Getting A Handel On Things
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
It rained in the night, a series of intermittent showers, and there was a stunning full moon, but somehow I managed to sleep anyway. I awoke on Sunday feeling cheerful and ambitious. It was a chilly morning, so I donned a knit cap and fleece jacket to supplement my plaid flannel pajamas, and was inspired to bake bread -- I had in mind some rustic, crusty whole wheat loaves. While the yeast was proofing, I turned on selected excerpts of Handel's Messiah, so the kitchen was filled with the joyful noise of "Unto Us A Child" and the Hallelujah chorus, and the sunlight poured in through the steamy window, and all was well. That's the way it's always been with this music. It never fails to lift my heart.
I was in the children's choir of St. Mark's Methodist Church in Brooklyn when I first experienced it. I didn't understand it quite, especially some of the slower passages, which still seem heavily operatic and vaguely ominous to me, but we were to add our voices, angelic and off-key, to the full choir and congregation at the Easter Sunday service, and when it all came together, I felt that I was a part of something beautifully transcendent and celebratory. I remember walking home afterwards; it was springtime in the city and every street proclaimed new life.
Many years later, in the dark days of Syracuse, I went with my roommate Patty to one of those Messiah Sing-Alongs held in a stately old church downtown the week before Christmas. Patty was annoyed at me (and with good reason) when we entered that church, but somewhere in the midst of the singing and the organ music, all mundane resentments vanished. She reached over and took my hand, and I held hers back, and we were friends again. Afterwards, when we stepped outside into the cold winter night, we beheld a world transformed by snow and moonlight. It was a magical night, a diamond night, a hallelujah night...
So I've summoned up this soundtrack many times in the ensuing years, and it's sustenance. It is an essential tradition that we play it in the house at Christmas, of course, but hope and beauty are not seasonal. It might just as easily be coming through my earphones when I ride my bicycle in the hills, just generally enjoying the glory of the world. And I was thrilled to discover a recent YouTube video in which the Philadelphia Opera Company and chorale singers from all over the city gather in Macy's department store and, in a Random Act of Culture, burst into a thrilling performance of the Hallelujah chorus. Here's the link to the video in case you haven't seen it. (I hope that works; I'm not very savvy about posting in videos and links...and I am typing this in transit on my iPad, a little bit tricky at times.) But watch that video if you can. It might brighten your day.
I had occasion to go into a mall yesterday and was promptly turned off by the usual pre-Christmas scene: that shameless shove into shopping accompanied by songs of sleigh bells, drummer boys, Santa Baby...over and over...insipid and insincere.
It's all been noted before; 'tis the season to greedily get stuff. I have an admittedly low threshold for it and got out as fast as I could. Anyway, after I saw the video, I was thinking what it might have been like to have been present when that Macy's was briefly transformed into a cathedral. (Well, if you look at it you will see that there are a handful of people who remain unmoved. How annoying to be interrupted while you're trying to shop or get your eyebrows tweezed. Let us never become one of those...okay? NEVER.)
Most people, though, do recognize that something amazing has happened, and they allow themselves to be swept into it. Smiles appear, non-singers sing, babies are hoisted up on shoulders, and scores of cell phone cameras seek to capture something (since so many of us have forgotten how to be in a moment without attempting to record it.) The point is this: the place is completely changed. Almost miraculous.