As you listen to a Christmas performance of Handel’s Messiah, it is easy to persuade yourself that all is still well with music and the arts in Britain. I again felt the familiar potency of both Messiah and of music more widely in London’s St Martin’s-in-the-Fields on Tuesday this week. When the musicians and singers launched into the fabulously affirmative final chorus, Worthy is the Lamb, towards which Handel and his librettist Charles Jennens have all along been building, the annual ritual poured forth Messiah’s deep sense of shared security and allayed doubt afresh.
I’ve been going to Messiah at Christmas for decades now, at one venue or another, and the experience never ceases to lift the spirits in this darkest of seasons. This year, though, more disturbing feelings were also in play. The tender balm of Messiah’s opening lines for the tenor – “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people” – has rarely sounded more necessary and consolatory than it did this week. The austere solemnity of the oratorio’s collective reprimand against “the iniquity of us all” felt very contemporary too, especially at the end of such a dismal, demented and dangerous year.
