Word: singed
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly Host praising God" and singing Handel's Messiah. Though cynics may snarl "But who may abide the day of His coming?" they will be a small, silent (or at least ignored) minority. As Christmas threatens from Tokyo to Toledo, Messiahs are busting out again all over the world. The work is being staged, illustrated with color slides, tinkled through by tiny orchestras, blasted over by huge ones, shouted by great singers and squeaked by small ones. In New York and San Francisco, people are paying to sight-read...
...always been a smash. If a nearly endless succession of well-meaning popularizers have taken gross and extravagant liberties with it, Handel is partly to blame. A shrewd businessman, he ensured The Messiah's success by hiring the best and most popular singers in 18th century London to sing it. If the bass singer was not very good, Handel would turn the bass aria into a recitative, rewrite it for an alto or even a soprano. For flexible soprano voices, he would doll up the music with ornaments and, if another soprano complained, he would steal a few arias...
Obese Orchestras. Thereafter, everybody got into the act. From Mozart to obscure professors, composers reorchestrated and rearranged The Messiah. Since everybody wanted to sing it too, the choruses became enormous, and orchestras swelled proportionately. On the theory that if Handel had had a big orchestra he would have used it, a series of uncalled-for instruments puffed Handel's clean, baroque textures into plodding Victorian obesity. This musical elephantiasis reached some sort of a climax in 1959, when Sir Thomas Beecham recorded a Messiah that sounded a bit like Richard Strauss's Elektra: with cymbals, bells, triangles...
...Dylan and Joan Baez sing protest songs at the Newport Festival...
NOEL COWARD: It will be a week of hell, not only for me but also for the people who have to sing my praises. I'll be sitting there wearing my tribute-accepting face, which shows me proud but unspoiled by my own success. It is a face I have used since...