My wife and I attended a performance of Messiah not long ago, something we generally avoid. We found ourselves on the front row of the auditorium, listening to a splendid presentation by professional musicians, and I was moved by the music in ways that made me wonder why.

It’s hard to explain the appeal of the world’s best-known Christmas music. On the one hand, Messiah is too strange to be popular. On the other, it’s too familiar. Yet for reasons nobody fully understands, it’s still around.

Ironically, this religious classic did not start out as religious music at all. Unlike Bach, his great contemporary (they were born in the same year), George Frederick Handel devoted himself to secular music. His strengths were operas and oratorios. Written in the style of the Italian oratorio, Messiah is one of numerous oratorios based on biblical themes that Handel wrote during a long and productive career. (The others included Judas Maccabeus, Solomon, Joshua, Saul, Israel in Egypt, and Alexander’s Feast.) Their purpose was pure entertainment, not religion. People in the eighteenth century didn’t go to oratorios for inspiration any more than we watch videos of Ben Hur or Joseph Prince of Egypt for family worship. And nobody except music historians listens to them anymore. They passed out of fashion years ago. Except one, of course.

Handel wrote Messiah primarily as a commercial venture. He desperately needed the money. His professional life reached a low point in 1741. His latest compositions had been box office failures. It looked like his career in England was finished. Then he received an invitation to visit Dublin, Ireland, and present a series of several subscription concerts, including a new composition. He received a copy of the libretto of Messiah and decided to set it to music. In an astonishing burst of activity, he completed the score in just three and a half weeks. It was first performed in a music hall.

If it is remarkable that music so old, in a style long out of date, should be popular today, it is even more remarkable for something so familiar to maintain its popularity. Like Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, or Rossini’s William Tell Overture, Messiah is one of those compositions that is instantly recognized. Whether we like it or not, music from Messiah is all around us, and some of its themes are musical cliches. Strains from the Hallelujah chorus pop up in everything from Broadway musicals (Cats!) to TV ads and cartoons.

Then there is the bewildering variety of artists and would-be artists who tackle this difficult music. It is performed by world-class opera stars, polished chamber groups, ambitious church choirs, and in recent years massive sing-alongs open to anyone who likes the sound of his voice and gets his hands on a score.

And, yet, somehow nothing seems to wear it out. Messiah is always fresh. Its arias and choruses, even its recitatives, fascinate and uplift us in ways unlike any other composition.

So how is it that a piece of popular entertainment from the seventeen hundreds, in a style that went out of vogue centuries ago, is synonymous with Christmas itself for thousands of people today? And how is that music so familiar and so widely exploited still manages to inspire us? Why hasn’t it worn out?

I don’t know. I don’t think anyone does. We could call it a classic, which it is, of course. But that merely labels its enduring popularity, it doesn’t account for it. After all, a classic is something whose greatness everybody recognizes and no one can explain.

The test of great music, as of all great art, is time. It takes time for a composition to become a masterpiece. Handel was no doubt pleased with his work, but he was certainly unaware that history would regard it as his greatest accomplishment. The first audiences who heard Messiah were mixed in their reaction. Some people thought it was fine. Others were indifferent. Sometimes it played to near-empty houses.

Nevertheless, we can point to at least two things that make Messiah special. One is the wonderful union of Handel’s music with the words of the Bible. The entire text of Messiah comes from the Bible. But Handel’s music is much more than a mere accompaniment to various biblical passages. It infuses these words with fresh vitality. It lifts them from the printed page and inscribes them on our hearts.

In fact, so closely connected are word and melody that it is impossible to read certain verses of the Bible without recalling music from Messiah. How can anyone come across Isaiah 40:1 without hearing the tenor’s plaintive call, "Comfort, comfort ye my people," or Job’s confession of faith, "I know that my redeemer liveth," without recalling the soprano aria from part three? My own favorite is the bass aria based on 1 Corinthians 15, which gives flight to humankind’s deepest longing: "The trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible." Then there is the stirring Hallelujah chorus, which the angels themselves must enjoy singing.

But even greater than this solid marriage of inspired word and music is the great theme Messiah deals with, the central meaning of Christmas itself: its affirmation of divine love in a dark and lonely world; its claim that the majesty of eternity comes to be with us, not through a dazzling display of supernaturul power, but in the form of a child, a tiny, helpless babe.

The lasting message of Christmas is its portrayal of a God who is not content to inhabit the vaults of eternity surrounded by bright adoring beings, but who comes to us in the humble round of our daily lives, who sits at our tables, who enters our shops and our offices, who shares the joys of our feasts, the anxiety of our sickrooms, and the pain of our funerals; a God who is with us for better or worse.

Handel’s music is incomparable because the story it tells is incomparable. It is still the greatest story ever told.

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