Handlel

My main book of research was Handel’s Messiah: A Touchstone of Taste. The book is a journey throughout Handel’s life that explores Handel’s many oratorios, and discusses them in, for the most part, great detail. The author utilizes many of Handel’s other works in comparison to Messiah.

Handel was a huge part of our Baroque era discussion in class, and was our main composer for oratorios for that era. We had a lot of information on Handel, and I thought with so much information about one man and his works, he must be important. On a personal note, I became interested in this piece when I subbed for a trombone player in Indianapolis. That may not sound significant to the topic, but I subbed in a “production” of Messiah, and was floored when I heard the choir. This piece has always been an interest of mine. Not particularly on where it came from but to perform it. I fell in love with the music and have since wanted to play or even sing on a concert that has this piece in it.

I really enjoyed the book by Myers for the most part. The detail of Myers’ book was rather extensive, and really made me feel like I was learning something. The author goes through a brief history of the “oratorio”, states what it was used for, and also lets you know why he thinks Handel wrote many oratorios. “Oratorio offered the composer a convenient medium between church music and theatrical music.”(Myers 35) The content explored many different aspects of how this magnificent piece came about. The information was organized in chronological order, which made the book easier to read. The information flowed smoothly and was very easy to follow and not get bored. The attention to detail was very impressive. The amount of facts and little quotes that the author was able to come up with made the book much more enjoyable to read.

My main source was published in 1948 and the other book I read was published in 1992. There is a large gap and more information could have been recovered, documents could have been lost, etc. Richard Luckett, the author of the complimentary book, had much more of a “story” in his book about Handel and Messiah. In comparison, Myers had more detail about the work Messiah and Luckett had the story of how it came to be. In Luckett’s book he discussed the fact that Handel didn’t want to write anything at the time he wrote Messiah. July Charles Jennens was the main convincer of Handel to write another oratorio based on the subject Messiah. Jennens wrote the original text for Messiah, and later was revised a little by Handel but for the majority it was kept the same. Both books cover the same topic but from somewhat different viewpoints. As previously