Opinion | Handels Messiah, an Anthem of Hope, Was Born of a Contentious Friendship

When Charles Jennens, a wealthy art collector, first heard the work we now refer to as Handel’s “Messiah” in 1743, a year after it premiered, he came away thoroughly miffed.“I don’t yet despair of making him retouch the ‘Messiah,’” Jennens wrote to a friend, imagining his own suggestions for revisions to a work that is now inseparable from the holiday season.Handel was Britain’s foremost public composer and court musician to George II.

But it turns out that “Messiah” wasn’t really Handel’s — or at least not only his.It was born of one of the least recognized partnerships in music history but one of significant artistry, the Enlightenment-era equivalent of George and Ira Gershwin or Elton John and Bernie Taupin.

Handel wrote the music but the original idea and the libretto — “the book” as it would be called on Broadway — belonged wholly to Jennens.“Messiah” has endured for centuries as a monument to the possibility of hope.The biblical texts it draws from tell a story of unity and redemption.

Yet it came about only because of two creators who, throughout their adult lives, disagreed on issues from religion to the single thorniest political matter of their day, the legitimacy of the reigning British monarch.From that fellowship of opposites sprang a work of music that still gets people to raise their voices together in song.The text and music of “Messiah” have inspired generations of listeners, but the history of its creation contains its own lesson: In a society riven by discord, art and friendship are the hidden workshops where we figure out how to narrow otherwise unbridgeable divides.Handel was born the son of a “barber surgeon” and a much younger wife in a territory that would later become Germany.

After an itinerant musical apprenticeship in Italy, he arrived as an immigrant in London at the height of a craze for Italian opera.He had a genius for melody and the rare ability to make an audience truly feel what ...