Aside from a single post on Bach's St. Matthew Passion, I really haven't written about any classical sacred music here. A number of years ago and on a different blog, I wrote two rather lengthy posts on Handel's Messiah (one with a number of the Biblical sources and some commentary on the music and a second with additional Biblical sources I'd identified in the interim). In an effort to spur my writing about more classical sacred music (or at least to put everything in the same place), I'm going to transfer those two posts to this blog. In order to make things more organized, I'm going to divide those two posts into the individual movements, publishing one every Monday.
Over the last few years, I've found additional features in the Messiah that I want to write about, but I'm going to wait to do that until I've posted all of my old notes. There are only a handful of the 53 movements about which I don't have any comments, so going through the whole thing will take about a year.
