New Musical Color for Messiah Performances
Performed for eighty-five years in Duke Chapel, George Frideric Handel’s oratorio Messiah is a beloved tradition on Duke’s campus and beyond. This year the three Messiah concerts at the Chapel, running November 30 through December 2, will be presented with all the familiar solos and choruses … as well as with a flourish new to the Chapel.
For this year’s Messiah, Chapel Associate Conductor Philip Cave and the Chapel Choir will use Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s orchestration of the piece.
“It was a bold move to set to music the story of the life of Christ,” Cave says about Handel’s original composition of Messiah. While retaining all of the work’s text and much of its music, Cave explains that Mozart’s version provides “lovely touches of orchestral color.”
“I hope that people will be intrigued by the differences and comforted by the similarities,” Cave says.
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Handel’s Messiah was first performed in Dublin in 1742; Mozart’s version debuted in Vienna in 1789. Although the forty-seven years between the two concerts may seem relatively short when viewed from 2018, Cave explains that musical styles shifted between the two times and places.
“It wasn’t really a reflection on Handel’s music being somehow not good enough,” Cave says of Mozart’s interpretation of Messiah. “Mozart was very careful to keep all of Handel’s music, but he just filled it out with more instruments, which was the current taste at that time.
“With Mozart, we get the use of the classical orchestra—that’s to say, with woodwinds and horns, which of course Handel didn’t really use. Handel just used oboes and bassoons, but Mozart added flutes and clarinets.
“That’s really the main aural difference: People will hear different orchestral colors.”
One example of the difference in Mozart’s orchestration comes in the third part of Messiah when the bass soloist sings, “The trumpet shall sound!” For this aria, Mozart has taken a trumpet part and arranged it for two horns.
“It’s a spectacular effect,” Cave says. “I think it’s a wonderful opportunity to hear this part of the composition through Mozart’s ears.”
“I started singing it as a boy treble, I’ve played in the orchestra for it, I’ve played the organ to accompany it, I was a solo tenor in it, and I have conducted it,” he says.
As a professional choir director, Cave has conducted dozens of Messiah performances by church choirs, choral societies, and professional singers in churches, cathedrals, and concert halls.
“I think it has musical rewards; it certainly has spiritual rewards,” he says about his many experiences with Messiah.
“There will be some changes in interpretative detail, but the gist of the choral writing remains the same,” Cave says. “The main difference is in the orchestral parts, especially for those instrumentalists—such as the flutes, clarinets, horns and trombones—who do not usually get to play Messiah in Handel’s original scoring.”
Presenting a familiar work of sacred music reimagined by a subsequent master composer—as is the case with Mozart’s gentle reworking of Handel’s original—is an ongoing theme for this year’s Chapel Music season. In the spring, all three of the Chapel’s choirs will join together under Cave’s direction to present Felix Mendelssohn’s edition of Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. Also in the spring, the Duke Evensong Singers, under the direction of Chapel Organist Christopher Jacobson, will perform composer Robert Schumann’s revival of Bach’s St. John Passion. (See a detailed listing of concerts this spring.)
“What we’re doing this year is looking at music in transition—how it’s not a fixed object,” Cave says. “We want to be aware of the original styles of performing but we should also be interested in how people have viewed this music in contemporary ways.”
At right: The cover for the program for the first Messiah performance in Duke Chapel, which was in 1933.