Isaiah 9-12
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Any musician will recognize part of these verses in Isaiah from
Handel’s Messiah, one of the best
known and most frequently performed pieces of music in history. The text for Handel’s Messiah is all from Scripture, both from
the Old and New Testaments. There
are several verses from Isaiah, the prophet.
Isaiah, some 700 years before the birth of Jesus, is given by God
visions of the coming Messiah, the promised eternal king from the line of
David. The “Wonderful Counselor,
Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” The “great light” for those “walking in darkness.”
I find it interesting that Handel completed his composition for Messiah in just 24 days. (The entire thing takes about three
hours to perform!) When he
received the Scriptures compiled by his friend Charles Jennens, it is recorded
that he shut himself in and worked day and night often going without food. It is rumored that as Handel was
working on this composition one of his servants was calling him and there was
no response, so he went into Handel’s room to find him bent over weeping. When he asked what was wrong, Handel
held up his work on Messiah and said,
“I thought I saw the face of God.”
He ended his manuscript with the letters SDG, as Johann Bach is known
for doing at the beginning and end of his pieces – “Soli Deo Gloria,” which
means “To God alone the glory.”
I’m fascinated first of all by the very idea of prophecy and how
God gave Isaiah this gift to see and paint the picture for others what was
going to happen hundreds of years later.
I’m also fascinated by how, I believe, God inspired Handel as he wrote
what became the masterpiece of the oratorio Messiah
and how the power of that music and the scriptures within it have impacted
people all over the world for hundreds of years.
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