Handel for a Hobby

Friedrich Chrysander ran a pickle factory on the side. But for years he lived on little more than rolls and water, and his wife sold flowers in the Hamburg market, to scrape together enough money to finance his life's work. It was to make a complete edition of Composer George Frederick Handel's works. Chrysander died in 1901, with the job far from done.

Thirty years later, the mission was taken up by a man who had played the organ between movies at Manhattan's Capitol Theater. Jacob Maurice Coopersmith, a stubby, dedicated, bustling man with thick eyeglasses, caught the fever too. He caught it quite by accident. At Harvard, working on a Ph.D. thesis, he had trouble finding his way through Chrysander's 100 volumes of the Handel "complete" works: they had no thematic index. He decided to make one. After two years at it he had caught up with Chrysander, but had accounted for only two-thirds of Handel's music. So Jacob Coopersmith went abroad to track down Handel's missing manuscripts. He has been following the trail ever since.

He rummaged through Italy's ill-kept libraries (they don't know what treasures they have, he says), pieced together unpublished cantatas, pages of which he found scattered through several countries. He once corresponded for five years with a Philadelphia dentist before getting to see a Handel letter that the dentist owned. He unearthed ten unknown Handel manuscript librettos in California's Huntington Library.

Coopersmith has developed a possessive fondness for his quarry ("He stood up to kings," he says admiringly), knows Handel's quirks and traits and more gossip about him than he knows about his own neighbors in Scarsdale, N.Y.

Jacob Coopersmith's definitive edition of Handel's mighty Messiah, newly published (Carl Fischer, Inc.; $1.25), was last week greeted by U.S. music scholars a one of the most important contribution of its kind in years. The Messiah, he had found, had never been properly performed since Handel's day. Original scores and pages had been misplaced. Performers and singers had arbitrarily changed notes, keys and instrumentation to suit their own peculiarities. Handel himself, who wrote the 3 1/2-hour-long oratorio in one 24-day burst, had reworked it several times to accommodate the talents of whatever group sang it.

Five days before Christmas, using the Coopersmith version, the 200 voices of the New York Oratorio Society will sing the first correct and uncut Messiah ever heard in the U.S. The differences between it and the versions previously heard would probably not be apparent to ordinary ears, but they meant a lot to meticulous musicologists. Coopersmith had found at least 50 mistakes in all standard editions of the Messiah.

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