Which composer wrote messiah

Perhaps the primary considerations that prevented Handel from planning Messiah for a grander-sized chorus and orchestra were simply the cost, the difficulty of assembling such ensembles at the time, and the lack of a hall big enough to accommodate them.

At the start of the 19th century, the conditions were ripe for even larger performances of Messiah. And not only in London, where the newly built Exeter Hall could hold larger ensembles and crowds, but also at the cathedral choral festivals that took place in York, Worcester, Gloucester, Hereford, Birmingham, and other locations around the country. In , Mozart created a notably richer orchestration of Messiah , adding classical woodwinds and brass to the ensemble, heavily editing the dynamics and articulations, and even changing some notes and rhythms.

With winds and brass doubling the choral parts, hundreds of amateur choristers could better hear their notes in the orchestra, and the additional instruments contributed greater weight and timbral variety than could be achieved merely by adding more strings. By the middle of the 19th century, Messiah performances occasionally reached gargantuan proportions. Most musicians of the day understood perfectly well the disadvantages of trying to perform on such an exaggerated Romantic scale a work conceived in baroque style.

The more spectacular the performance, and the more people involved in it, the better the chances that those two goals would be met. By the end of the 19th century, some music critics began to issue very public calls for a return to an authentically Handel-styled Messiah , indicating an imminent sea-change in tastes. Chamber-sized performances of Messiah did start to appear again in the early 20th century, though the larger ensembles still dominated.

Ebenezer Prout produced a much-used and later, much-maligned edition of Messiah in that was intended to facilitate festival performances by these massed amateur choirs and orchestras. During the 20th century, this growing interest in baroque performance practices, with the explicit goal of producing sounds that Handel himself may have recognized, fundamentally inflected performances of Messiah.

But these new versions by professional early-music specialists sometimes wanted for the kind of straightforward lay humanity that had attended Messiah throughout most of its history. Over the course of its history, the work has revealed a variety of potent strengths through each of its distinct performance traditions.

The exhilarating palette of the Early Music movement is now an integral part of the Messiah soundscape. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Search uDiscover Music. Format: UK English. Click to comment. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. Continue Reading. You may like. Don't Miss. See more Handel Guides.

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