This Day in World History
March 23, 1743
Handel conducts London premiere of Messiah
Source: NYPL.
On March 23, 1743, composer George Frideric Handel directed the first London performance of his sacred oratorio,
Messiah. While the composition has become revered as a magnificent choral work — and a staple of the Christmas holiday season — it met some controversy when it first appeared.
Remarkably, Handel needed only three weeks in the summer of 1741 to write Messiah. As his text, he used a libretto compiled by Charles Jennens from verses of the Bible and from the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer. Jennens was apparently upset that Handel wrote the work in such a short time; he thought the sacred subject needed more time.
He was also annoyed because Handel debuted the work in Dublin in the spring of 1742, not reserving it for a London premiere. Leading Irish clerics (led by Jonathan Swift) insisted that, if their church choirs were to be used to sing the oratorio, ticket sales had to go to charity. That precedent established a longstanding tradition for Messiah.
When Handel finally prepared to present the work in London, more controversy arose. Some people objected to a work on a sacred theme being performed in a secular setting — London’s Covent Garden Theater. The controversy disappeared with the popular acceptance of Handel’s music, however. Even Jennens became reconciled to the composer, in part because Handel rewrote some sections his collaborator considered poor.
Today’s performances do not reflect the scores of these initial performances. Handel revised the piece often, and current productions use one or another of these later versions. The full Messiah tells not only the Christmas story but also of Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection. Groups that perform the oratorio at Christmas generally only perform the first part.
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Like the narrator of his new novel, The Instructions, Adam Levin “wanted to be the Jewish Messiah” as a kid. “I could beat up everyone in my grade,” he says. (Via.)
Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at Obama’s gestures. See Lim’s previous OUPblogs here.
President Barack Obama gave his first speech from the Oval Office last Tuesday. It wasn’t great, as most commentators have noted.
To begin with, the White House appears to believe that body language is presidential language. Our eyes were constantly drawn to the bottom quarter of the screen, where the president’s hands seemed to have taken on a life of their own. If our democracy has degenerated from deeds to words, we’re now becoming accustomed to gestures. Our great deliberative democracy, reduced to a series of hand flicks.
The words weren’t that good either. Even though the President was, understandably, trying to signal strength and decisiveness with words and gestures, he had to lace his speech with tentative caveats in a bid to lower our expectations about what can be achieved and how soon – another presidential goal on Tuesday night. As a result, the speech was wishy-washy, tepid and pointless. It looked and sounded like a damage-control skit, and the president looked like he had George Clooney’s PR job in “Up in the Air” – telling the American people harsh news and artificially sweetening the news with an a dose of saccharine.
Talking about enlisting scientists and experts doesn’t help when they can’t even agree on the size of the oil spill. And everyone can see that the purpose of telling the American people how serious the problem served, selfishly, only to tell us that the president feels our pain. It is gratuitous at best and condescending and worst. Empathy and euphemisms together do not eloquence make.
The administration was hoping for a game-changer in this speech. But not even the weight of his office was able to help this young, politically inexperienced president stave off the inflexion point he did not intend. From now on, it looks like there will be no more free passes from Rachel Maddow and the liberal media.
If Obama is our era’s Greatest Communicator, then perhaps the only good that came out of this speech is that we may begin to realize that no rhetorical wizardry can solve our nation’s crises. There is no messiah, and there is definitely no rhetorical messiah. Indeed, I would go one step further and hope that we all realize that eloquence is not the solution to our problems. Eloquence – our atavistic yearning for a grand orator, a Cicero who can inspire our nation into action – is the problem itself for it is a phantasm that too often has become a substitute for deeds.
The next time the president is in political trouble, and he has nothing to offer but damage-control dribble, then perhaps he shouldn’t say anything at all. Let the pundits and bloggers chatter, but lie low and just get down to work, for goodness sake. Sometimes, a measure of humility, in spite of popular expectations for presidents to speechify and to perform, can help a president ride out of a po
The Ezra Jack Keats Awards. Heard of them? Here's a description:
The Ezra Jack Keats Book Award was established in 1985 to recognize and encourage authors and illustrators new to the field of children's books. Many previous winners of the award have gone on to distinguished careers creating books beloved by parents, children, librarians and teachers across the country.
All clear? Good. I mean, until I started working for the New York Public Library system I hadn't really heard of them either. Then everyone involved ended up in my Story Hour Room. Yes, this past Thursday we at the Donnell Central Children's Room found ourselves hosting the award ceremony for the
2007 Ezra Jack Keats Award winners. I was given a job: Buzz around everyone and snap photos for posterity. Okey-doke. Trouble is, there's a reason I never went into photography as a profession. I was a Fine Arts double major in both English and Photography in college. That was before I realized that when it comes to composing shots, I'm lamentable. Basically it all boils down to the fact that I'm too self-conscious to snap photographs of folks I don't know. It gives me a jim jams. It's why I can't act or be hypnotised either. Can't explain it. Anywho, after taking surreptitious snaps of people I already vaguely knew (I think I probably took 45 pictures in varying angles of super nice guy
Angus Killick) I gave up the whole enterprise and started chatting things up with people like
Heather Scott. And Heather
would have won the Hot Shoes of Children's Literature Award for this particular kidlit gathering, had I only thought to take a snapshot of her feet with my own camera and not the library's. Lackaday.
The winners of the award, I should probably mention, were as follows:
Brooklyn based Kristen Balouch will receive the New Illustrator Award for her book, Mystery Bottle (Hyperion, 2006), a heartwarming story about a young boy and his grandfather separated by the distance of their countries and united by a mysterious bottle.
The 2007 New Writer Award will go to first-time children’s book writer Kelly Cunnane for For You Are A Kenyan Child (Atheneum, 2006), illustrated by previous Keats Book Award winner Ana Juan, which recounts a day in the life of a young boy growing up a small Kenyan village. Kelly Cunnane lived in Africa for many years but now resides in Beals, Maine.
Ms. Cunnane left a lovely note for Pooh in the guestbook.
But who should be in attendance other than special guest star Michael Buckley! Yes! Author of the
Sisters Grimm books (we have the
art currently on display, by the way) and all around nice fella. We chatted about possible movie deals, which I will keep mute about. Authors get all touchy when you start yammering on about who's buying what when the actual "buying" part hasn't actually taken place. We discussed the total number of books he might write (could be 6, could be 9). I complimented him on having books that resemble the Lemony Snicket stories but that hold up so much better after multiple readings (well done, Abrams). He's a swell fella. He's also going to talk with some of our local schoolkids at some point here, so that should be fun. I may just have to do his book with my homeschooler bookgroup soon. And say, did you ever notice that the Sisters Grimm books have their own
theme song? Howzabout that?
Anywho, lovely evening. Good stuff. Now if I can just finagle some pics out of the Office of Children's Services . . . .
This is what happens when author/illustrators get their own friggin' blogs. Oh sure, they're all cute and cuddly at first. Then they start to grow up and post information that, quite frankly, YOU should have thought of in the first place. Take as your example Mr. Mo Willems' posting, I'm Off. Don't let its title mislead you. He isn't off in the least. In fact, he's touting about information regarding the Ezra Jack Keats Contest here in NYC. Basically, kids create their own picture books and the winners get people like Mo Willems to present to them their awards.
At this moment the Donnell Central Children's Room has all the books, winners and otherwise, up for viewing until April 30th.
Why check it out? Partly because some of the books are scary-good. And partly because these are some of the titles of the others:
- World Famous Hector - Could have gone with any name. Went with "Hector".
- When Snowflakes Stop! - We would have also accepted "When Snowflakes Go Bad".
- This Boy is Not Too Bad - I'm loving the correct usage of the word "too".
- Steak Tree - Mmmm. Steak tree.
- Never Apologize for Your Art - Which bears a Jackson Pollock lookalike on the cover. And my personal favorite . . .
- Poor Ugly Devil - Exactly what it sounds like.
