PRINCETON, N.J., April 20 — It is a rare musicological debate that quickly rises to broader public attention. Two classic examples in recent decades took place at conventions of the American Musicological Society in Boston, and both involved not only volatile issues but also combative personalities. In 1981 Joshua Rifkin and Robert Marshall locked horns over the size of Bach’s choruses, Mr. Rifkin arguing that Bach would typically have used only one singer per part. In 1998 bellicose defenders of the authenticity of the disputed claim that the book “Testimony” represented the actual “memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov” met with ferocious opposition from Richard Taruskin and others.
Friendly antagonists: Professors Michael Marissen and Wendy Heller, rear, and Ruth Smith after the debate.
A panel discussion of the American Handel Festival 2007 here on Friday certainly had an explosive issue: Michael Marissen’s thesis that “Messiah” and more specifically the “Hallelujah” chorus — perhaps the most sacrosanct and beloved totem in Western music, rivaled only by the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony — conveys malice toward Judaism. A boldly stated article by Mr. Marissen in The New York Times on April 8 drew considerable response from readers, from the saddened to the outraged. But for various reasons the fireworks here were relatively muted.
For one thing each of the two prime antagonists hid what appeared to be a steely resolve behind a soft-spoken, mostly polite manner. Mr. Marissen, a scholar at Swarthmore College who has devoted himself largely to examining what might be seen as anti-Judaic tendencies in works by Bach, argued the case against Handel at length. Ruth Smith, a Handel specialist at Cambridge University in England and the author of the landmark book “Handel’s Oratorios and 18th-Century Thought,” responded to the theological aspects of Mr. Marissen’s thesis, disputing many assumptions and interpretations.
Wendy Heller, an associate professor of music at Princeton University and one of the organizers of the festival, which was held on campus, livened things up a bit with an animated response to the musical aspects of Mr. Marissen’s argument. And members of the audience, which was laced with prominent Handel scholars, generated heat in the question-and-answer segment that followed.
But there were other factors that softened the confrontation, making direct hits difficult. The respondents had not seen Mr. Marissen’s paper in time to tailor their own comments to it. By and large, they were responding to other versions of it, presented at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society in November; in the article in The Times, “Unsettling History of That Joyous ‘Hallelujah’ ”; and in an extended article for The Journal of Musicology, as yet unpublished but available to the respondents in advance copies.
Mr. Marissen summarizes his argument in an abstract of the Journal article: “Scholars have too little investigated questions of religious meaning in Handel’s ‘Messiah,’ particularly the work’s manifest theological anti-Judaism. Previously unknown historical sources for the work’s libretto compiled and arranged by Charles Jennens (1700-73) reveal the text’s implicit designs against Jewish religion. Handel’s musical setting powerfully underscores these tendencies of Jennens’s libretto and adds to them, reaching a euphoric climax in the ‘Hallelujah’ chorus.”
The issue, Mr. Marissen suggests, is not one of anti-Semitism per se but one of triumphalism, a rejoicing in the misfortune of the Jews, specifically with the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans in A.D. 70.
Mr. Marissen has scoured sources for the libretto, notably a book in Jennens’s library by Richard Kidder, an Anglican bishop: “A Demonstration of the MESSIAS. In which the Truth of the Christian Religion is proved, against all the Enemies thereof; but especially against the JEWS.”
The biblical texts used in several numbers leading up to the “Hallelujah” chorus, Mr. Marissen suggests, are translated, interpreted or conflated in a tendentious manner in line with those earlier commentaries to portray the Jews as, for example, the “them” in “Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron.”
Ms. Smith was having none (or very little) of this. She granted Mr. Marissen the point that “Messiah” was very much a work of its time, and that denigration of Jews was then in the air. Although Jennens believed in one true faith and was ready to repudiate other faiths, there is nothing to suggest that he specifically repudiated Judaism, she added, and he “avoids direct impugning of the Jews by the use of Old Testament texts.”
The contention that Jennens chose texts because they were in Kidder is completely unproved, Ms. Smith said, and in any case the use of a specific text, from whatever source, does not imply that the interpretation of that text is necessarily accepted as part of the bargain. “Jennens does not make specific condemnation of any specific belief,” she added. Most of all, “he condemns a lack of belief in the Christian faithful.”
Ms. Heller was equally assiduous in trying to undercut Mr. Marissen’s musical arguments. To refute the notion that Handel’s use of regal trumpets and drums in the “Hallelujah” chorus, and only there in “Messiah,” represents over-the-top or even unusual triumphalism, she played a brief excerpt from the coronation anthem “Zadok the Priest,” no less triumphal.
To combat the notion that Handel uses a particular oscillating melodic figure in Wagnerian leitmotif fashion to represent the Jews, she pointed to other uses of similar figures. And the first questioner from the audience seconded her, noting that oscillating figures are ubiquitous in Handel, used to signify wind, waves, flying.
Most of the other questioners also attacked Mr. Marissen’s musical or theological assumptions, interpretations and conclusions. He emerged bloodied but seemingly unbowed.
Ms. Heller, for her part, concluded her presentation by pointing out that as a Jew she already felt enough guilt. “Do we have to feel guilty about the ‘Hallelujah’ chorus too?” she asked. “We don’t.”
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