[MLUG - DISCUSSION] [RELIGION] Unsettling History of That Joyous 'Hallelujah'

[Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

Interesting article slated for Sunday.  And don't forget that the famous 
slogan "The Jews must work" (translated from the German of course), was 
not brought to you first by Adolph Hitler but by Martin Luther.  --Mike

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http://select.nytimes.com/preview/2007/04/08/arts/1154671352477.html

N.Y. Times
April 8, 2007

Unsettling History of That Joyous 'Hallelujah'

By MICHAEL MARISSEN

IN New York and elsewhere a "Messiah Sing-In" -- a performance of Handel's 
oratorio "Messiah" with the audience joining in the choruses -- is a 
musical highlight of the Christmas season. Christians, Jews and others 
come together to delight in one of the consummate masterpieces of Western 
music.

The high point, inevitably, is the "Hallelujah" chorus, all too familiar 
from its use in strange surroundings, from Mel Brooks's "History of the 
World, Part 1," where it signified the origins of music among cavemen, to 
television advertising for behemoth all-terrain vehicles.

So "Messiah" lovers may be surprised to learn that the work was meant not 
for Christmas but for Lent, and that the "Hallelujah" chorus was designed 
not to honor the birth or resurrection of Jesus but to celebrate the 
destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple in A.D. 70. For most 
Christians in Handel's day, this horrible event was construed as divine 
retribution on Judaism for its failure to accept Jesus as God's promised 
Messiah.

While Handel scholars and enthusiasts say repeatedly that significant 
numbers of Jews attended the original performances of Handel's oratorios, 
they offer no compelling evidence. Most Jews in 18th-century London were 
too poor to attend such concerts, and observant Jews would in any event 
have balked at the public use of the sacred, unutterable name of God in 
the oratorios, even though "Jehovah" was a Christian misunderstanding of 
the prohibited name.

Handelians often assert too that the composer's practice of writing 
oratorios on ancient Israelite subjects (like "Israel in Egypt" and "Judas 
Maccabaeus") is pro-Jewish. Handel and his contemporaries did have a high 
opinion of the characters populating the Hebrew Bible, not as "Jews" but 
as proto-Christian believers in God's expected Messiah, Jesus.

But what about their stance toward living Jews and toward Judaism after 
the advent of Jesus? Relevant contemporary British sources have virtually 
nothing positive to say on that subject and very little that is even 
neutral.

To create the "Messiah" libretto Charles Jennens, a formidable scholar and 
a friend of Handel's, compiled a series of scriptural passages adapted 
from the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Version of the Bible. As 
a traditionalist Christian, Jennens was deeply troubled by the spread of 
deism, the notion that God had simply created the cosmos and let it run 
its course without divine intervention.  Christianity then as now rested 
on the belief that God broke into history by taking human form in Jesus. 
For Jennens and others, deism represented a serious menace.

Deists argued that Jesus was neither the son of God nor the Messiah. Since 
Christian writers had habitually considered Jews the most grievous enemies 
of their religion, they came to suppose that deists obtained 
anti-Christian ammunition from rabbinical scholars. The Anglican bishop 
Richard Kidder, for example, claimed in his huge 1690s treatise on Jesus 
as the Messiah that "the deists among us, who would run down our revealed 
religion, are but underworkmen to the Jews."

Kidder's title says it all: "A Demonstration of the Messias, In Which the 
Truth of the Christian Religion Is Proved, Against All the Enemies 
Thereof; but Especially Against the Jews." Jennens owned an edition from 
1726, and he appears to have studied it carefully. Kidder's work reads 
like a blueprint for "Messiah."

Central to Kidder and his like-minded readers is a mode of interpretation 
called "typology," which means that events in the Old Testament point to 
events in Christian history not only through explicit prophecy and 
fulfillment but also through the more mysterious implied spiritual 
anticipation of Christian "antitypes" in Old Testament "types."

At Romans 5:14, for example, the Apostle Paul describes Adam as a "type" 
of "the one to come" (Jesus, the antitype).

Such thinking was the driving force behind Kidder's book and Jennens's 
choice and juxtaposition of texts in his libretto. In "Messiah" Old and 
New Testament selections stand fundamentally in a typological alignment.

Jennens had the discernment to see that he couldn't thwart his adversaries 
simply by producing reading matter insisting that biblical texts be 
understood both typologically and as Jesus-centered. Like Arius, who won 
popular opinion for his views with catchy anti-orthodox jingles in the 
fourth century, Jennens resorted to music, approaching Handel with his 
libretto.

What better means to comfort disquieted Christians against the 
faith-busting wiles of deists and Jews than to draw on the feelings and 
emotions of art over and above the reasons and revelations of argument?

"Messiah" does exactly this, culminating in the "Hallelujah" chorus. At 
Scene 6 in Part 2 the oratorio features passages from Psalm 2 of the Old 
Testament set as a series of antagonistic movements that precede excerpts 
from the New Testament's Book of Revelation set as the triumphant 
"Hallelujah" chorus: type and antitype, prophecy and fulfillment.

The bass aria that opens Scene 6 asks, "Why do the nations so furiously 
rage together, and why do the people imagine a vain thing?"  But in the 
King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, the passage, Psalm 2:1, 
reads not "nations" but "heathen." Why the difference, and where does it 
come from?

Jennens took his reading from Henry Hammond, the great 17th-century 
Anglican biblical scholar, whose extended and fiercely erudite commentary 
on Psalm 2 suggests the advantage of "nations" over "heathen": "Nations" 
can readily include the Jews. In the 18th century no one would have 
uncritically used the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer's 
word "heathen" for Jews or Judaism. Even children would have known this, 
from the famous hymn writer Isaac Watts's wildly popular "Divine Songs for 
the Use of Children," which includes the verse "Lord, I ascribe it to thy 
Grace, /And not to Chance, as others do, /That I was born of Christian 
race, /And not a Heathen or a Jew."

Handel sets Psalm 2:1 as an aria drawing on the stile concitato (agitated 
style), with repeated 16th notes as a convention for violent affects to 
underline the raging of the nations, pointedly including the Jews. "The 
people," when they "imagine a vain thing," are further associated with a 
conspicuous violin line of oscillating pitches.

A similar melodic idea depicts the Jews in the earlier recitative "All 
they that see him laugh him to scorn; they shoot out their lips, and shake 
their heads." The recitative sets Psalm 22:7, a text that can be 
understood (typologically) to foreshadow a New Testament passage, Matthew 
27:39-40, which refers to Jewish pilgrims attending Passover and Jesus on 
the cross: "They that passed by, reviled him, wagging their heads." The 
oscillating pattern and its scornful tone capture the Jews' rejection of 
Jesus as the Messiah.

Later in Scene 6, at the tenor aria, Jennens skips to Psalm 2:9, "Thou 
shalt break them with a rod of iron." His excision of verses 5 through 8 
makes the violent language in "Thou shalt break them" refer to the 
Jesus-rejecting Jews, because without the intervening verses, "them" 
refers to "the nations" (including the Jews) and "the people" (the Jews) 
of the bass aria, rather than the gentiles referred to in the missing 
Verse 8.

If Jews make up "them," who is the "thou"? Jesus, as John Newton explains 
in his 1786 book "Messiah: Fifty Sermons on the Celebrated Oratorio of 
Handel": The resurrected Jesus, sitting at the right hand of God, 
unleashed his anger on the Jews by having the Roman armies lay waste to 
Jerusalem and its temple in A.D. 70.

Newton is best known today as the author of the hymn "Amazing Grace," and 
he is a central figure in the film of that name now in theaters, in which 
he is portrayed as repenting his devotion to the slave trade in the 1780s. 
But his grace apparently wasn't amazing enough to curb the constant 
affirmation of anti-Jewish sentiment in his "Messiah" sermons.

Here he comments, "The music to which Psalm 2:9 is set is so well adapted 
to the idea that it expresses, as, in a manner, to startle those who hear 
it." In Jennens and Handel's time, Christians were all but unanimous in 
believing that the violence depicted in Psalm 2:9 represented the 
prophesying type for a later event: the destruction of Jerusalem and its 
temple, the fulfilling antitype. So when Jennens has brought in Psalm 2 
and its understood prophecy of the destruction of the temple, widely 
understood as signaling God's rejection of Judaism, what is the response? 
"Hallelujah! for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth; the kingdom of this 
world is become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ" (Revelation 
19:6, 19:16 and 11:5).

Jennens undoubtedly got the idea of juxtaposing these passages directly 
from Hammond, who wrote: "Now at Revelation 11 is fulfilled that prophecy 
of Psalm 2. The Jewish nation have behaved themselves most stubbornly 
against Christ, and cruelly against Christians, and God's judgments are 
come upon them." This is surely how listeners would have understood the 
combination of these texts in 18th-century Britain.

Handel's music makes its own contribution to the troubling theological 
message here. The mood of the "Hallelujah" chorus is over-the-top triumph.

For the first time in "Messiah" trumpets and drums are used together, 
although they would have been appropriate or welcome at several earlier 
places. In Baroque music trumpets with drums were emblems of great power 
and of victory. In "Messiah" the combination is saved for celebrating the 
destruction of Jesus' crucifixion-provoking "enemies" prefigured in Psalm 
2.

With Old Israel supposedly rejected by God and its obsolescence long 
before ensured, why did 18th-century writers and composers rejoice against 
Judaism at all, whether explicitly or, as here, implicitly?  There must 
have been some festering Christian anxiety about the prolonged survival of 
Judaism: How could a "false" religion last so long? Might Judaism somehow 
actually be "true"?

These issues were a matter of life and death, says Jennens's key guide, 
Kidder's tome: "If we be wrong in dispute with the Jews, we err 
fundamentally, and must never hope for salvation. So that either we or the 
Jews must be in a state of damnation. Of such great importance are those 
matters in dispute between us and them."

This would represent ample motivation for the text and musical setting of 
"Messiah" to engage these issues and would perhaps help explain any lapse 
from decent Christian gratitude into unseemly rejoicing in the 
"Hallelujah" chorus.

While still a timely, living masterpiece that may continue to bring 
spiritual and aesthetic sustenance to many music lovers, Christian or 
otherwise, "Messiah" also appears to be very much a work of its own era. 
Listeners might do well to ponder exactly what it means when, in keeping 
with tradition, they stand during the "Hallelujah" chorus.


Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

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