Handel’s Messiah

I read that the “inspired” connection between the words and music is not as it appears. What seems to celebrate the words from Isaiah, was originally written for a profane, frivolous, duet for two sopranos castigating “blind Cupid” and “cruel beauty.”

How even more “divine”, then, if a radical Handel had, perhaps, written an oratorio to the Birth of Venus (that pesky imps mother), and the joy in a natural religion that celebrated the eroticism that fires all human creativity & love.

GFH and the Christian mythology are robust enough for a little very well intentioned teasing.

If by the erotic one means a lovely sense of sharing oneself, playfulness, deep yearning, a transcendental desire and reverence, a sense of dissolving the barriers between oneself and another – well, adults at their best can do that. It is also at the heart of “religious” experience. Certainly there are echoes of it in the way mothers and infants are together. Vide Freud’s “3 Essays”.

I modestly propose a slightly more humanist, democratic, feminist ode to joy. One that runs through my head and heart when I hear the annual Messiah at St James in Piccadilly. The stresses still work well:

“From us a goddess is born, unto us all love is given,
And our government shall be upon our shoulders,
And her name shall be called beautiful, counsellor,
The mighty goddess, the everlasting mother, the princess of peace!”

xx andrea, recovering from xmas