Handel’s Messiah was first performed 275 years ago this week, the April 13, 1742 premiere taking place in Dublin’s New Music Hall before a distinguished and appreciative audience — though perhaps a crowded one, as the 700 ladies and gentlemen attending were asked, as a space-saving measure, to leave their hoop skirts and swords at home. For one rapt reviewer, the combination of Handel’s music with the biblical text compiled by Charles Jennens was a marriage made in heaven: “The Sublime, the Grand, and the Tender adapted to the most elevated, majestic, and moving words conspired to transport and charm the ravished Heart and Ear.”
Sublimity was an issue, given that the Messiah premiered on Easter weekend. Originally scheduled for April 12th, the premiere had been delayed a day by “persons of Distinction.” Possibly those persons preferred April 13th because it was Good Friday; possibly they had to do a little more arm-twisting on Dean Jonathan Swift of St. Paul’s Cathedral. Asked to permit members of his choir to participate in the Messiah, Swift had initially refused on the grounds that the music hall, situated among the shops and pubs of central Dublin, was but “a club of fiddlers in Fishamble Street.”
In George Frideric Handel: A Life with Friends, Ellen T. Harris notes that the composer’s unrivaled popularity in England, his home from 1712 until his death in 1759, was based on his ability to bridge the sacred and the secular:
In London, the sound of his music reached from court to theater, from cathedral to tavern, and was performed by the greatest virtuosi of the era as well as the lonely spinster sitting at her keyboard. It served not just at coronations but as a background to daily life . . . In 1732, the first public performance of Handel’s Esther occurred at the Crown and Anchor Tavern, and from 1739, his biblical oratorios in English, commencing with Saul and Israel in Egypt, began to represent, even in some ways to create, the national Protestant identity in Great Britain.
As elsewhere in the West, Britain’s religious identity is now more diverse than in Handel’s day. The religious scholar Diana Butler Bass is not among those who lament the diversity and what has evolved from it. Her recent Grounded: Finding God in the World — A Spiritual Revolution pursues the argument introduced in her earlier Christianity after Religion — the idea that a world “spiritual but not religious” is preferable to a religious world that is highly sectarian. Turning our attention away from the decline of organized religion in the West and the rise of fundamentalist belief elsewhere, Bass notes that a shift in religious consciousness has brought “a reenchantment of the world, a spiritual revolution”:
We no longer live isolated behind boundaries of ethnicity, race, or religion. We are connected in global community. We search the Internet for answers; we ask our Buddhist or Hindu neighbors; we read our own sacred texts and the texts of others; we listen to preachers from the world’s religions. Answers are no longer confined to the opinions of a local priest, mullah, rabbi, or guru. The answers depend on us figuring this out together.
In Grounded, Bass happily exchanges “top-down religions” for “a rebirthing of faith from the ground up.” In Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People, Nadia Bolz-Weber takes us along on her spiritual road trip — a bumpy, many-detoured, and funny ride in search of, or hoping to inspire, ground-up faith. Bolz-Weber says that it is a trip that she and her congregation at House for All Sinners and Saints in Denver, Colorado take daily:
We see a need, we fill it. We fuck up, we say sorry. We ask for grace and prayers when we need them (a lot). Jesus shows up for us through each other. We eat, we pray, we sing, we fall, we get up, repeat. Not that complicated.
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Sig Nordal 