First Nights – Handel’s Messiah and Baroque Oratorio
Discover Handel’s Messiah in this installment of First Nights, which will explore five masterpieces of western music.
What you will learn
- Get to know some wonderful music
- Identify genres and subgenres of 18th-century opera and oratorio
- Understand text-music relationships in the Baroque period
- Distinguish basic aspects of musical texture and musical form
- Appreciate cultural context and performance circumstances of Handel’s Messiah
Program Overview
While Italian opera set the standard in the Baroque era, German composer George Frederic Handel quickly gained popularity for his oratorios, which put operatic techniques to work in the service of sacred music. Handel’s Messiah premiered in Dublin on April 13, 1742, and remains popular to this day. Harvard’s Thomas Forrest Kelly (Morton B. Knafel Professor of Music) guides learners through Messiah’s musical highlights, while detailing Handel’s composition process, the preparations and rehearsals, and the premiere performance.
Learners in this module of First Nights need not have any prior musical experience. In this unit, you will learn the basics of musical form and analysis, the genres and styles used in Messiah , the circumstances of its first performance, and its subsequent history.
Additional First Nights Modules:
Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo and the Birth of Opera
Handel’s Messiah and Baroque Oratorio
Beethoven’s “Ninth Symphony”
Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique and Program Music in the 19th Century
Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring: Modernism, Ballet, and Riots
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