The A Collector's Messiah - Historic Handel Oratorio Recordings, 1899 - 1930 Page
at the George Frideric Handel Pages at the Teri Noel Towe Home Pages
Handel at 56, in 1741, the year in which he composed Messiah in the house on London's Lower Brook Street a portion of which which soon will house the Handel House Museum. This image is the frontispiece to the 1760 John Mainwaring biography, and is the cover art for the two CD album, A Collector's Messiah - Historic Handel Oratorio Recordings, 1899 - 1930.
A Collector's Messiah
Historic Handel Oratorio Recordings, 1899 - 1930
Truly a Labor of Love and Devotion
Of all of the historical reissues that I have produced in collaboration with the incomparable and unsurpassable Seth B. Winner over the course of the past decade and more, there is none in which I take greater pride and pleasure than A Collector's Messiah - Historic Handel Oratorio Recordings, 1899 - 1930. Since childhood, I have been passionately fond of Handel's Messiah. More than once I have admitted that, while Bach is my favorite and most admired of all composers, if I could have only one piece of music (God forbid that I should be so limited!), that composition would be Handel's Messiah.
One of the first classical recordings that I asked for as a child of seven was a recording of Messiah. Because the complete recordings required three, and sometimes four, LPs, I was started off with a single discs of excerpts, but what a disc it was! The disc is now much battered, but I still have it, a precious souvenir of my childhood. The conductor is Sir Thomas Beecham, and the excerpts are derived from his second complete recording of the oratorio, the one recorded in 1948, with Elsie Suddaby, Marjorie Thomas, Heddle Nash, and Trevor Antony as soloists. As those who have read my critical discographies of Messiah, most importantly the discography that I contributed to Alan Blyth's anthology Choral Music on Records, Beecham's 1948 Messiah, the second of the three recordings he made over the course of three decades, is the first complete and uncut recording of the score. (It is also the first to include an authentic alternate version of any of the various solos and choruses, but that is way beyond the scope of this page!) It remains my all-time personal favorite, although I would not want, under any circumstances, to be without the 1984 Hogwood recording of the 1754 Foundling Hospital Version, the Marriner recording of the 1743 London version, or the eclectic, eecentric, and iconoclastic John Tobin recording!
My fascination, my obsession with Messiah has been one of the driving forces for me as a lifelong record collector, and the serendipitous, fortuitous, and unanticipated discovery of a few of the twenty-some-odd sides that make up the so-called G&T Messiah, released in 1906, only fueled the fire of my passion for the oratorio. (Nearly twenty years later, I am still trying to assemble a complete set of the G&T sides with a view to transferring all of them to CD; they are an important historic document, for many reasons. Not the least of those reasons is the 1906 G&T Messiah is not just the first attempt to record a "complete" Messiah; it is the first attempt to make a "complete" recording of any major choral work.)
As things arranged themselves, to use an expression I learned from Pablo Casals, the celebrations in 1992 surrounding the 250th anniversary of the première of Messiah afforded Seth and me the opportunity to assemble, on commission from Koch International (now Koch Entertainment), two CD anthology drawn from my extensive collection of early Messiah recordings and from the collections of some fellow collectors who were generous and gracious in lending rareties from their collections for the project. The result - A Collector's Messiah - Historic Handel Oratorio Recordings, 1899 - 1930 - was released in 1993. I dedicated the album to my beloved Big Blond, my "other half" of almost 17 years, Johnny McMurray, who, though he did not particularly care for classical music, enjoyed Messiah and did not turn down the invitation to attend a performance with me. He was gravely ill during the months that Seth and I were assembling the set, but the release appeared in time for him to have one before he crossed to the next world.
A Collector's Messiah - Historic Handel Oratorio Recordings, 1899 - 1930 is still in the Koch Entertainment classical catalogue, and it seems to me, particularly in light of the prevailing, lamentable lack of interest in and appreciation of historical recordings that infects the HIP movement, that the album's importance as a resource for those who are actively engaged in research on the performance practice of earlier periods ought to be emphasized and promoted. For that reason, I have decided to post here at my home pages scans of the contents of the booklet that accompanies the set.
As Seth B. Winner will confirm, I labored intensely over the annotations, to assure not only that they are as accurate as possible factually but also that they define for those who chose to listen to this remarkable aggregation of early recordings the magnitude of their historical significance and the extent of their evidentiary value at a time when the reconstruction of the performance practice of the Baroque era is a subject of intense interest in every part of the world.
First, I repeat, albeit in smaller sized scans, the recto and verso of the jewel cover:
Here, seriatim, are the pages of the booklet, including those with illustrations, all of which were photographed from originals in my own library:
I have since determined that the McFarland recording was made even earlier than my initial researches had indicated; it was recorded in 1898.
I shall take the liberty of inserting corrections and amendations to my annotations along the line, when and if necessary!
As I remarked earlier, during the discographical section of the booklet, my subsequent investigation of the date of the McFarland recording of "Every Valley" indicate that it was recorded one year earlier than I originally determined, and that this precious 7" Berliner gramophone disc dates from 1898, confirming that it is, without question, the earliest "flat disc" recording of any portion of Messiah, if not the first recording of any portion of the oratorio. This earlier date also means, of course, that, if my desire to re-do this set comes to pass, I shall have to adjust the subtitle slightly! {:-{)}
It appears that the Costa performing materials, in fact, have survived. A large lot of Costa's Handel performing materials were included in one of the sales of musicalia from the Novello family collections that were held at Sotheby's, London, several years ago. Unfortunately, to my dismay, because I should have liked to have bid for that lot, the catalogue reached me after the sale, but I am told that the Costa materials were acquired by an educational institution. To my knowledge, however, they have yet to surface publicly. Needless to say, I should like to gain access to them, because, among other things, I would like to see what clues they provide about the orchestrations that were used by Sir Henry Wood in 1926!
So many significant advances have been made in the technology available for the transfer of early recordings that I would welcome gladly an opportunity to redo this set, working with Seth B.Winner, of course, and, in the best of all possible worlds, add to the album a third compact disc that would contain more early English and American recordings and a handful of German ones as well. I also continue to pursue, albeit with limited success, the goal of assembling a complete set of the 1906 G&T recordings for inclusion in the revised version.
Teri Noel Towe
June 21, 2001
Revised, October 8, 2001
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The Statue of Handel that was commissioned from Roubilliac by the promoters who owned the notorious Vauxhall Gardens, a
libertine pleasure garden that was the "Heaven" or "Studio 54" of its day.
The A Collector's Messiah - Historic Handel Oratorio Recordings, 1899 - 1930 Pages at the Teri Noel Towe Home Pages is a
PPP Free web page.
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