If you could only choose one song to listen to for the rest of your life, what would it be? I posed this question to friends and family a few years back.
Leaving room for the possibility that your choice could likely change over the course of time, for me—as I thought about my response—I didn’t have to deliberate.
If I could only choose one song to listen to for the rest of my life it would be a selection written by a well-known German-British baroque composer, famed for his operas, oratorios, anthems, and organ concertos.
Born 36 days before Johann Sebastian Bach, this composer’s inauspicious 17th century early childhood was anything but supportive of music. His father, an eminent barber-surgeon, made sure no musical instrument entered their German household and he forbade his young son from visiting any house that had instruments. His mother, however, managed to install a small clavichord (a small keyboard instrument with a very soft sound) in the family’s attic and, at the age of 5, the young musical prodigy would practice on the sly –you might say– when his father went to sleep.
By the time he was 9, he began composing converted sacred cantatas for voices and instruments and did so every week for three years successively.
Then, nine days before his twelfth birthday, his father, who was 63 years of age at the time of his son’s birth, died at the age of 74 –remarkably, the same age at which his son would greet death 62 years into the future.
When the young musician reached the age of 18, he decided to commit himself completely to music, accepting a violinist’s position at the Hamburg Opera’s Goose Market Theater, Germany’s oldest public opera house.
Three years later, at the age of 21, he found himself in Rome, where his virtuosity so stunned an aristocratic audience at his first public appearance that some suggested there was “magic attached to his hat.”
You’ve probably figured out who this composer is by now; if not, he is George Frideric Handel whose compositions reached from court to theater, from cathedral to tavern, and were performed by the greatest musicians of the era as well as the lonely spinster sitting at her keyboard. Handel’s music was heard not just at coronations, royal funerals, and celebrated cathedrals, but also as background to daily life.
Handel was 56 years old when the Duke of Devonshire, serving as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, commissioned Handel to write a new oratorio based on a biblical text assembled by Handel’s close friend Charles Jennens.
Jennens, an enigmatic character, had an enormous influence on Handel’s life and work. His carefully chosen scripture selection was to inspire Handel to even greater creative heights. Together these two men created one of the preeminent musical works of all time: Messiah. Written in 1741, it debuted at the Great Music Hall in Dublin in April 1742, creating a deep impression. Proceeds from the performance secured the release of 142 indebted prisoners.
Handel’s score is recognized as a magnificent achievement, a seeming miracle itself, composed and orchestrated as it was in only 24 days. Especially given the fact that Handel was recovering from what is thought to have been a stroke he suffered in 1737; a stroke that caused Handel to lose the use of four of the fingers on his right hand.
Messiah’s global reach is nowhere more evident than in the popularity of the “Hallelujah Chorus,” which may be the best-known piece of classical music ever written.
My choice for the one song I would listen to for the rest of my life, however, comes from the twelfth movement in Part 1, Scene 3 of the Messiah: “For Unto Us a Child is Born” the text taken from the prophet Isaiah’s words in the Old Testament book, Isaiah 9:6, “For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.”
American statesman and Founding Father James Madison, in composing his argument in defense of a proposed national constitution that would establish a structure of “checks and balances between the different departments” of the government and, as a result, constrain the government’s oppression of the public, penned the following paragraph, which comes close to being a short course in political science:
“But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government.”
Understanding government’s intended role, I have sat in cathedrals in Montreal and Quebec, The Basilica of Saint Mary in Minneapolis, Orchestra Hall and countless auditoriums listening to Handel’s inspired compositions. Whenever I hear “For Unto Us a Child is Born,” …I weep, just as Handel must have wept when he attended what would be his final performance of the Messiah at Covent Garden eight days before his death …the familiar layers of ascending and escalating melodies he had notated on manuscripts nearly two decades earlier; lyrics paired with harmonizations that conveyed messages of eternal hope to a man who had succumbed to blindness and the frailties of old age.
On Saturday, April 14, 1759, Handel retired to his bed in his home at 25 Brook Street (now Handel’s museum). He must have known death was at hand and his thoughts turned to the close friends and associates he had made over nearly five decades of residence in his adopted English homeland. The baroque composer and organist was 74 years of age at the time of his death.
Ellen T. Harris, author of “George Frideric Handel – A Life with Friends,” writes: “Handel’s music from the 1740s and 1750s, dealing with friendship, religion, death, and reputation, offers rare insight into his own deeply held convictions. Handel’s professional and compositional choices illuminate the composer in a far more intimate light than we might ever have imagined. Seen through the subjects and counter-subjects of his life and the lives of his friends, his music speaks to us vividly of the man–not, of course, of his transitory mental or emotional state when composing, but rather of his ingrained values, attitudes, and beliefs. In the end, it is Handel’s creative response to text and circumstance in his music that permits us this glimpse of the private composer, hiding in full view behind his public persona.”
Accorded high esteem by fellow composers, both in his own time and since, Handel’s legacy to posterity was his music. J.S. Bach declared, “[Handel] is the only person I would wish to see before I die, and the only person I would wish to be, were I not Bach.” (The two countrymen never met although both were born in the same year.) Mozart is reputed to have said of him, “Handel understands effect better than any of us. When he chooses, he strikes like a thunder bolt,” and to Beethoven he was “the master of us all …the greatest composer that ever lived. I would uncover my head and kneel before his tomb.”
In 1762 a larger-than-life monument by the renowned sculptor Roubiliac, showing the composer holding his manuscript of “I know that my Redeemer liveth” with a score of Messiah open next to him, was erected to mark Handel’s grave.
In 1911 King George V entrusted Handel’s autograph manuscripts to the British Museum as part of the Royal Music Library.
The composer’s own assessment, more than any other, may best capture his personal aspirations for his well-loved work. Following the first London performance of Messiah, Lord Kinnoul congratulated Handel on the excellent entertainment. Handel replied, “My Lord, I should be sorry if I only entertain them. I wish to make them better.”
Former Cook County Commissioner Garry Gamble is writing this ongoing column about the various ways government works.
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