Handel's 'Hallelujah' chorus: A malice toward Judaism? (oh the humanity!)

[Petr]

Got the link for this one from David Irving's site; he added in a cryptical English way, "They seek it there, they seek it here"... :p

I'm telling you, the Judaic fanatics are over-reaching themselves.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/23/arts/handel.php


Handel's 'Hallelujah' chorus: A malice toward Judaism?

By James R. Oestreich
Published: April 24, 2007


PRINCETON, New Jersey: It is a rare musicological debate that quickly rises to broader public attention. Two classic examples in recent decades took place at conventions of the American Musicological Society in Boston, and both involved not only volatile issues but also combative personalities. In 1981 Joshua Rifkin and Robert Marshall locked horns over the size of Bach's choruses, Mr. Rifkin arguing that Bach would typically have used only one singer per part. In 1998 bellicose defenders of the authenticity of the disputed claim that the book "Testimony" represented the actual "memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov" met with ferocious opposition from Richard Taruskin and others.

A panel discussion of the American Handel Festival 2007 here on Friday certainly had an explosive issue: Michael Marissen's thesis that "Messiah" and more specifically the "Hallelujah" chorus — perhaps the most sacrosanct and beloved totem in Western music, rivaled only by the "Ode to Joy" from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony — conveys malice toward Judaism. A boldly stated article by Mr. Marissen in The New York Times on April 8 drew considerable response from readers, from the saddened to the outraged. But for various reasons the fireworks here were relatively muted.

For one thing each of the two prime antagonists hid what appeared to be a steely resolve behind a soft-spoken, mostly polite manner. Mr. Marissen, a scholar at Swarthmore College who has devoted himself largely to examining what might be seen as anti-Judaic tendencies in works by Bach, argued the case against Handel at length. Ruth Smith, a Handel specialist at Cambridge University in England and the author of the landmark book "Handel's Oratorios and 18th-Century Thought," responded to the theological aspects of Mr. Marissen's thesis, disputing many assumptions and interpretations.

Wendy Heller, an associate professor of music at Princeton University and one of the organizers of the festival, which was held on campus, livened things up a bit with an animated response to the musical aspects of Mr. Marissen's argument. And members of the audience, which was laced with prominent Handel scholars, generated heat in the question-and-answer segment that followed.

But there were other factors that softened the confrontation, making direct hits difficult. The respondents had not seen Mr. Marissen's paper in time to tailor their own comments to it. By and large, they were responding to other versions of it, presented at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society in November; in the article in The Times, "Unsettling History of That Joyous 'Hallelujah' "; and in an extended article for The Journal of Musicology, as yet unpublished but available to the respondents in advance copies.

Mr. Marissen summarizes his argument in an abstract of the Journal article: "Scholars have too little investigated questions of religious meaning in Handel's 'Messiah,' particularly the work's manifest theological anti-Judaism. Previously unknown historical sources for the work's libretto compiled and arranged by Charles Jennens (1700-73) reveal the text's implicit designs against Jewish religion. Handel's musical setting powerfully underscores these tendencies of Jennens's libretto and adds to them, reaching a euphoric climax in the 'Hallelujah' chorus."

The issue, Mr. Marissen suggests, is not one of anti-Semitism per se but one of triumphalism, a rejoicing in the misfortune of the Jews, specifically with the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans in A.D. 70.

Mr. Marissen has scoured sources for the libretto, notably a book in Jennens's library by Richard Kidder, an Anglican bishop: "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."

The biblical texts used in several numbers leading up to the "Hallelujah" chorus, Mr. Marissen suggests, are translated, interpreted or conflated in a tendentious manner in line with those earlier commentaries to portray the Jews as, for example, the "them" in "Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron."

Ms. Smith was having none (or very little) of this. She granted Mr. Marissen the point that "Messiah" was very much a work of its time, and that denigration of Jews was then in the air. Although Jennens believed in one true faith and was ready to repudiate other faiths, there is nothing to suggest that he specifically repudiated Judaism, she added, and he "avoids direct impugning of the Jews by the use of Old Testament texts."

The contention that Jennens chose texts because they were in Kidder is completely unproved, Ms. Smith said, and in any case the use of a specific text, from whatever source, does not imply that the interpretation of that text is necessarily accepted as part of the bargain. "Jennens does not make specific condemnation of any specific belief," she added. Most of all, "he condemns a lack of belief in the Christian faithful."

Ms. Heller was equally assiduous in trying to undercut Mr. Marissen's musical arguments. To refute the notion that Handel's use of regal trumpets and drums in the "Hallelujah" chorus, and only there in "Messiah," represents over-the-top or even unusual triumphalism, she played a brief excerpt from the coronation anthem "Zadok the Priest," no less triumphal.

To combat the notion that Handel uses a particular oscillating melodic figure in Wagnerian leitmotif fashion to represent the Jews, she pointed to other uses of similar figures. And the first questioner from the audience seconded her, noting that oscillating figures are ubiquitous in Handel, used to signify wind, waves, flying.

Most of the other questioners also attacked Mr. Marissen's musical or theological assumptions, interpretations and conclusions. He emerged bloodied but seemingly unbowed.

Ms. Heller, for her part, concluded her presentation by pointing out that as a Jew she already felt enough guilt. "Do we have to feel guilty about the 'Hallelujah' chorus too?" she asked. "We don't."

[cerberus]

It is a great piece of music - period.

[delete]

More proof that jews are living inside a cult, where thing takes on different perspectives than for the rest of us.

Whining over a 300 year old piece of music, when they themselves at the time, thought all non-jews were cattle.

[Petr]

The issue, Mr. Marissen suggests, is not one of anti-Semitism per se but one of triumphalism, a rejoicing in the misfortune of the Jews, specifically with the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans in A.D. 70.

Mr. Marissen has scoured sources for the libretto, notably a book in Jennens's library by Richard Kidder, an Anglican bishop: "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."

The biblical texts used in several numbers leading up to the "Hallelujah" chorus, Mr. Marissen suggests, are translated, interpreted or conflated in a tendentious manner in line with those earlier commentaries to portray the Jews as, for example, the "them" in "Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron."
I'd like to point out that the uncritically pro-Israel attitude, Zionism masquerading as Christianity, that dispensationalists have made notorious during the last few decades, is a very recent phenomenon even among Protestants.


Far from "praying for the peace of Jerusalem," the early Christian church actually saw the Great Jewish War (66-70 AD, where the Romans killed 1,1 million Jews according to Josephus), as God's righteous judgment on an apostate people.

The early Christian church fathers did not believe that the "holocaust" that the Jews had gone through at the hands of the Romans in 66-70 AD and again during the Bar-Kokhba rebellion in 130-135 AD (where 580,000 Jews fell in battles alone, and many more on famine or pestilence according to Dio Cassius), had in any way sanctified the dispersed remnant, making them holy "survivors" - on the contrary, it was seen as God's clearly foretold and just judgment on a people who had rejected the Gospel of true living God.


Several examples of this attitude can be found here:

http://www.bible.ca/H-Mt-24-destruction-jerusalem-70AD.htm


200AD Hippolytus of Rome (On the Significance of A.D.70) 30. Come, then, O blessed Isaiah; arise, tell us clearly what thou didst prophesy with respect to the mighty Babylon. For thou didst speak also of Jerusalem, and thy word is accomplished. For thou didst speak boldly and openly: "Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire; your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate as overthrown by many strangers. The daughter of Sion shall be left as a cottage in a vineyard, and as a lodge in a garden of cucumbers, as a besieged city." … What then? Are not these things come to pass? Are not the things announced by thee fulfilled? Is not their country, Judea, desolate? Is not the holy place burned with fire? Are not their walls cast down? Are not their cities destroyed? Their land, do not strangers devour it? Do not the Romans rule the country? And indeed these impious people hated thee, and did saw thee asunder, and they crucified Christ. Thou art dead in the world, but thou livest in Christ." (Fragments of Dogmatic and Historical Works, 30)


150AD Justin Martyr Chap. Xlvii.--Desolation Of Judaea Foretold. That the land of the Jews, then, was to be laid waste, hear what was said by the Spirit of prophecy. And the words were spoken as if from the person of the people wondering at what had happened. They are these: "Sion is a wilderness, Jerusalem a desolation. The house of our sanctuary has become a curse, and the glory which our fathers blessed is burned up with fire, and all its glorious things are laid waste: and Thou refrainest Thyself at these things, and hast held Thy peace, and hast humbled us very sore."(6) And ye are convinced that Jerusalem has been laid waste, as was predicted. And concerning its desolation, and that no one should be permitted to inhabit it, there was the following prophecy by Isaiah: "Their land is desolate, their enemies consume it before them, and none of them shall dwell therein."(7) And that it is guarded by you lest any one dwell in it, and that death is decreed against a Jew apprehended entering it, you know very well.(First Apology, Ch. 47.)


Petr

[Kim Jong Tha Illest]

My impression is that the early church's opinion of the jews varied from pope to pope.

[Ahknaton]

To combat the notion that Handel uses a particular oscillating melodic figure in Wagnerian leitmotif fashion to represent the Jews, she pointed to other uses of similar figures.
LOL. Got to watch out for those dangerous anti-Semitic oscillating melodic figures. They're a secret anti-Semitic mind control technique that can cause Gentiles to SNAP! - at any moment - and turn into psychopathic Jew-killing monsters (which they are from the moment they're born anyway, in their heart of hearts).

[Dan Dare]

Isn't anything vaguely hinting that the Messiah has already turned up likely to be jarring to Jewish sensibilities?

That aside, Handel's Messiah is a masterwork, although in my view the Hallelujah Chorus is not one of its strongest sections.

As for regal trumpets only appearing in the Chorus, what about 'The trumpet's loud clangour'?

[Petr]

And here's the actual NYT article that attacks Händel and the above piece merely commented upon:

http://www.preteristarchive.com/ARTchive/1742_handel_messiah.html


Unsettling History of That Joyous ‘Hallelujah’

By MICHAEL MARISSEN

Published: April 8, 2007 in the New York Times


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.

[Felix the Cat]

Which is more calculated to generate hatred against Jews - the performance of a popular 300-year old piece of music, or Jewish attempts to suppress it?

[Geist]

I guess its just the latest attempt to tear down Western sacred cows. Eventually they'll start attacking nursery rhymes for promoting genocide.

[Ahknaton]

It would be funny to get the "Hallelujah!" sequence as a mobile phone ringtone, then you could conduct covert anti-Semitic psyops everytime you get a phone call.

[Petr]

I guess its just the latest attempt to tear down Western sacred cows. Eventually they'll start attacking nursery rhymes for promoting genocide.
Actually I can understand (which is not the same as caring about) the feelings of some Jews must have as they learn about the un-PC origins of "Hallelujah".

They feel that Christians celebrating the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple is like taking megaphones to Auschwitz camp, blaring triumphant music and mocking the sufferings of Jews, even praising God about it. Hmm, an interesting idea...


Petr

[Petr]

Here's the music:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnHksDFHTQI


Petr

[Petr]

And so, I would actually agree that the "complaint" against Händel is indeed somewhat justified - we have here some deeply un-PC, unapologetic Christian triumphalism! Even rejoicing over the destruction of anti-Christian powers.

Many people consider me an cranky asshole for being so triumphalistic and dismissive towards unbelievers, but as you can see, I'm merely inspired by "that old-time religion".


Petr

[Errigal]

...

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...

The original performance was in Dublin, not London. The premiere was overseen by the Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral, Jonathan Swift who's famous for his Gulliver's Travels. Just a bit of info.

[Ahknaton]

The original performance was in Dublin, not London. The premiere was overseen by the Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral, Jonathan Swift who's famous for his Gulliver's Travels. Just a bit of info.
I visited the cathedral last year. They were selling Handel-related knickknacks and other merchandise like "Too Hot To Handel!" chef's aprons.

[Errigal]

I visited the cathedral last year. They were selling Handel-related knickknacks and other merchandise like "Too Hot To Handel!" chef's aprons.

I like St. Patrick's. Lots of history.
Wikipedia.org St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Patrick's_Cathedral,_Dublin)
During the stay of Oliver Cromwell in Dublin, during his conquest of Ireland the Commonwealth's Lord Protector stabled his horses in the nave of the cathedral. This was intended to demonstrate Cromwell's disrespect for the Anglican religion, which he associated with Roman Catholicism and political Royalism.


That's one reason why I like this song:

Morrissey -- Irish Blood, English Heart
I've been dreaming of a time when
The English are sick to death of Labour
And Tories, and spit upon the name of Oliver Cromwell
And denounce this royal line that still salute him
And will salute him forever

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