Messiah at the Foundling Hospital

An excellent little (1 hour) documentary about the origins of Handel's Messiah and The Foundling Hospital in London.

It has to pack quite a bit in, with musical performance, the years-long effort by Thomas Coram to found the Foundling, Handel's late career woes, and social history of mid-18th century London and the early years of the Foundling Hospital.

Yes, there are some (non-musical) recreations but they are generally played with informational voice-over and not just mime.

A wonderful aspect of this is the sterling performances of bits of Messiah by the Gabrieli Consort and Players (as always with period instruments, but this time in period dress, too) under Paul McCreesh dressed as Handel. It includes fine singers Lucy Crowe, Andrew Staples, Ashley Riches and the spectacular countertenor Iestyn Davies, recorded in period style in St Paul's Church in Deptford, London.

I knew a lot of this story of how Messiah helped fund The Foundling Hospital, but I learned a lot and got so see some wonderful performance, too. Recommended.

In the mid-eighteenth century retired sea-captain Thomas Coram decided to provide refuge for all those illegitimate babies peopling the center of London and living in filthy conditions. He created the Foundling Hospital, where the luckless mothers could leave their offspring, so long as they were less than six months old. There the children could grow up in a secure atmosphere and be well looked after, even if their lives were somewhat institutionalized.

Despite Coram's best intentions, his project was beset by shortages of funds. Hence he has the idea of raising money from all the society swells of central London, promising them extensive benefits in return such as attendance at charity concerts where they could see and be seen.

He managed to get in touch with G. F. Handel, whose MESSIAH had had a disastrous premiere in Dublin. Together they hatched the idea of staging the magnificent oratorio at the Foundling Hospital in front of a society audience. By all accounts the performance was an unqualified success, leading to the creation of the MESSIAH's reputation as perhaps the best-known choral work ever.

The story is an inspirational one, but somewhat slight. Presenters Tom Service and Amanda Vickery (who subsequently worked together on another historical documentary about the first British performance of LA TRAVIATA) work hard to create a narrative, and there are plenty of re-enactment scenes with actors and singers to divert our attention. Yet we cannot help but feel that the material has been somewhat over-stretched to fill a one-hour slot; the documentary might have worked far better in shorter form without some of the historical reenactments added as padding.