Gratuitous Musickal Posting, "Aw, Jeez" Division

Alert Reader "Sailor Mike" dropped this article by Michael Linton in the Tasty Bits (TM) Mail Sack about the way the Gray Lady chose to celebrate Easter Sunday, namely, by including an article claiming that the "Hallelujah Chorus" from Handel's Messiah is really a triumphal screed against the JOOOOOOOOOS!!!

Wow. We didn’t know. The “Hallelujah Chorus” is a paean celebrating Titus’ sack of Jerusalem and the Christian’s God’s bloody vengeance upon the Jews. That was the New York Times’ Easter Sunday gift to its readers, courtesy of Swarthmore professor Michael Marissen.

Yup, it's all there, plain as a pikestaff:

Undoubtedly Marissen will expand his argument about the “Hallelujah Chorus” in his new book, but in the newspaper version it goes something like this: Charles Jennens, who cobbled together the oratorio’s libretto, intended the work as an anti-deist and anti-Jewish polemic. In the oratorio’s second section, Jennens substituted “nations” for “heathens” in Psalm 2:1, so as to include the Jews among those who “imagine a vain thing” by taking counsel “against the Lord and his anointed.” Thus the arrival of the “Hallelujah Chorus” that closes the section is, in fact, an “over the top” celebration of God’s judgment on the Jews—Handel’s addition of martial trumpets and drums underscoring the militaristic vision of divine pillage.

Marissen argues that here Jennens follows a tradition going back to Richard Kidder (d. 1703), the bishop of Bath and Wells, and continued by sermons John Newton published on “the Celebrated Oratorio of Handel” in 1786. The relation between these texts and the destruction of Jerusalem was so traditional in Handel’s time that it was “surely how listeners would have understood the combination of these texts in eighteenth-century Britain.”

Of course, as Linton patiently points out, this is utter horse-hockey:

Surely not. What did come to mind, and what Handel wanted to come to mind, was the immensely popular music he wrote for the coronation of George II in 1727 (repeated at the coronation at every British monarch since). “Zadok the Priest,” in its D major key, diatonic construction, choral outbursts, and orchestration is the model for the “Hallelujah Chorus,” written fifteen years later. What Handel’s listeners heard in the Messiah chorus wasn’t a conquest anthem but music celebrating the coronation of Christ as King of Kings and Lord of Lords, music directly reminiscent of the music they already knew celebrating the coronation of George, “by the Grace of God, King of Great Britain, France, Ireland, Defender of the Faith, etc.”

Ah, that “Defender of the Faith” business. The Protestant Faith, of course. It’s hardly news that the English saw themselves as Israel’s heirs. They were a new chosen people whose election had been confirmed by the “holy wind” that sank the Spanish Armada and the much more recent defeat of the Catholic-backed Scots at the 1746 Battle of Culloden (an event which Handel celebrated with his oratorio Judas Maccabaeus). English Protestants were the new Israelites (look at all those “Salems” they founded in North America).

They were Christians who believed that the Old Testament could only be understood properly when read through the saving work of Christ—and Christians who believed that those who didn’t read the Old Testament that way were endangering their immortal souls with hellfire. (It’s not particularly insightful to notice that this caused tension among the church, the synagogue, and the chattering philosophers.)

It should be noted that musically, this is Freshman Intro Survey Clapping For Credit "Well, duuuh!!" material. If you listen to the two works by Handel, which I have, their relationship is blindingly obvious, as is the parallel between the coronations of George II and Christ. Linton asks:

Marissen’s is a very odd article. The most important aspect of the “Hallelujah Chorus” that one might think a scholar would want modern listeners to know about to help them understand the piece is ignored while a controversial interpretation of pretty-well-known truisms is headlined. What gives?

Actually, what gives is the reason I quickly gave up any notion whatever of pursuing an academic career. Especially in the Humanities, as time goes by there is simply less and less original and enlightening to say about a given writer, composer or painter. But it's a savage and over-crowded field. And unless one wants to spend the rest of one's life as a special visiting teaching assistant at Back of Beyond Junior Community College, Arse End of Nowhere Satellite Campus, teaching the local knuckle-draggers to rhyme "moon" with "June," one starts inventing things to say that are original and outrageous. As a matter of fact, I doubt whether Prof. Marissen really even believes his own theory. But it sells books and gets him noticed, which is what counts.

I simply shake my head in sadness at this kind of academic gamesmanship which, truth be told, goes on all the time in the Ivory Tower. But what I find outrageous is the fact that the NYTimes chose to run with this rabid attack on the holiest day of the Christian calendar. Show of hands, please, of all those who expect to see a Holocaust-denial article on Yom Kippur? No, I didn't think so.