Some years ago, I was on my way home through a fog-blinded Venice. I’d not seen fog that thick for decades: this was caigo. It was dense, almost palpable, blinding. The world was white, and everything beyond a distance of a metre had been obliterated. Familiar buildings and bridges had to be read in Braille; I came down the bridge and started across Campo Santa Maria Formosa, my hand on the walls to keep track of where I was. Forms appeared from the fog, everyone’s speed reduced to a crawl, all of us blind.
I was somewhere in the middle of the campo, more alone than I’d ever been in my life, when suddenly from my right I heard the angels singing ‘Hallelujah.’ (This is true: I swear it on the head of my mother.)
I forgot how to walk and stopped in place. Yes, it was a choir, singing what is perhaps the most famous musical cliché ever written, and although their voices had to fight their way through the fog, it had to be Handel, and it had to be the Hallelujah chorus.
I shuffled my way to the right, then to the left and saw light fighting its way from the door of the church of Santa Maria Formosa. Silence came with it. And then an ethereal soprano voice told me, ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth,’ and my faith was confirmed. I’d stumbled upon a performance of Messiah: in the fashion of Venice, there had been no posters, no information, no announcement, and Part III had begun.
I slipped through the door as an usher was closing it and stood, fully open to the power of this music.
‘I know that my Redeemer liveth,’ the soprano told me. Well, all right; I know it, too.
‘The trumpet shall sound,’ the bass declared. And why should it not?
‘O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?’ the alto and tenor enquired of one another. Certainly not here, never with this music.
‘Worthy is the Lamb,’ the chorus asserted. Indeed.
And then it rushed over us, that four-minute choral ‘Amen’, as if all of us were being told to stand and affirm that every word we’d just heard was the Truth. And why was it not? Every note of the music was.
In that instant, in tears, as happens every time I listen to Messiah, I was willing to toss away a lifetime of non-belief and accept the truth of what had just been sung to us.