The Messiah at Christmas - 21 December 2001

I'm not myself a great collector of old letters but from time to time, rifling through the chaos of what I dare to call my files, I come on a note from someone I'd long forgotten.

And the other morning I fell on a funny, shrewd letter from a shrewd, funny man, who's been lost to us for much too long a time - a loss that I feel now because at time of pretentious theories in literature and politics, this man was the sanest of English critics and a splendid slaughterer of sacred cows in England, whether of the left or right, the lowbrow or the highbrow as Tom Wolfe has been in America: Philip Larkin.

I had the privilege of keeping up a correspondence with him in what, alas, turned out to be the last year of his life.

We exchanged ideas mostly about poetry and jazz - the word jazz being understood as only and always what we agreed to like, namely jazz from the earliest New Orleans days up through, say, the 1940s and there an end.

The arrival of be bop was to both of us the death knell. Larkin called Thelonious Monk "the elephant on the keyboard".

In this, as it turned out his last letter, there was a PS: "Another thing I note we have in common. You say that you play The Messiah right through every Christmas. So do I."

Now I must not assume, as people of my, and indeed the previous generation, always do assume, that a permanent item of our culture passes on to the next and the next generation.

Nearly 50 years ago I had the rare, weird pleasure of introducing the Messiah to Leonard Bernstein.

Please don't ask "Who is Leonard Bernstein?" as indeed one of the greatest living golfers once did ask me.

Leonard Bernstein came to fame with a national audience, as distinct from the concert-going audience, when he appeared first on television.

The show was the first 90-minute show in this country. It was a collection, collage, of music, science, drama, politics, history - anything and everything - and Bernstein was one of our earliest stars when he was already blazing his way from Boston to Vienna in the works of the 19th Century Romantics - the Russians especially.

One day the small core of our staff - half a dozen of us - were sitting around tossing ideas and we'd come to sketching out the Christmas show.

It was then I threw in what I thought was the very hackneyed but beautiful idea of having Bernstein conduct a short version of The Messiah.

Bernstein, I remember, looked up: "Handel?" he said with a rising inflection, as if it might just as well have been Gershwin.

"That's the man."

"You know something," said Bernstein, "I don't know it."

Well need I say he came to, and I - as one brought up in the non-conformist North of England and therefore having known every note of The Messiah since the age of five - I had the pride of standing before a television audience of 290 stations and introducing George Frideric, a pretty old German - 56 was beyond the usual span in 1742 - not doing well with his concert music or operas, in bad financial trouble, being invited to go to Dublin for a few weeks and, for a price, compose an oratorio.

He lived alone in two rooms in a small house but once he had this conception of writing the life of Christ, not as a chronicle but as a series of spiritual musical themes, he scarcely paused from dawn to midnight, had his meals pushed under the door and at the end of 15 days only, during the last twilight, he finished The Hallelujah Chorus and wrote in his journal: "I felt that the Lord God Almighty had come down and did stand before me."

At the end Bernstein embraced us all.

"What a sublime work," he said.

One of the oldest musical traditions of New York city is a performance of The Messiah given with the instruments of the original scoring, first in 1770, in a church which stands miraculously today only three blocks from the mountainous rubble and ashes of the Twin Towers.

On 12 September the minister and the choir master padded in gas masks through the horrors underfoot and knew that this year the old tradition was bound to be broken.

However, three months have passed and the 90 pipes of the old organ are still choked and the burning smell is everywhere and the church has stained glass, no open windows, the ash and the grime and the smoke came in through the leading.

But last Sunday, once more, into an acrid atmosphere the old tradition stayed unbroken.

It may strike some listeners as odd that of all cities New York city, which houses two million of America's six million Jews, should hold to this, by now ancient Christian tradition.

But if you knew New York city as this administration is desperately trying to have it known to the Arab world, you would know this to be most characteristic.

Long ago the most elegant essayist of the 20th Century, EB White, wrote: "The most admirable thing about New York is not the conflict of the races and religions but the truce they keep."

The word Messiah exists in many languages, though it wasn't until the 16th Century that translators of the Bible chose to fix its spelling with an 'h' as sounding more Hebrew, and that's the way it stayed.

It means, as everyone knows, "the one who would come and set free the oppressed children of Israel" and ever since it has been used in general in other languages and countries to signify "the liberator of the oppressed".

When I was watching that appalling tape of Bin Laden it struck me that one of the tragedies of this war is the fact of the striking good looks of Osama bin Laden - a sombre and handsome presence, the fine eyes. An expression almost of tenderness.

It was hard, from the beginning, to appreciate that this man is the latest of a dreaded breed we've known to our rage and sorrow in the 20th Century - Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein - all of them either ordinary or ugly.

And here is a totalitarian fanatic whose majestic presence lends itself, at least, to the role of Robin Hood - which is the one he claims - at most as a messianic figure who will deliver the impoverished peoples of Arabia from what some see as the superpower bully of the Western world.

Enough of these morbid musings, though I believe they are, unhappily, very relevant to the main American propaganda problem, which is how to define this new, strange war and how to make people recognise the chief personal enemy as an old tyrant in a new guise, let alone to see this war as a bizarre revival of the medieval religious wars - the Middle Ages returned with a bomb and a germ.

As I settle for Christmas Eve sipping the twilight wine of Scotland I shall think of another tape, another television interview, which at this season of the year it is a pleasure to remark on.

Everyone who follows a sport for long is frequently caught, I believe, between two emotions in watching the stars of the game - horrified awe at the huge monies they earn and yet relief that they're not paid as they used to be at the going rate of plumbers' assistants.

We're bound to wonder, from time to time, what they do with all this loot and too often the answer is, as a famous golfer put it the other day: "Well what do you think? I used to ride the subway. Now I have six cars, a yacht and a private jet. How about that."

Well the tale I have to tell is quite another story and shines like a good deed in a naughty world.

The interview came at the end of last week, the final tournament of the season, and it was won by the young man who is without question the best golfer in the world.

He'd just picked up $2m from winning this one tournament and he was asked if it was true that the money would go to the Tiger Woods Foundation.

Yes it would, he said.

His foundation he described simply as a fund with the simple aim of helping poor children of colour make something of themselves.

"What," asked the breezy interviewer, "is your main goal in life?"

Tiger blinked as if we'd just had another glimpse of the obvious.

"I said: The foundation. My aim is to make it global, based in the United States but taking in many, many countries and that's far more important than winning tournaments."

Here is a young man, just 26, who was urged only four years ago by an old well-wishing friend - an old man and a ravenous golfer - urged Tiger to stay one more year in college and "enrich his life".

Well Tiger decided, on the other hand, to turn pro and sign a first sponsor's contract for $52m.

Since then new contracts and renewals have poured in like Niagara and he's grown in maturity as a human being ever since - stayed remarkably modest with his enormous fame, level-headed and, from the start, decided to hand over his fortune to enriching the lives of impoverished coloured children across the globe.

At Christmas time I can't think of a finer role model - young or old.

One more solemn item has just come in from a very double-dome publication.

It seems that among the experts, the expert physicists, there is now grave doubt about the truth, the validity, of the Big Bang theory.

How our universe came about, especially "who done it", has for long been beyond me.

I've never trusted the Big Bang theory, not until someone tells me who triggered it, who struck the match.

But if I were compelled at pistol point to choose between the Big Bang and the Book of Genesis I should plump for Genesis:

"And God said: 'Let there be light!' And there was light."

And then bring on the thunder and lightning of The Hallelujah Chorus.

Merry Christmas.

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