Ian Warden | Light rail extends forever as does the Canberra Liberals' term in opposition

As I write this I am just two sleeps away from going to Handel's Messiah in the Sydney Opera House and approximately 4745 sleeps from having light rail's stage 2B trundle out in 2035 to my already privileged niche of Woden.

Going to the Messiah is one of the joys of Yuletide for a quasi-cultured, tradition-loving Australian. Messiah time is upon us.

Meanwhile for Canberrans light rail issues have been given a teensy fillip by last Monday's announcement by the Canberra Liberals that they will make righteous opposition to light rail's extension to deepest Woden the core of their approach (a slithering, reptilian approach if you ask me) to voters for the 2024 election.

I mention the light rail matter in the same breath, in the same paragraph as the Messiah, because there is always something semi-religious about the ways in which opponents of it, light rail, characterise it as a Great Satan, a great fiscal Beelzebub.

This hostility gains little political traction in sensible, secular, genially, welcomingly pro-tram Canberra. As a misguided strategy it cost the Liberals any chance of winning the 2016 election and it will be a sodden squib for them again in 2024.

Hallelujah! Hallelujah! For with the daft zealotry of its light rail policies the Canberra Liberals will be out of office for ever and ever.

And my little paraphrase there of the greatest hit of the Messiah beings us back to the divine, to how there are always umpteen performances of Messiah, in venues great and small, across our wide brown land every Christmas.

I've been to memorable and engaging local performances in bucolic places' town halls but this year, mingling with an audience of well-heeled nobs (our tickets have cost $124 each, putting this Messiah beyond the reach of the battling lower orders) I am going to a great and grand one in the Sydney Opera House.

This one has a distinguished cast of soloists, an orchestra of accomplished musicians and a blockbustingly large (far, far too large in my opinion) choir of hundreds of warblers, even though Handel himself wrote the work for a swish, cathedral-trained choir of only about 30.

But a gigantic choir of the kind used for this annual Messiah done in the Opera House does give proceedings a kind of Cecil B. DeMille, Hollywood biblical epic grandeur. And so one half expects one of the soloists, perhaps the manly bass, to be Charlton Heston, and one half expects miracles to happen during the sacred extravaganza (perhaps triggered by the soul-tingling majesty of the Hallelujah Chorus) just as they do in Cecil B. DeMille's and Charlton Heston's 1956 Vistavision blockbuster The Ten Commandments.

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The music of Messiah is so very wonderful, sometimes soulful and melancholy, sometimes pulse-quickeningly and soul-tinglingly triumphant that it suits credulous Christians to imagine Handel had divine help with the composition.

The fact that he, Handel, seems to have written the music of the whole oratorio at supernatural speed, in just three weeks, adds to the faithful's feeling that God must have done a lot of the composing.

It is an engaging, thought-stoking notion. In our mind's eye and ear we see and hear God dictating the music to His servant by singing all of its recitatives arias and choruses. God magically modifies His almighty voice so as to be a tenor one moment, a soprano the next, then a contralto then a bass-baritone.

We see a frantic Handel trying to keep up by inking in the divinely dictated crotchets quavers and minims.

They, the excitably pious Christians, may be right about this. Yet in my mild-mannered agnosticism I have to opt for a less picturesque explanation.

It is that Handel, already a highly productive, highly original creative genius (by the time he speed-composed Messiah in 1741 he'd written more than 30 brilliant operas) had no choice but to get a wriggle-on with his Messiah.

From about 1737 ill-health, physical and mental, had reduced him to ruin. By 1741 he was destitute and close to being sent to debtor's prison when out of the blue (but perhaps via heaven, who can tell?) librettist Charles Jennens commissioned him to write an oratorio.

Jennens' libretto, using choice chunks of the Bible and of the Book of Common Prayer, was the compact story (imagine a kind of Readers' Digest bonsaing of the New Testament) of Our Redeemer's nativity, trial and crucifixion, resurrection and rocket-like ascension to Heaven.

Handel, inspired by urgent, life-rescuing necessity (but tuning in to his ample genius) responded by getting on with one of the greatest wriggle-ons ever seen in human creative wriggleondom.

Handel, bless him, insisted on his Messiah being performed in secular theatres (he'd approve of this Saturday's show being in the agnostic Opera House) rather than churches (causing great gnashings of the teeth of the bishops).

His Messiah was an instant, sensational success, enabling him, Handel to pay off his debts and to then (bless him, yet again) to use some of his earnings from it to do Christian things such as imitations of Christ's own priorities of feeding the poor, clothing the naked and giving comfort to those in prison.

When one knows this little bit of Handelian history the already buoying feel-good powers of Messiah the oratorio (the psychotherapeutic benefits of being at a throbbingly live performance of the Hallelujah Chorus alone last one a whole year) are magnified. To them we now add how good we feel about Handel's richly-deserved deliverance from the gutter, about the good his deliverance enabled this good man to do.