When I was a child in the 1960s and my Dutch Calvinist immigrant family bought our first record player, among the half dozen or so LPs we acquired was the classic recording ofMessiahby Eugene Ormandy with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and the Philadelphia Orchestra. My parochial school education had made me deeply familiar with the Bible, and therefore I recognized the scriptural texts used in Handel’s masterpiece. But in those days I wasn’t much interested in the words, and I more or less ignored them. What inspired me was the staggering magnificence of Handel’s music.

For my youthful...

Across North America, performances of Handel’s oratorioMessiah—many of them “sing-ins,” with the audience joining in for the choruses—are musical highlights of the Christmas season. Christians, Jews, and others come together to delight in one of the consummate masterpieces of Western music.

The high point, inevitably, is the Hallelujah chorus, familiar not only from countless concerts and recordings but also from its use in less lofty surroundings, from Mel Brooks’sHistory of the World, Part I, where it signifies the origins of music among cavemen, to recent television ads depicting frantic bears’ ecstatic relief in chancing upon Charmin...

This part of the book is meant primarily as a general reference work but also as an additional means to further contextualize and support the primary arguments of the main essay, in chapter 2. Both the essay and the annotated libretto, however, are designed in a way that they can be profitably be read in isolation.

The annotated libretto primarily focuses on providing biblical background. In Jennens’s and Handel’s day, authors and composers could (and did) rely on their audience to understand the contexts of a biblical libretto—essentially the King James Version of the Bible (KJV) and theBook...