Charles Jennens (1700-1773)
What’s the one story you could tell without thinking? Perhaps the one where four children walk through the back of a wardrobe into a magical land, face a powerful enemy and with the help of a mysterious saviour go on to win the day? Or the one where a child walks through a wall to a magical school, faces a powerful enemy, and with the help of a mysterious saviour goes on to win the day? Or perhaps it’s the one where a farm boy flies into a Death Star, faces a powerful enemy, and with the help of a mysterious saviour goes on to win the day?
For hundreds of years, whether fairy tale, novel, musical or movie, storytellers have retold the same story of the hero overcoming adversity and living happily ever after. Yet does life imitate art? Do all dreams come true? Can everyone expect a happy ending?
A difficult beginning
In his book Every Valley: The Story of Handel’s Messiah Charles King tells the story of how George Handel, a famous composer, had endured a dry spell. Struggling for a new idea he came across a collection of Bible verses, set them to music and went on to be remembered as one of the greatest musicians of all time. But where did those Bible references come from?
The answer is Charles Jennens. Descended from one of the Norman conquerors, Jennens lived in a country house with access to plenty of money. Jennens was also a Christian but despite this, he experienced a lot of sadness. He described himself as puny and ‘so afraid of the cold he lay under six blankets in winter and four in summer.’ He never married, fathered no children and made distant enemies more readily than close friends.
His brother Robert struggled to reconcile orthodox Christian teaching with the philosophy he was being taught at university. He attempted to form a kind of Deist interpretation of the world. He wondered whether there was a creator, but a creator who had no interest in what had been created. Gripped with depression and mental illness he ended up taking his own life in a particularly upsetting manner.
Like Robert, Charles suffered from mental health problems, which he called ‘the hyp’. Throughout his life, he would go through periods of melancholia and depression made worse by physical illness. King writes that ‘he was tender and sensible to things other people didn’t notice. “I find my stomach so much disposed to breed wind I am forced to be very cautious in my diet: white wine mixed with hot water at my meals.” He could be impetuous and moody, often losing himself to hasty expressions that proceeded from a delicate texture of the nervous system.’
Overcoming adversity
This is the first stage of the classic narrative. Wealthy but troubled, both men are waiting for something to bring about a happy ending. That something is discovered by Jennens. King describes it like this: ‘One troubled season, surrounded by what had become one of Britain’s finest repositories of human creativity, Jennens started pulling down books from his library shelves. He spent days poring over them, scribbling notes, filling up fresh sheets of paper with a sharpened quill. He copied down quotations from the sacred Scriptures, some from the Psalms and the Hebrew prophets, some from the New Testament. He linked up one passage with another, editing and rearranging them, tying together themes that leapt out at him from the text – the whole of it not so much a story as an archaeology of ancient promises, dug up and dusted off for the present.’
His dream was to set these words to music and who better to do that than Handel? Handel was somewhat out of fashion at this point, his recent works having been greeted with indifference and some mockery but he had received an invitation to conduct a series of concerts in Ireland. Looking for something fresh to perform he took up the words sent to him by Jennens and began to compose. Some phrases he applied to existing tunes, others were fresh compositions. He composed the whole oratorio in his home in London (much later the same home as rented by Jimi Hendrix), practised it in lodgings in Chester and then Parkgate on the way to Ireland, and then performed it in the Great Music Hall in Fishamble Street in Dublin.
Over the next few years, The Messiah would be performed again and again, often as a fundraising event for charities. Performances were regularly sold out and Handel was the talk of high society again. The belief that the King stood in appreciation for the Hallelujah chorus apparently did not happen but this common myth added lustre to the already popular piece.
A happy ending?
Adversity has been overcome but where is the happy ending? For Handel it was fame, fortune and a final resting place in Westminster Abbey. For Jennens, not so much.
Jennens and Handel never celebrated their success together in the coffee houses of London. In fact, Jennens was not satisfied with the Oratorio at all. He said it was ‘rushed, full of mistakes and that he would like to give Mr Handel a piece of my mind about the whole thing.’ Nor did Jennens get any praise from his academic peers. An encyclopaedia entry for Charles Jennens read cruelly: ‘He is said to have composed the words for some of Handel’s oratorios and particularly those for the Messiah: an easy task as it is only a selection from Scripture verses.’ Meanwhile, his rival, George Steevens, spent his life destroying Jennens, declaring his ‘eye for art inferior, his taste in books even worse, his attainment in any field negligible.’
Today Jennens is almost completely unknown. The monument he made for his friend Edward Holdsworth has collapsed and his family home which was demolished in the 1950s is now the site of a caravan park.
To the cynic Jennens seems to prove that life does not imitate art and that there are no happy endings. Yet Jennens is enjoying his happy ending now.
This is the truth of Calvary. The cross must be raised and the Messiah must die. In a sense we are still living in the mixed up half light of Easter Saturday but the resurrection is coming. Jennens understood what Job meant when he said, ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth and on the last day I shall see God’ (Job 19:25, 26).
Jennens had one dear friend. His name was Edward Holdsworth. His epitaph is this: Non omnis moriar – I shall die, but not all of me. Our storytellers say that heroes will rise, defeat evil and grant us a happy ending. The gospel says the same. We have to be careful not to rush ahead. In this life we will face adversity and weep but our Messiah has come and defeated evil. One day we will rise and see God.
