Last month I performed Georg Friedrich Händel’s Messiah, together with Coro Polifonico Santo Spirito. This was my second time, first being in 2004. It is believed that it took Händel just 24 days to compose this impressive oratorio but the vocal score is more than 300 pages long so – after five years – I had to study it again.
Like all great music, Messiah is easy to appreciate for anybody but then, when you have the opportunity to listen more carefully or to spend some time reading the score, you start to also appreciate the sophisticated structure and the musical inventions that lie behind it. Take for example this famous line from the fifth movement. The text says Thus saith the Lord of Hosts; Yet once, a little while and I will shake the heavens, and the earth, and the sea, and the dry land. Look at how the word shake is described in music with a sequence of fast vibrating notes, shaking from the bottom up to the Heaven, which is at the top of the line followed by the Earth at the bottom again.
This way of composing is called word painting. The idea is that you can use music to describe the meaning of the words being sung and Messiah makes extensive use of this technique. In fact Messiah is one of the examples most used when explaining what word painting is.
Another good example is in the 22nd movement: And with his stripes we’re healed. The main theme is C A D E with a dissonant interval on the last two notes corresponding on the words his stripes. If you look better at the notes and try to connect C-E and A-D you will see this is a cross. Every time the theme kicks in, we can see like a whip hitting the chest of Jesus and cutting through his flesh. If the conductor wants to highlight this effect even more he can ask the choir to indulge on the consonant group str, making the actual note a little delayed. Of course after the cross we are healed lies on a rising scale that, like a resurrection, will save us all.
I could go ahead and show you all the tricks I found but at the end of the day they are not important. The important thing is how beautiful is this music when you listen to it and the warm and powerful feelings it can convey. After silence what comes closer to express the inexpressible is music.
