Charles Jennens: The Man Behind Handel's Messiah

by Ruth Smith

In a major new exhibition the Handel House Museum explores the life, work and character of Handel's great collaborator Charles Jennens. An enigmatic character, Jennens had an enormous influence on Handel's life and work. As librettist for the oratorios Saul and Belshazzar, he provided the composer with words that inspired some of his most challenging and exciting music. His carefully chosen scripture selection for Messiah was to inspire Handel to even greater creative heights, and together these two men created one of the greatest musical works of all timeThe exhibition's curator is Dr Ruth Smith, author of Handel's Oratorios and Eighteenth-Century Thought (CUP), who has made a particular study of the life and work of Charles Jennens.

80 pages, Paperback

First published November 21, 2012

Reviews

[Chuck Fry · Rating 5 out of 5]

The life of Charles Jennens is a very important and satisfying topic. Ruth Smith is an excellent scholar who has given much of her vocation to the study of Jennens' life. I admire her work a great deal and look to her as a model of how one may do scholarship. Along with Jennens himself, Ruth Smith is one of the unsung heroes of our time.
This book, "Charles Jennens: The Man behind Handel's Messiah", makes available to us a comprehensive yet concise presentation of this man. In a mere 80 pages, she effectively informs us of this remarkable man and his importance in history.

[Anson Cassel Mills · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brief but thorough biography of Charles Jennens (1700-1773) (pronounced "Jennings"), the librettist of Handel's Messiah. Ruth Smith, Faculty of Music, Emerita, University of Cambridge, seems to have ferreted out virtually everything known about the man, and we are in her debt for rehabilitating his reputation from the vicious calumny of a contemporary, one George Steevens, "a habitual liar who was a byword even among his friends for professional jealousy and malpractice." (10) Smith's scholarship is impeccable, and her writing is both sensible and approachable.