From Messiah to Messias

The ‘Mozart year 2006’ is full of new releases of recordings of the composer’s music. Thus, even some of his works which have notoriously been neglected by the recording industry, now appear on the shelves. Among those is Mozart arrangement of Handel’s oratorio Messiah of which surprisingly little recordings are available. Between 1788 and 1790 Mozart arranged several of Handel’s big choral works for performances in Baron van Swieten’s series of the concerts of ‘ancient music’. Mozart’s work was mainly restricted to slight changes in the instrumentation and transpositions for the cast available. The main difference to Handel’s original is indeed the German text, entered in the score by van Swieten himself, who used the translation by Klopstock and Ebeling from 1782, with slight own changes. However, even subtle changes can have a great…