Text Painting in Handel

Text painting in Handel’s Messiah Handel’s Messiah is a piece to be studied for many different reasons. The music is beautiful, the melodies brilliant, but most of all, the text painting is so apparent that it is hard not to comment on it. In the first 8 movements of the Messiah the text painting is a prominent characteristic for analysis. In each movement there are many examples of Handel’s brilliance in explaining the …

…technique so well to highlight for the listeners those words that are the most important or meaningful. I have not studied the other movements in Handel’s Messiah, but I can safely assume that Handel uses this same technique throughout the whole piece. Text painting is a skill that was very important in the baroque period and few mastered this technique. Handel is one of the few masters of text painting during the baroque period.