657. Whose “Messiah” Is It Anyway?

Jane Glover is an early music scholar and a prolific conductor. I've conducted over 120 performances of Messiah, which I have loved since I was nine years old. That first Messiah she heard was at Lincoln Cathedral in the East Midlands. of England. My grandparents lived there and we had a family Christmas and we were all taken to Messiah and I was blown away by this piece.

I can to this day remember everything about it. What had really blown me away was not the huge stuff. It wasn't actually Alleluia and Amen, though of course they did. It was actually the much more contemplative stuff. The thing I wanted to come and bash out on the piano when we got home was

I know that my Redeemer liveth. Something rang a chord within me, and I couldn't really articulate it at the age of nine, but I somehow knew instinctively that music was going to be important and that Handel was going to be important to me. Because whenever I encountered Handel, And it's certainly Messiah. It always felt natural and familiar and this is what I should be doing.

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