Messiah

GEORG FRIEDRICH HÄNDEL / arr. WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
Der Messias (The Messiah), oratorio for solos, mixed choir and orchestra HWV 56, KV 572
Jan Siber soprano
Václava Krejčí Housková, mezzo-soprano
Christoph Prégardien tenor
Lukáš Bařák bass-baritone
Slovak Philharmonic Choir
choirmaster Jan Rozehnal
Brno Philharmonic
conductor Dennis Russell Davies
Handel's Messiah
The complete failure of the opera Deidamia convinced the fifty-six-year-old Georg Friedrich Händel (1685–1759) that the long years in which he reigned over London as an opera composer and as a businessman were definitively over. Financial distress and social deprivation forced him to leave London. However, before he left - at the invitation of the King of Ireland to Dublin, he wrote Messiah, probably his greatest work, in three weeks (in August and September 1741). The textual background prepared for him by his librettist Charles Jennens is not the usual oratorio libretto; it is compiled exclusively from short quotations from the Scriptures - from the Psalms to the Apocalypse. The Dublin premiere of Messiah went down in history; her enthusiastic response also reached London, so when Handel returned there after some time, he again walked with his head held high and set about composing other oratorios. He wrote fifteen more, and his position became unshakable: if before the Messiah he had actually been an exponent of Italian opera fashion and an importer of Italian singers, he now became the living embodiment of the English choral tradition.
Mozart's adaptation of the Messiah
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart heard Messiah for the first time in London in 1764 (or 1765). At the instigation of the patron Gottfried van Swieten, he modified the oratorio in 1789: he adapted it to the German version of the libretto (the translation of which was based mainly on Luther's translation of the Bible), expanded the wind section to bring the original sound of the baroque orchestra closer to the taste of Vienna; At the same time, Mozart's genius did not allow the work to lose its original spirit, on the contrary, he discovered a new beauty in it. The Messiah in Mozart's arrangement was performed for the first time on March 6, 1789 in the palace of Count Esterházy, it was not published until 1803, i.e. long after Mozart's death.