Messiah

Staged Oratorio

“But who may abide the day of his coming?
And who shall stand when he appeareth?”

Messiah is Handel’s most ambitious work in scale: it doesn’t tell of an event in history, but of history itself – of the end of history, the end of time.

And yet, as an opera composer, Handel approaches the subject in the way he knows best: as a psychologist focused on the human perspective. He finds in the ancient messianic tradition – the idea that something or someone can and must interrupt all this madness, and that the signs of its coming are multiplying – nuances that feel very familiar in our day: hope of revolution and redemption blending with perverse delight in the idea of an apocalypse, or that very specific mixture of depression and burn out.

The ideological nature of Charles Jennens’ libretto, that perpetuates the old Christian retconning of the Jewish scriptures into prequels of the New Testament, is in itself redeemed by Handel’s psychological skill, and choice of offering a theatre not of the Messiah himself, but of the expectation of him, dramatized through four anonymous characters and a crowd, seen from up close but also as small figures in a vast landscape, like in the paintings of which Handel was a keen collector. The drama of the mind invented by Handel doesn’t grow old because, as Walter Benjamin reminded his contemporaries in the 20^th century, “each generation is given a weak messianic power,” the power to make a difference, and each birth is a chance for the world not to be the continuation of the exact same catastrophe. Messiah forces us to face the most terrifying prospect while waiting for the world to be destroyed and/​or redeemed: that we actually have to decide what happens next

Aleksi Barrière

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