At this time of year, worries about classical music’s relevance (or lack of it) are for once set aside. We can all relax and, whether at home or in the concert hall, enjoy seasonal favorites such as Handel’s Messiah and Bach’s Christmas Oratorio. Their relevance is guaranteed – it’s Christmas, for heaven’s sake – so they surely need no special pleading.
Yet that hasn’t stopped a brand new concert promoter called Classical Everywhere from creating a lavish multimedia show, Handel’s Messiah: The Live Experience, with the aim of making the 1741 work more “relevant to a younger audience”. At the premiere earlier this month at the Theater Royal in London’s Drury Lane, Handel’s oratorio was swathed in an elaborate spectacle involving dancers and a screen that showed suggestive images of glowing suns, threatening asteroids and (possibly) a dimly outlined fetus.
In between the familiar arias and choruses, two narrators declaimed a newly written dramatic dialogue about a son separated from a grieving mother.
The experience was greeted with rapture by some and stony-faced silence by others. Whatever your opinion, there was no escaping the fact that for Classical Everywhere, making Messiah “relevant” seemed to mean emptying the work of its specifically Christian content and replacing it with a vague universal message about oppression leading to release. And while taking Christianity out of Messiah may seem an unusual stratagem, it was only one example in recent years of performers going to extraordinary lengths to “rescue” classical music from the dreaded condition of “irrelevance”.
This is not to say that musicians in the past did not update and “improve” works to make them more palatable for contemporary tastes. Messiah is a case in point. When it was first performed in Dublin in 1742, the number of performers was quite modest: about 60 singers and instrumentalists. But within a few decades, Mozart was beefing up Handel’s masterpiece with wind and brass instruments and as early as the Handel Commemoration celebrations in 1784 a tradition arose for “monster” performances. This reached its peak in the 1850s at Crystal Palace in south London where up to 4,000 musicians performed for crowds of 80,000.
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