Sir, - "Updating" Handel's Messiah is not an idea confined to the 20th century.
The first person to attempt this was a poverty-stricken pianist and occasional composer eking out a meagre living in Vienna during the 1780s. This musician added various new instruments to Messiah's score, re-arranged most of the tenor arias for soprano, and made serious changes to the famous bass aria "The Trumpet shall Sound", due to the lack of a sufficiently able trumpeter.
He even added a short aria of his own composition, using a melody that he would later spatter liberally through a comic opera!
His name? Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. - Yours, etc.,
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Rory Whelan, Burleigh Mews, Burlington Road, Dublin 4.