Volume 25 Issue 4 - December 2019 / January 2020

BEHIND THE SCENES
The TSO trombone section - Gordon Wolfe, centre
The Trombone
Shall Sound?
Mozart’s Handel’s Messiah
An Orchestra Librarian’s Nightmare
GARY CORRIN
JAG GUNDU
For many North American orchestras, playing in
the pit for ballet performances of Tchaikovsky’s
Nutcracker is a common holiday tradition. This
was my experience, first as a clarinetist and then as an
orchestra librarian. My first encounter with Messiah as
a professional, however, was during my interview for
the librarian position of the Phoenix Symphony when I
was asked, “What edition do you like for the Messiah?”
It is an extraordinarily complex question – much more
so than I would have known at the time. I managed to
offer up something I’d learned from a couple of singalong
Messiahs I had attended – the organizer cautioning
the audience/performers about the different numbering
systems in various publications. But over the succeeding
30 years I have learned that there is much more to it than
that, as I hope to share with you in this article.
The complexity begins with the fact that George Frideric Handel was
a German who spent the last 49 years of his life in London and achieved
his greatest successes there. He composed Messiah – in English – in
1742 and, over the next several years, conducted it 13 times. As might
be expected, these performances featured varying casts of vocal soloists,
so during those years Handel rewrote several of the solo pieces to
better suit these different voices. With its extraordinary popularity (and
copyright protection still in its infancy) came many publications of
the music, each with its own system of organizing and numbering the
content. Moreover, because of its timeless story and memorable tunes,
Messiah became the object of updates by several composers (including
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart) who made new orchestrations to capture
an expressive sonority more in keeping with their time. The TSO’s own
Sir Andrew Davis is the most recent example of this.
Let’s pause right here to consider the things that could go wrong
at a first rehearsal. The conductor might ask for “No. 44,” at which
the chorus (reading from the Watkins Shaw edition) would sing,
“Hallelujah!” while the alto and tenor soloists (reading from the
Bärenreiter edition of the Handel version) would launch into “O Death,
Where is Thy Sting?” and the orchestra (reading from Bärenreiter parts
of the Mozart version) would chime in, “We don’t have a number 44!”
Even worse, the additional flutes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, trombones,
tuba and percussion (variously required for versions by Mozart, Prout,
Beecham or Davis) might not even show up! There are, in fact, so many
performance variables that it really is necessary for each conductor to
have a set of parts marked to his or her specifications.
I got that that first library job in Phoenix, and that fall was
presented with a score of Messiah into which the conductor had
entered thousands of performance indications, which I was obliged
to transfer into the parts (first ensuring, of course, that the soloists,
chorus and orchestra would all be performing from that same
edition). It took a couple weeks of constant work, but I vividly
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