Messiah
It started with a hand-me-down piano-vocal score of Handel’s masterwork oratorio Messiah. It was heavily marked in pen and, more to the point, it was an edition that shall not be named. Not all editions are created equal. Some are for reading from, while others are for cutting into little circles.
Then a Bach Mass in B-minor piano-vocal score handed down from a friend and mentor, also a pretty crummy edition. Worse, it was crumbling away on yellowing, acidic paper. Another hand-me-down score, another staggering work of artistic genius by a German in a wig.
Then a Bach Mass in B-minor piano-vocal score handed down from a friend and mentor, also a pretty crummy edition. Worse, it was crumbling away on yellowing, acidic paper. Another hand-me-down score, another staggering work of artistic genius by a German in a wig.
Johann Sebastian Bach’s Mass in B-minor is many things: a last will and testament by a composer nearing the end of his life; an offering to God; a buzzing nest of chromaticism; a triumph of trumpets and drums; a bafflingly long thing to have to sit through when you were a kid, when you were too young to understand that your choral-singing parents were actually introducing you to your betrothed. Yep, the B-minor is long (“Confiteor,” I’m talking to you). But it is torture and sweet solace to those who perform it, transcendence to those who listen.
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