Ditching Your Holiday Hits For Handel’s ‘Messiah’ Connects You To The Past And Future

“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire,” said Gustav Mahler, the Romantic composer, paraphrasing St. Thomas More. Last weekend, my choir director shared a similar sentiment as we prepared to take the stage to perform Handel’s “Messiah.” As Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You” tops Billboard’s Holiday 100 and department stores pump ubiquitous Christmas pop through speakers, yearly performances of “Messiah” offer respite from saccharine holiday nostalgia. “Messiah,” which tells the scriptural story of salvation, is a tradition that manages to preserve fire.

Invocations of “tradition” at this time of year bring to mind carols crooned by Josh Groban — or, if tastes run older, Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole, and Dean Martin. If these songs preserve fire, it’s a comfortable, domesticated flame that flickers uncertainly. “White Christmas” and “The Christmas Song” drip with emotion, evoking snow-dusted memories that Thomas Kinkade might paint. They’re beautiful songs, and they bring beautiful things to mind, but they fail to address the central longings of Christmas, settling instead for an easily commercialized nostalgia.

The fire worth preserving lies further beyond the greatest generation, found in works like those of Handel, as well as the choral works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, Benjamin Britten, and even John Rutter. Classical Christmas music suggests that perhaps we should long for something older and richer than the post-war America of our parents and grandparents. 

Tradition preserves a fire that, rightly understood, defies sputtering candles. This fire blazes, bonfire-like, too grand to understand, too bold to approach, too majestic for pop music to capture. It is a fire not stolen from the gods but given to us by God. 

Perhaps we should cling to our cultural inheritance instead of exchanging it for a constant cycle of seasonal singles. Each year, pop artists remake tradition in their own image with albums filled with covers of standard carols. The wonder of “Messiah” and other music like it, however, is the resistance to a market ideology that demands constant newness while stifling genuine creativity. 

When performing “Messiah,” musicians participate in a lineage of sound unchanged since the 18th century. In an era of auto-tune and synth, the baroque orchestra sounds almost otherworldly. And yet, it is a work of such delicate balance and attention to the human voice that soloists need no microphone to be heard over the strains of strings, oboes, and organs. Lasting more than three hours when sung straight through, the oratorio is rarely performed in full. Unlike sugary pop hits, which clock in around three or four minutes, “Messiah” is a test of endurance for performers and audiences alike. And it’s worth every second. 

There is a flame, wild and untamed, in the gymnastic figuration of Handel’s arias, but the oratorio’s compelling power comes from the story it tells. In the work’s opening numbers, a soloist begs, “But who may abide the day of His coming? And who shall stand when He appeareth? For He is like a refiner’s fire”