Charles Jennens: The Man Behind Handel's Messiah

"So much of Handel’s music is setting of words – like all composers of drama. The pieces are very much collaborations, and how a composer chooses their wordsmiths – their librettists – is a key feature of musical history. Some have chosen to do it themselves, like Wagner , so they have complete control over the artwork. But most haven’t. In that case, they are to a certain extent at the mercy of their librettists, and composers haven’t always been as scrupulous as they might be about getting the best results. Handel’s librettists do vary, there’s no doubt about that. Again, often this is a question of practicality. He worked with a man called Miller on Joseph and His Brethren , one of his lesser-known oratorios, but Miller then died. So he turned back to Jennens. Jennens was a fascinating character, again revealing a different side of 18th century thought. He was much more high class than Handel, he was landed gentry with a beautiful big house. He was well-travelled, highly educated, but he also had a rather checkered background: he was a Non-Juror, so he refused to accept the legitimacy of the Hanoverian kings, which meant he wasn’t able to have any official position in Court or anything of that kind; he was essentially a man of leisure. “Jennens said Handel wrote Messiah too quickly, and that parts of it were no good, and the overture was no good” He was also – though clearly you have to be a bit careful about making medical diagnoses from 200 years’ distance – probably a depressive. He clearly had significant mood swings, he was very prickly and his letters are kind of funny sometimes in how readily he takes offence. He sees plots against him all the time. Handel is well-known himself to be short-tempered and rather grumpy, but comes across in their correspondence as rather more diplomatic. Jennens was a great letter writer. There’s lots of correspondence from Jennens to his friend Edward Holdsworth, who travelled to Europe a lot. On one occasion Jennens described Handel ‘having maggots in his brain,’ a great expression. They worked together on an oratorio on the subject of Saul, which is one of my favourite Handel works. It’s absolutely wonderful. But Jennens said Handel wrote Messiah too quickly, and he would take a whole year over it, and parts of it are no good, and the overture’s no good, and ‘I told him what bits he needs to change,’ all this kind of stuff. Handel wrote to Jennens from Dublin, where Messiah was performed; he said ‘your oratorio Messiah has been a great success’ – being very diplomatic in referring to it as your oratorio. But the important thing about Jennens was that he was a very good poet. The libretto of Saul is terrific, it’s very dramatic and it moves from this corporate universal expression to these moments of intense personal expression. In Messiah , he didn’t write the libretto, but he selected it from the scriptures. It’s important to recognise that this is completely unlike anything else, really, before or since. It’s called Messiah , and it tells the story of Christ. But it’s not a narrative; it’s not like the Passions of Bach . The name of Jesus is hardly mentioned at all. It assumes that the listener already knows the story, and what it provides is a sort of commentary on the meaning and the significance of this story. And it does it in a beautiful, very moving and well-structured way. Which suited Handel’s musical genius perfectly. It is an extraordinary achievement. There’s lots of little details, like how he would combine together two bits of text from different parts of the Bible, and maybe he might have to change a verb… For example, in the alto aria, the emotional centre of the piece is – He was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. Then the middle section is: He gave his back to the smiters Which comes from a different place in the book of psalms, where it reads, “ I gave my back to the smiters.” So he’s changed it to make it fit with the other piece of text that he’s chosen. That’s right. Yes. He wrote it first, then sent it to Handel. There’s correspondence where Handel acknowledges receiving it, and says he will take it on a trip to Tunbridge Wells, of all places. Well, as I say, her background is that she wrote about 18th century thought. The oratorio is a crucial link into the whole current of Enlightenment thought. Presenting sacred stories as human dramas, I see that as a key aspect of Enlightenment thinking, rather than the older, more old-fashioned, wholesome, catholic – if you like – presentation of fixed texts. She describes the character of the man so well, his wide circle of friendship, and puts him in the context of the Enlightenment, politics and finance, his family. Also, she brings out the importance of Jennens to Messiah . It really brought home to me the extent to which this work is by Handel and Jennens , even though Jennens didn’t actually write the words – because the whole shape, the whole direction was Jennens’s creation. And it is a remarkable one. That’s what that book has done so well. It’s also beautifully produced. One of the wonderful things about reading about the 18th century is that you have such an enormous wealth of visual artefacts that go with it. There are some wonderful portraits of Handel by Thomas Hudson – actually, one of them commissioned by Jennens, who could afford it – and indeed of Jennens himself, and pictures of the wonderful houses and the churches and the places that they worked. That’s important to me in a book, it brings the whole atmosphere of the kind of circles that these people moved in to life. And, again, another contrast with Bach, actually, who lived in the small town of Leipzig. Therefore there is only one portrait of Bach, and it’s not very good. It affects how we think about him, because we can’t see him. He was certainly well-off, yes. I mean, typical musician, he had his ups and downs, that’s for sure. He was very much at the mercy of fashion, and changes of pace, things like that. There were periods when his finances went into a bit of a tailspin, but by the end of his life, he was certainly comfortably off. His house in Brook Street, now a museum , is a very fine Georgian townhouse."