Hooray for the Lord!

In the late summer of 1741, Composer George Frederick Handel, plagued by ill health and spurned by a once-adoring public, isolated himself in his London house to work on a new oratorio. Falling into an almost trancelike state, he slaved feverishly day and night with little food or sleep. At one point a servant found him at his desk, tears streaming down his face. "I did think I did see all Heaven before me," Handel cried, "and the great God himself!" After 23 days Handel emerged with his monumental Messiah, the profoundly moving testament of Christian faith that has be come the most revered of all sacred music traditionally performed during the Christmas season.

Nowhere is the Messiah tradition more cherished than in Boston, where the Handel and Haydn Society, the oldest active choral group in the U.S., has sung the oratorio every Christmas for the past 146 years. This season's uncut performance at Symphony Hall was sold out, attracting a devoted cross section of Bostonians to whom the Messiah is as integral a part of Christmas as the Beacon Hill bell ringers or the oyster stuffing for the turkey.

Culturally Ready. Many in the audience had not missed a performance since they were children. One white-haired lady allowed that she had been coming for more than half a century, but confessed that she couldn't "tell how good this year's performance was because my hearing-aid batteries went dead." More fortunate were the audiences who last week listened to a taped performance of the society's uncut Messiah over 45 educational TV stations across the country.

This season marks the 150th anniversary of the Handel and Haydn Society. It will be celebrated in March with the world premiere of The Passion According to St. Luke by American Composer Randall Thompson, and again in October with a week-long international choral festival to be held in Symphony Hall. Among the participants: Britain's Huddersfield Choral Society, Vienna's Singverein of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde and the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir.

Though the society boasts a repertory of some 100 choral works, many New Englanders know it simply as the "Messiah Society." The complete Messiah, in fact, was given its U.S. premiere (1818) by the society, as were many of the great choral works, including Haydn's Creation (1819), Handel's Solomon (1855) and Mendelssohn's Elijah (1848), a coup that was achieved only after the society's president sought out Mendelssohn in London and convinced him that Boston was culturally ready for the work.

Vast Confusion. The Handel and Haydn Society was the outgrowth of a chorus assembled in 1815 for a Peace Jubilee celebrating the signing of the Treaty of Ghent, word of which took 52 days to reach Boston. The society grew rapidly, until by the late 1850s it was more than 700 voices strong. Not a historical event passed in old Boston that the society did not commemorate with a concert, featuring such speakers as Daniel Webster and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

In 1872 the society helped stage one of the most grandiose performances in musical history-an International Peace Jubilee in which a chorus of 17,000 voices assembled in the now-razed Boston Coliseum and sang to the accompaniment of a 1,500-piece orchestra and the sounding of anvils, cannons and bells. The result, observed a reviewer at the time, was "vast confusion."

Today the society numbers 150 voices from three New England states. They are nurses, lawyers, a cab driver, a mortician, music teachers, a hairdresser, a boilermaker. Most are church members, and all approach their work with a deep sense of spiritual mission. At one recent rehearsal Conductor Edward Gilday, 54, told his singers that "the Messiah is an ecclesiastical way of saying 'Hooray for the Lord!' Express your faith openly. Don't be afraid to bare your souls in public. This is the Lord you're talking about, not the mayor of Boston. Let your hair down, lose yourself in the anonymity of 150 voices."

Instead of Diapers. And they do. Caught up in the swelling power of the music, they sing out with the eloquence of conviction, their expressions grow radiant, they gaze heavenward, and the eyes of some of the women well with tears. "It's about the most exciting thing there is," says Bass Eldon Fay, a Boston sales manager who has been singing with the society for 23 years. "You get so much more out of it if you really believe it."

Society members are not only devout but devoted; even the busiest seldom miss a rehearsal. Explains Gilday: "For a woman whose day is changing diapers or a man who shuffles paper, singing sacred music is an exciting release. In this age when everything is being debunked, it's nice to know that for a few hours every week we can get together and come close to something spiritually sublime."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.