The Power of Music

The favorite piece of Reiner Leister comes from Handel’s Alexander’s Feast with which Handel opened his oratorio season on 19 February 1736 at the Covent Garden Theatre, London. For Reiner Leister, it is here that the power and the emotional force of the music is absolutely clear and unambiguous.

My favorite piece comes from Handel’s Alexander’s Feast with which Handel opened his oratorio season on 19 February 1736 at the Covent Garden Theatre, London. Handel used a text which was passionately admired in England at that time. He could rely on the fact that the London audience would be curious about the setting. The curiosity grew to enthusiasm, and Alexander’s Feast became one of Handel’s most popular works of all.

Handel had the libretto fashioned from a text by John Dryden. The Ode has the title Alexander’s Feast, or, The Power of Music – a work which is devoted to the power of music and Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of music. How the power of music unfolds is depicted in the Ode through a feast which Alexander the Great celebrated on the occasion of his victory over the Persians (330 BC). Handel allows us to experience how the world’s most renowned general is driven by even more powerful music through all the heights and depths of human passions.

One particular number fromAlexander’s Feast has become my favorite piece this year: “The many rend the skies.” The piece has an energy and joy in life which is exciting and carries you along with it. The fact that Handel achieves such depth of expression with the astounding lightness of his musical language is breathtaking. For me, it is here that the power and the emotional force of the music is absolutely clear and unambiguous.

At the end the classical world sinks and is drowned out by light almost celestial flute sounds, and Cecilia leads the people beyond themselves to “pure”music. Greek beauty and fullness of life on the one hand, and Christian values represented by Cecilia on the other find their common expression in the music.