Redemption and the Modern Age – Handel's Messiah between the Late 18th and the 21st Century Georg-Friedrich-Händel-Gesellschaft and Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Halle (Saale), 29 May–2 June 2021

In 2020 both the Halle Handel Festival and the annual musicological conference in the composer’s birthplace were cancelled, though the conference papers were published in the 2021 volume of the Händel-Jahrbuch. By contrast, in 2021 a significant number of festival concerts were held online and the conference was transferred fully to Zoom. Thanks to the organization of the latter by Wolfgang Hirschmann, Annette Landgraf and Konstanze Musketa, as well as the enthusiasm of the participants, the online format did not impair the scholarly gathering in any way. As opposed to the last couple of years when the themes of the conference were conceived along broader, often interdisciplinary lines, this time it was instigated by a specific circumstance, the two hundred and eightieth anniversary of the first performance of Messiah in Dublin in 1741.The call for papers invited applicants to explore ‘the performance history, the history of the arrangements and the history of the impact’ of Handel’s most famous oratorio. The conference opened with a keynote lecture by Andreas Waczkat (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen) on images of Jesus Christ as saviour and hero in oratorios by composers from Handel to Friedrich Schneider. After briefly examining Charles Jennens’s theological precepts, Waczkat devoted most of his attentions to Handel’s lesser-known successors. The prolific, but unpopular, oratorio author Schneider composed a trilogy about Christ but was criticized by his librettist Philipp Mayer for portraying him only as triumphant, while settings of sections from Klopstock’s Messias by composers such as Andreas Romberg rarely offered a heroic view. After this address, the biennial Handel research prize was awarded to Teresa Ramer-Wünsche (Hallische Händel Ausgabe, Halle) for her dissertation on the genesis of Handel’s serenata Parnasso in festa per gli sponsali di Teti e Peleo, HWV73, stemming from her work on the critical edition (Bärenreiter: Kassel, 2017). The ceremony was followed by her lecture on affect, subject matter, word setting and borrowing in Parnasso in festa. She focused first on the working methods of the Italian librettist who wrote parody texts based on English models in the works from which Handel borrowed, and then investigated the roles that the original affect and subject matter of those models may or may not have played in Handel’s compositional process. The first two sessions on 31 May continued the pursuit of theological questions and approaches. Karl Friedrich Ulrichs (Theologische Fakultät Universität Leipzig) explored the comparatively infrequent use of extracts from Messiah in evangelical homilies, that is, sermons which take a piece of music as a source of inspiration. While Ulrichs merely stressed in a neutral manner the suitability of Handel’s music for such purposes, the following two papers took a more polemical stance, mostly on the controversial view by Michael Marissen – as expressed first in his article ‘Rejoicing against Judaism in Handel’s Messiah’, The Journal of Musicology 24/2 (2007), 167–194, and expanded in his monograph Tainted Glory in Handel’s Messiah: The Unsettling History of the World’s Most Beloved Choral Work (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014) – that Jennens intentionally corrupted the biblical sources of his librettos to express anti-Judaistic sentiments. One example is the aria ‘Oh