The most eagerly awaited event of the Christmas season?
No, it’s not the annual holiday-decorating binge at Butch McGuire’s.
We are talking something far more serious here: “LaSalle’s Do-It-Yourself Messiah.”
This is not the only sing-along performance of George Frideric Handel’s imperishable oratorio in the Chicago area. But it emphatically is the most popular, the most famous, the most widely imitated.
Each year the two-night event jams Orchestra Hall to the ceiling with nearly 5,200 singers, most of them dedicated amateurs eager to lift up their voices in the “Hallelujah” chorus. For many, it simply would not be Christmas without it.
The “DIY Messiah” also happens to be the hottest ticket in Chicago music. Every last free ticket is invariably snapped up by mail order as soon as seats are made available to the public in mid-November.
And the fact that the 1995 edition, to be given at 7:30 p.m. Sunday and Monday at Orchestra Hall, marks the 20th annual “Do-It-Yourself Messiah” has made it even hotter.
If you don’t already hold a ticket, don’t even think about trying to get in.
“This year we had to turn away about 3,000 requests for seats. Terrible,” laments Al Booth, the retired Chicago realtor who founded the “Do-It-Yourself Messiah” here in 1976 and who remains the driving force behind the event, sponsored annually by LaSalle National Corp.
The vast majority of Do-It-Yourselfers are not members of professional choruses or even church choirs. They are ordinary people who enjoy participating in, not simply listening to, a performance of the most universally beloved oratorio ever written.
For them, and for the 90-odd musicians who make up the orchestra, “Messiah” resonates with a profound sense of wonder. Singing or playing in it is an exalting experience–a religious experience that transcends denomination. When the roughly three-hour performance is over, people walk up to people they have never met and say, “Wasn’t that a wonderful experience?”
“To play this wonderful oratorio, it’s a fantastic feeling,” says Helmut Fritzsche, a professor of physics at the University of Chicago, an amateur violinist and seven-year veteran of the “DIY Messiah.” “I’ve never seen such a glow of joy on the faces of the (performers) when they walk out of Orchestra Hall.”
“It’s the only chance for one to hear what it sounds like for sound to emanate from the seats in the audience as well as on stage. Orchestra Hall becomes a great sound-chamber. It’s an incredible acoustical experience,” adds Paul Rink, a Chicago attorney who also plays piano in a jazz ensemble, Ivory Reeds. Rink, who happens to be blind, has been happily taking his place in the chorus bass section since 1980.
Nor is Rink the only visually impaired individual who will be taking part in this year’s “Messiah.” Sally Cooper of Chicago’s Blind Services Association Inc. has recruited 30 blind or partially sighted people to sing in the chorus. Some will perform with Braille music, but most have memorized their parts.
“They are all terribly excited to be going to this,” says Anna Perlberg, the association’s executive director. “Music is the greatest source of joy, reward and passion for the blind and partially sighted. It puts them on a level playing field with sighted people.”
Perhaps no single piece of music invites so special a degree of sharing from such a diversity of participants.
Loyal participants. Harry Porterfield, the violin-playing reporter for WLS-Ch. 7, has missed only one performance in 20 years, and that was only because he came down with the flu. Others are traveling from all parts of the globe to be a part of the 20th singing of “Messiah.” Daliwanga Tshangela, a 20-year-old cellist, hails from South Africa. When he heard this was an anniversary year, bass William Welker wrote Booth that he was flying in from Singapore to sing in the chorus.
Susan Davenny Wyner, who will be directing her fifth “DIY Messiah” this weekend, says she is especially moved by the fact that these performances cut across every stratum of society.
“I have received some deeply touching letters from people who are not musicians and who describe the spiritual nature of the experience,” she says. “They sense not only the meaning of the music but what it means symbolically to come from various walks of life to present this great work.”
Booth, whose other musical brainchild is the weekly Dame Myra Hess Memorial Concerts Series at the Chicago Cultural Center, got the idea for the sing-along “Messiah” from performances in which he and his wife took part in 1973 in England, where they were then temporarily living. At the time no one else was presenting a do-it-yourself “Messiah” anywhere in the United States.
Margaret Hillis, founder and then-director of the Chicago Symphony Chorus, agreed to conduct the first performance. Booth booked Orchestra Hall, then got individual donors and a Chicago bank to underwrite fees, rent and insurance. He gathered an orchestra and invited all interested choristers to write in for tickets. The response was enough to guarantee a full house on Dec. 14, 1976. Television and the press greeted the first “Do-It-Yourself Messiah” with open hearts.
And so a holiday tradition was born.
The “DIY Messiah” orchestras have varied in size and quality over the years, depending on which players were available. For the 1985 edition Hillis found herself with 18 trumpet players, 10 more than the score can use. She decided to station the extra musicians in a box out in the auditorium. Would that Handel were around to behold the stentorian blast that greeted the bass soloist when he launched into his famous aria, “And the trumpet shall sound”!
These sing-along “Messiahs” quickly became so popular at Orchestra Hall that the idea spread to various community and church choirs, first in the city and suburbs, later around the nation. At last count, there were 17 churches and other organizations presenting do-it-yourself “Messiahs” in the metropolitan area. Booth estimates there are hundreds of such performances every year around the country.
That first year, 1976, Talman Home Federal Savings & Loan sponsored a live radio broadcast of the “DIY Messiah.” Two years later the bank began underwriting all costs associated with the performances; the sponsorship has continued, through the merger of LaSalle and Talman in 1992, right up to the present.
“Nothing is forever, but I can’t see how we would ever do anything but continue (sponsoring) it,” says Theodore H. Roberts, president of LaSalle National Corp. He declined to say how much money is involved, only that the corporation regards the “DIY Messiah” as its holiday gift to the city.
This season’s vocal soloists consist of Andrea Folan, soprano; Joslyn King, alto; Roderick Dixon, tenor; and Stephen Powell, bass.
Handel, who composed the oratorio for a Lenten performance in Dublin in 1742, probably never reckoned on his work growing from a relatively intimate, secular meditation on Christian themes to a sacred Yuletide obeisance involving platoons of amateur performers.
“Messiah” isn’t even a Christmas work: Like all other English oratorios of its day, it was intended for performance during Lent, when the opera houses were barred from doing secular music. Moreover, for the first performance, Handel used a chorus of only six boy sopranos and 14 men, with a chamber orchestra no larger than 25 players. Many of the choruses we in the late 20th Century associate with masses of full-throated singers were meant to be sung by only 8 to 10 voices per part, not the hundreds that are so prevalent today.
In Chicago around the turn of the century it was common to find “Messiah” performed by a thousand or more voices, accompanied by an enlarged Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Great Britain, with its plumply furnished amateur choral societies, went us one better. Conductor Thomas Beecham recalled having heard Handelian choirs of 4,000 to 5,000 voices in the years leading up to World War I.
But if there is precedent for the bigger-is-better kind of “Messiah” being presented here–also for the spirit of enlightened amateurism behind it–how can a massed chorus of well-meaning novices possibly cope with the musical difficulties of this work?
The plain truth is that only an expert choral ensemble that is relatively small can cope successfully with the more intricate demands of Handel’s florid part-writing. In short, you simply cannot achieve the musical effects with 2,600 voices that you can with 40 or 50.
This, and the fact that the “DIY Messiah” chorus never gets to rehearse together before going out to perform at Orchestra Hall, can make for some scary moments, Rink observes.
“This year they have dropped the chorus `The Lord gave the word,’ which hasn’t been done for a number of years. It was always a riot!” he says, with amusement. “The chorus would start off OK, but somewhere around the middle, when the music got rough, more and more singers would drop out; not till the end would they all come in. Then everybody would laugh, because they recognized it was too much for a lot of them.”
Wyner, who has conducted any number of non-sing-along “Messiahs” (several of them historically informed performances using smallish forces and original instruments), admits some of the music lies just beyond the reach of amateurs. But she’s not worried. Usually, she points out, each section of the chorus–sopranos, altos, tenors and basses–includes a sufficient number of experienced “Messiah” singers capable of carrying the others.
“The first time I did `Messiah’ here, in 1990, it caught me totally by surprise to discover how well the piece can carry the slightly broader tempos and the sheer mass of sound,” Wyner says. “To be honest, I was stunned how responsive the participants are.
“No matter how many times I conduct this,” she adds, “I come away filled with admiration (for them).”
Given the growing crush of people who have to be turned away from each year’s “Do-It-Yourself Messiah” performances, wouldn’t it make sense to add a third performance? Booth elected to do just that several years ago but found that “it was too much work and didn’t make a heck of a lot of sense, so we have been two ever since. There are enough other performances in the area.”
Yes, but none quite so precious as this. What Chicago has taken to its collective heart now for two decades is a people’s “Messiah,” a Christmas tradition in which many may share. Not high art, not popular entertainment, but something in between–beautiful music that spreads an uplifting balm of peace and joy over all who make and experience it.
Hallelujah and amen.
