Handel Messiah Quotes

I should be sorry if I only entertained them. I wished to make them better.

I have heard great music--even sublime music. I've heard music fit for princes, for kings. I have hard music fit for any monarch. But that night, for the first time in my life, I heard music fit for God.

To want a gift and not receive it,that is a life of torture. To have a gift and lose it--that is eternal hell.

To me, animals have all the traits indicative of soul. For soul is not something we can see or measure...No one can prove that animals have souls. Asking for proof would be like demanding proof that I love my wife and children, or wanting me to prove that Handel's Messiah is a glorious masterpiece of music. Some truths simply cannot be demonstrated. But if we open our hearts to other creatures and allow ourselves to sympathize with their joys and struggles, we will find they have the power to touch and transform us. There is an inwardness in other creatures that awakens what is innermost in ourselves.

In the nineteenth century, Emile Durkheim, the founder of sociology and an early pioneer of the social sciences, ran a thought experiment in one of his books: What if there were no crime? What if there emerged a society where everyone was perfectly respectful and nonviolent and everyone was equal? What if no one lied or hurt each other? What if corruption did not exist? What would happen? Would conflict cease? Would stress evaporate? Would everyone frolic in fields picking daises and singing the "Hallelujah" chorus from Handel's Messiah? Durkheim said no, that in fact the opposite would happen. He suggested that the more comfortable and ethical a society became, the more that small indiscretions would become magnified in our minds. If everyone stopped killing each other, we wouldn't necessarily feel good about it. We'd just get equally upset about the more minor stuff. Developmental psychology has long argued something similar: that protecting people from problems or adversity doesn't make them happier or more secure; it makes them more easily insecure. A young person who has been sheltered form dealing with any challenges or injustices growing up will come to find the slightest inconveniences of adult life intolerable, and will have the childish public meltdown to prove it.

William was quite the hand at Couperin’s Messe pour les couvents, too, and Alice had been right about the Christmas section from Handel’s Messiah. As for the seduced parishioner, the military man’s young wife, Jack’s mother told him little—only enough that the boy assumed his father hadn’t been asked to leave Kastelskirken for flubbing a refrain.

The political powers, in both Jesus’ day and our own, play on fear to get their way—whether it be the fear of the emperor, the fear of terrorists, the fear of the foreign “other,” or the fear of death. But with “this day” comes a new possibility. The first words spoken after Jesus’ birth are “‘Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people.

Isaiah 40–66 is of the utmost importance for the Gospels’ self-understanding and proclamation. Sprinkled throughout all the Gospels, but especially Matthew and Luke, are direct quotations, strong allusions, and subtle echoes from Isaiah. We can say without overstatement that the eschatological vision of Isaiah 40–66 serves as the primary subtext and framing for the Gospels’ witness.[41] This is not a new insight, as is witnessed by the centrality of Isaiah in Christian interpretation, in everything from homily and commentary to Handel’s famous oratorio Messiah, which begins with the tenor aria “Comfort, O Comfort my People” (from Isa. 40:1).

Human beings are responsible for art, science, medicine, education, the Sistine Chapel, Handel’s Messiah, New York City, space travel, the novel, photography, and Mexican food — I mean, who doesn’t love Mexican food? But we’re also responsible for a world with 27 million slaves, blatant racism, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the genocide in Rwanda, ISIS, the financial meltdown of 2008, pornography, global warming, the endangered-species list, and don’t even get me started on pop music. So we humans are a mixed bag. We have a great capacity — more than we know — to rule in a way that is life-giving for the people around us and the place we call home, or to rule in such a way that we exploit the earth itself and rob people of an environment where they can thrive. This was God’s risk. His venture. His experiment.

I told him that I liked “light” classical, such as Mozart, Handel, and Tchaikovsky. I didn’t really know what I was talking about since my exposure to Mozart was Eine kleine Nachtmusik, Handel meant Messiah, and Tchaikovsky meant the 1812 Overture.

The treaty was finally signed, and the two young princes – Abdul Khaliq, who was eight, and Muizuddin, aged five – handed over to Cornwallis on 18 March 1792. The boys were taken off by elephant to Madras, which they appeared in general to like, though they clearly did not enjoy being made to sit through entire performances of Handel’s Messiah and Judas Maccabaeus.58 Having created a sensation in Madras society with their dignity, intelligence and politeness, they were sent back two years later when Tipu delivered the final tranche of his indemnity payment.

I need rituals that encourage me to embrace what is repetitive, ancient, and quiet. But what I crave is novelty and stimulation.” We could all use some help patterning our lives after what we need rather than what we crave, after what is “repetitive, ancient, and quiet” rather than what keeps us insulated from greater “Christian tradition, belief and practice.” Learning to order our lives according to the church calendar provides a significant help for correcting these tendencies

we are better equipped to obey the Lord’s most oft-repeated commandment to the children of Israel: remember. Remember the Lord in good times and bad. Remember the Lord in every season of life.

This sequence mirrors the whole story of the Church — a story of blessing and hardship, growth and persecution. The church calendar prepares us for the valleys and mountains life contains for all of us. More importantly, by focusing the major seasons of the year on the life of Christ, the church calendar teaches us that, whether we are metaphorically in times of “feasting” or “fasting,” the center of life is Jesus.

One thing I appreciate about the liturgical year is that when it becomes a part of your family culture, it can have a stabilizing affect. As life swirls around us, we have the familiarity of the same activities, traditions, smells, sounds, and words to keep us anchored. And what better to be anchored to than the Church (the Bride of Christ) and (as the Bride of Christ) to Christ himself?

They’d heard it all, the dead: crying children, wailing widows, confessions, condemnations, questions that they could never answer; Halloween dares, raving drunks—invoking the ghosts or just apologizing for drawing breath; would-be witches, chanting at indifferent spirits, tourists rubbing the old tombstones with paper and charcoal like curious dogs scratching at the grave to get in. Funerals, confirmations, communions, weddings, square dances, heart attacks, junior-high hand jobs, wakes gone awry, vandalism, Handel’s Messiah, a birth, a murder, eighty-three Passion plays, eighty-five Christmas pageants, a dozen brides barking over tombstones like taffeta sea lions as the best man gave it to them dog style, and now and again, couples who needed something dark and smelling of damp earth to give their sex life a jolt: the dead had heard it.

Between 1714 and 1830, every king of England was named George. They were all members of the House of Hanover, which is in Germany. It rather embarrassed the English to have to import their royal family from Germany, but they didn’t have much choice. They’d more or less run out of Stewarts. (Well, no entirely, but that’s another story.) Anyway, the first four Hanoverians were all called George. To make them easier to tell apart, they were numbered, with typical Germanic efficiency, George I, George II, George III, and George IV.

Too many musicians — singers and instrumentalists — performed it so many times that it’s hard not to just go through the motions of playing (or singing) the notes, rather than remembering that you have to turn the notes into real music.

There are such astoundingly beautiful hymns to Jesus freely available to each one of us, written by many of the greatest musicians of all time, from Handel’s Messiah and Bach’s St. Matthew Passion to Aretha Franklin’s rendition of “Amazing Grace” and Chance the Rapper’s mix of “How Great (is our God).

They wove them into the fabric of time, passing them down from generation to generation. Snippets of the story were passed down, too, with no one the wiser that they were vessels. Humming bits of Handel's Messiah to babes as they fell asleep. Naming pigs after the one who came before it, and before that, and before even that. Generations of pigs named Salt, nobody dreaming the name sprang from the sty of one of the finest warships ever to traverse the seas in the name of His Majesty the King.

Christmas is a spontaneous prayer of the common folks, a prayer, a hymn. All the while Raphael was paintng the Sistine Madonna, Frenchman building the cathedral of Chartres, English bishops composing The Book of Common Prayer, Handel his Messiah, Bach his B Minor Mass, the common people, out of whom these geniuses sprang, were busy composing Christmas.

A study of Handel’s operas and other dramatic works in addition to the undramatic and hence atypical Messiah will disclose a Handel largely unknown: a composer with a remarkable sense for dramatic human character. He saw men and women where others have seen only historical-mythical busts.

Finally, the ethical staying power of the Apocalypse is a product of its imaginative richness. The text throbs with theopoetic energy, expressed in its numerous songs of praise and worship. It is no accident that Milton drew inspiration from Revelation or that Handel found the lyrics for the climactic choruses of the Messiah (“Hallelujah” and “Worthy Is the Lamb”) in the poetry of Revelation: “The kingdom of this world is become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign for ever and ever” (based on Rev. 11:15).

Composing for money was held in no shame, and the public concert spread throughout Europe. Wealthy countries that did not groom their own composers, such as England, imported them from outside with lucrative offers. Handel and Haydn were their two most notable imports. British conductor Roger Norrington said of Handel: "[the Messiah] was written for money ... he was a commercial composer; if he were alive today, he'd be doing jingles for