Handel's Messiah and the Great Awakening

On the Reformation of Music, Culture, and Strangely Warmed Hearts

To the evangelical pietist, Handel’s “Messiah” presents a strangely warmed problem.

One of the paradoxes of evangelical history is the tension between cultural excellence and religious piety. We have often been suspicious of aesthetic excellence or complexity, opting instead for simplicity and heart-level devotional experience at all costs. To such attitudes, Handel’s Messiah offers a strangely warmed problem.

What is especially interesting to me is that this Jesus-centred masterpiece—performed every year in numerous choral performances in some of the most prestigious historic buildings in Britain—was composed at the very same time as the Great Awakening, where churches were springing up all across the highways and byways of this same nation not as a result of artistic brilliance but by the urgent preaching of the need for heart conversion to Christ. How did Handel’s immensely popular and immensely complex musical extravaganza “fit” with that revivalistic vision to awaken the dying embers of cultural Christianity to true salvation?

Did it even “fit” at all, or was it seen as part of the problem of stultified high Anglican culture which the Great Awakeners were challenging?

Handel’s Awakening in the Age of Reason

Well, for one thing it seems highly relevant that one reason the Great Awakening had such a dramatic impact on Britain and the US was its challenge to the malaise of the Enlightenment.

Though well prior to the destructive crescendo of the French Revolution, this was still “the Age of Reason” where many were beginning to turn their hearts and minds away from the “primitive” faith of their medieval and reformational forebears, embracing the brave new world of scientific progress and human autonomy. Whilst this may seem hope-filled, it was also culturally traumatic.

Into this increasingly secularising and despair-tinged context steps Handel and his cosmic operatic masterpiece which, even to this day, remains curiously unsurpassed. As Jan Swafford of The Atlantic writes in “The Genius of Handel’s Messiah”:

Reasons for the Messiah’s enduring power are manifold, though certainly they begin with the music itself, which manages to join the lofty and the populist, as does all of Handel’s work. In Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s Messiah, Charles King takes his cue from the oratorio’s ability to convey, era after era, “a transporting sense that something cosmic and profound was at stake, even when the cares of this world happened to intrude.” King, who embarked on the book during the pandemic, found renewed comfort in the Messiah’s arc, especially its message of hope in difficult times, starting with those first words: “Comfort ye.” He also felt moved to recover “the Messiah’s sheer weirdness” by exploring its origins in the murkier currents of what is remembered as the age of reason.

It seems that the sheer force of this masterpiece broke through the dim fog of the Age of Reason with blazes of unstoppable light. The libretto (words) was not arranged by Handel, of course, but by his poet friend, Charles Jennens, who was himself described as “a depressive man struggling to find his way toward hope and a return to a pre-Enlightenment vision of religion”.

He certainly seems to have found such hope in his writing of the libretto, which is essentially a selectively edited arrangement of passages from the King James Bible. Jennens is said to have delivered the libretto to Handel in a parcel, with a note claiming he had been inspired by God.

Handel was an Anglican of sorts, but was certainly no paragon of holiness, nor a heartfelt evangelical heaven-bent on converting lost souls to Christ. It is also said that, at first, he scoffed at Jennens’ notion of “divine inspiration” for the libretto. Yet it is clear that even Handel was markedly changed by the Messiah. He would never be the same again. Despite facing fluctuating finances (as did many composers of his time) he donated the proceeds from the performances of Messiah to charity, and he notably yearned to see people not merely entertained but affected by its substance.

Handel felt this way about it no doubt because the Messiah had affected him first. It had done something to him. It had “awakened” him, almost as if he had experienced the enthusiasms of a revival meeting.

The Messiah and the Great Awakeners

What did the Great Awakeners themselves make of the Messiah? Was Handel an ally to their cause, or a purveyor of distractive hindrances to the earnest “heart religion” which they sought to recover in that time? They are not obvious kindred spirits, but neither should they be thought of as mutual enemies. Could it even be said that, in Handel’s very different approach, there was at least as much evangelistic fervour as in one of Wesley’s famous sermons?

There is actually more direct interaction between Handel and the Wesleys than many people realise. Handel even composed music for some of Charles Wesley’s hymns, including, for example, “Rejoice, the Lord is King” (even if Handel’s tune is not ultimately the one most people sing today). Strangely enough, John Wesley himself was also present at the premiere of the Messiah in 1742. In his journal afterwards he said:

“There were some parts that were affecting but I doubt it has staying power.”

That is quite the understatement! But it at least records that Wesley saw something of what had affected Handel himself in this powerful presentation of these most cosmically “affecting” themes as those in Messiah.

The reality that required the Great Awakening, of course, is the same as that which faces the functional secularisation of choral evensong across Britain today. Beautiful music and beautiful words without a worshipful heart connection by the participants is repugnant to God. This is a perennial theme of Scripture, but perhaps captured most effectively by Isaiah (which was, notably enough, quoted by the Messiah Himself in Mark 7:6-8)

And the Lord said:
“Because this people draw near with their mouth
and honour me with their lips,
while their hearts are far from me,
and their fear of me is a commandment taught by men,
therefore, behold, I will again
do wonderful things with this people,
with wonder upon wonder;
and the wisdom of their wise men shall perish,
and the discernment of their discerning men shall be hidden.”

—Isaiah 29:13-14

This was effectively the heart-cry of the evangelical revivals: return to God; be reconciled to Him; throw everything away if it hinders your heart from knowing Him; renounce all manmade culture and wisdom if it would hinder your worship of Him. These have always been necessary things to remember and to put into action.

Handel’s Messiah could easily become seen as what Isaiah disdains as “the wisdom of the wise” too, if those who hear it merely appreciate its aesthetic appeal and ignore its substance. Perhaps this is why some less open-minded clergy at the time even considered the Messiah “a religious farce”, because it seemed to be playing with grand themes in a way that some worried would reduce the Word of God to mere theatrical entertainment.

But if you think about it, is this not the same as what might also happen with any great sermon too?

Sermons and Music

After all, even revival sermons can be admired purely for their rhetorical or emotional effects rather than their substance. We might consider, for example, those sermons of Wesley’s sometime compatriot George Whitefield, whose preaching was so aesthetically powerful and eloquent that even unbelievers of the Age of Reason like David Hume, would flock to hear him, not because they believed what he said, but because he did.

Notably, Wesley went back to see Messiah again, in 1758 at Bristol cathedral, after which he remarked not upon the piece itself but on the audience’s affected response to it in contrast to ecclesial preaching:

“I doubt if that congregation was ever so serious at a sermon as they were during this performance.”

This could be read either as a criticism of the hearts of the people, a criticism of the preachers of his time, or as a profound compliment to Handel!

Either way, Wesley’s response highlights again the tension between aesthetics and the heart. What is the meaning of a piece of art that may awaken the soul, as it appeared to do for Handel? Is such work necessary for God to work in this way? Or is God merely happy to use such art just as easily as he might use a piece of trash on the floor to remind us of our fallen state, or a sunset to remind us of eternal hope in Him?

The flattening out of what we do in culture as being essentially irrelevant to the kingdom of God is one of the problematic legacies in evangelical history we are still trying to unpick. This relates to the musicality of sermons as much as to the sermonic power of music. This is why Handel’s Messiah really does open up a plethora of other questions for evangelical churches to consider about the overflow of our hearts to the actions we take within this world, to the things we say, the things we sing, and the things we create and build for the blessing of future generations.

1. Why does Scripture instruct us to sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs?

2. Does God care about how melodic the music is, or are such concerns an inevitable heart distraction from true worship?

3. How can evangelical churches begin to take musical aesthetics seriously again without succumbing to the aesthetic idolatry often found in the secularised choral tradition (or the more subtly secularised soft rock band tradition of modern evangelical worship)?

4. Rather than slavishly following behind the culture in order to produce a poorer version of it c.5-7 years later, how might musical excellence help the Church lead the way in shaping culture again?

These are the kinds of questions discussed on a recent That Good Fight podcast on this topic. Building on a prior episode about the impact of different kinds of worship on congregational discipleship, in the episode below I sat down with special guest, Chris Horn, a trained chorister and conductor, to discuss some of these themes further. We talked particularly about the reintroduction of hymns and psalm-singing as well as the cultural significance of Handel’s Messiah, which Chris recently conducted for and with our church, to glorious effect.

Soli Deo Gloria!