable from the holiday season.

Handel was Britain’s foremost public composer and court musician to George II. But it turns out that “Messiah” wasn’t really Handel’s — or at least not only his. It was born of one of the least recognized partnerships in music history but one of significant artistry, the Enlightenment-era equivalent of George and Ira Gershwin or Elton John and Bernie Taupin. Handel wrote the music but the original idea and the libretto — “the book” as it would be called on Broadway — belonged wholly to Jennens.

“Messiah” has endured for centuries as a monument to the possibility of hope. The biblical texts it draws from tell a story of unity and redemption. Yet it came about only because of two creators who, throughout their adult lives, disagreed on issues from religion to the single thorniest political matter of their day, the legitimacy of the reigning British monarch.

From that fellowship of opposites sprang a work of music that still gets people to raise their voices together in song. The text and music of “Messiah” have inspired generations of listeners, but the history of its creation contains its own lesson: In a society riven by discord, art and friendship are the hidden workshops where we figure out how to narrow otherwise unbridgeable divides.

Handel was born the son of a “barber surgeon” and a much younger wife in a territory that would later become Germany. After an itinerant musical apprenticeship in Italy, he arrived as an immigrant in London at the height of a craze for Italian opera. He had a genius for melody and the rare ability to make an audience truly feel what was happening onstage. He reveled in a full table and a good joke, remained indifferent to religion until late in life and could swear creatively in at least four languages.

Jennens, by contrast, was a devout Anglican, a member of the English gentry and the heir to a considerable fortune. He suffered in his adult life from what physicians called “the hyp” — an enfolding, debilitating despair that we’d recognize today as chronic depression. He used his wealth for the one thing that seemed to provide relief: surrounding himself with European art, sculpture and musical manuscripts, many purchased directly from their creators. One of the oldest copies of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” would later turn up in his papers.

Among all Jennens’s enthusiasms, Handel held pride of place. It’s likely that the two first met when Jennens was in his early 30s and Handel in his late 40s and the two men developed a continuous but contentious friendship. They were a wealthy patron and his artistic idol, bound to each other by common passions and straightforward economics.

Jennens spent each London social season making his way from one Handel opera to the next. He purchased every piece of sheet music the composer had on offer, which he bound in leather volumes. Jennens even developed a sense of proprietary regard for Handel’s work — including feeling empowered to correct Handel when he believed his friend’s artistry had faltered. The maestro’s “head is more full of maggots than ever,” Jennens once complained to a relative.

Where Handel and Jennens differed most profoundly was over politics. Anyone alive at that time had good reason to believe that theirs was the most polarized age in history, since British society was split over who was the correct king. The reigning House of Hanover, German-speaking and securely Protestant, had succeeded an older royal line, the Stuarts, who leaned Catholic. Handel had served the Hanoverian kings loyally ever since George I’s accession in 1714, and when George II was crowned in 1727, it was Handel who provided the soundtrack that accompanied the royal procession in Westminster Abbey.

Jennens, by contrast, was part of the minority of British society convinced that the Hanoverians were illegitimate. The kingdom could be healed, he believed, only with the reseating of the Stuarts.

One troubled season, in a country ruled by what he viewed as the wrong king, Jennens sat down to write himself out of his despair. In his private library, he pulled down the King James Bible, and books on theology and philosophy. With a sharpened quill, he copied down quotations from the Hebrew prophets, the Psalms and the New Testament. He edited the passages and rearranged them, tying together themes that leaped out at him from the text — creating an archaeology of ancient promises that might clarify the muddled present.

When he finished, his plan was to send Handel this new “scripture collection,” as Jennens told a friend, in the hope that “he will lay out his whole genius and skill upon it.” As luck would have it, Handel needed new material, since he’d received an invitation to stage a series of concerts in Dublin. Over 24 days, Handel sketched out the music for “Messiah” using Jennens’s text, passed the manuscript to an assistant for final touches and then boarded a ship on the Irish Sea.

After the premiere of “Messiah” in a Dublin music hall on April 13, 1742, newspapers were rapturous. People in attendance praised this new “species of music different from any other,” as one bishop recalled. But when Jennens finally heard “Messiah,” he was less impressed. “Tis after all, in the main, a fine composition, notwithstanding some weak parts, which he was too idle and too obstinate to retouch,” Jennens wrote at the time. He had done what he could, he said, correcting errors in the printed libretto and cajoling Handel to rework bits of the music. His verdict was about as close to high praise as the temperamental, tortured Jennens was likely to come.

Even today, “Messiah” is still being edited. Nearly every performance is an altered version of the original, the tiresome bits removed, the famous “Hallelujah” chorus sometimes placed where it seems to belong — at the end — rather than where Handel put it, two-thirds of the way through.

Handel is interred at Westminster Abbey, memorialized by a sculpture of himself wrapped around the manuscript of “Messiah.” Jennens lies buried in a Warwickshire village church. A plaque on the wall lists the many charitable donations he had made but with no mention of his role in the making of “Messiah.” Yet Handel and Jennens’s unlikely collaboration, despite the political canyon that ran between them, produced one of the most moving and enduring pieces of music of all time.

Jennens wove bygone prophecies and personal anguish into a script. Handel transformed that script into eternal art. From “Comfort ye” near the top of the performance to the three-minute-long “Amen” at the end, “Messiah” still sounds fresh and unexpected because it came from the hands of two political enemies and irascible friends. Their common message, expressed in the language of faith, still plays well in our own secular age: We should never discount the staggering possibility that the world might yet turn out all right.

Charles King is a professor at Georgetown and the author of “Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s ‘Messiah.’”

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