[78-L] Messiah Sources

[DAVID BURNHAM]

I'm no expert, but I do know there were definitely a couple of examples of Handel using his own previously written music in "Messiah" - in at least one case, very inappropriately.  The chorus "For Unto Us a Child is Born" is based on a comical duet, "No, di voi non vo' fidarmi", HWV 189, and "All We Like Sheep" is a re-working of another duet for two sopranos, "Quel fior che all' alba ride", HWV 192.  "His yoke is easy" and "And He Shall Purify" are also reputably borrowed from earlier works.  In the first example, the music is inappropriate because in the first line, "For unto us a Child is Born", the most important word is "Child", but musically, the most important word is "For".  The musical line makes more sense in the duet where the word "No" is the most important.  In the second case, "All we like sheep", the music is very inappropriate for the words.  The sentiment of the prose is very heavy and remorseful, but the music is very rollicking
 and gives an image of sheep gambolling about in a meadow - hence the common urge to change the words to "We all like Sheep".  Another example of word/music miss-match, "His yoke is easy" the music for the word "easy" is not easy at all, but is quite complicated.

db


No, di voi non vo' fidarmi 

Like its equally engaging companion, Quel fior che all’alba ride, HWV 192 (also for two sopranos and available in this series as HH 41), HWV 189 presents music that today is familiar to us from four-part choruses in the celebrated oratorio Messiah. These two duetti are in fact the original versions of the pieces in question: they were completed, in early July 1741, at around the time when Handel is believed to have received the libretto for Messiah, some seven weeks before he began, on 22 August, to set it to music. The choruses that were adapted from them – “For unto us a child is born” and “All we like sheep have gone astray” from the outer movements of HWV 189; “His yoke is easy” and “And He shall purify” from HWV 192 – are particularly fascinating cases of self- borrowing, involving much re-composition besides re-texting in a different language and rescoring on a grand scale. Moreover, one can hear, in the motif for “So per
 prova” in the present duet’s Wnale, the germ of the famous “Hallelujah” chorus. Together with a further case (“O Death, where is thy sting?”, derived from the Wrst movement of Se tu non lasci amore, HWVv 193, a duetto dating from the early 1720s), these adaptions exemplify a compositional practice regularly employed by Handel as both a stimulus to his creativity and the means of recycling some of his best musical ideas. On occasion he would recycle a literary text alone. The words of No, di voi non vo’ fidarmi, for example, were re-set in late 1742 as the duetto for soprano and alto hwv 190, a piece that otherwise bears no resemblance to the present work. 
Although it is probable that HWV 189 and HWV 1