Messiah

I'm singing Messiah tonight as part of the fact/staff choir.  It should be a nice concert.  We have a chamber orchestra and soloists from the voice faculty. Yesterday I went to Vespers, an almost 2 hour concert of holiday music.  

Anyway, at rehearsal I was taking conscious note of the fact that strong metrical beats in the text fall on the 1 or the 3 of the musical measures. This is a banal fact of text setting, so well known that few people even take the time to articulate it. I would say this: everyone would notice an instance in which this rule was not followed. It would sound wrong and jarring.  It would, in fact, be like accenting the wrong syllables while speaking.  

"O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion"  That one's in 3/4 time.  The emboldened syllables fall on the 1.   A lot of the libretto is from Isaiah, with a bit of Luke and Malachi thrown in.  The language doesn't have to be metrical: you can just squeeze the unstressed syllables between the strong beat however you want.   Another kind of obvious thing: you don't need a lot of words. The entire libretto is a few pages long, though the piece would last 3 hours (?). (We are only doing part 1). Mostly, we just repeat the lines over and over again.  Vocal music doesn't have to be wordy. **** I was also listening to some social poetry sung by Paco Ibáñez.  "La poesía es un arma cargada de futuro."  Some of it is super awkward to sing.  "Maldigo la poesía concebida como un lujo cultural por los neutrales."  Ouch.  It's bad poetry in the first place, and it also isn't "cantabile."  The songwriter hasn't constructed a very tuneful melody for it, but uses a kind of lilting, up and down, recitative style.  You can sing prose (Isaiah) but not prosaic poetry of this sort. It's the tone, the string of 3 or 4 unaccented syllables that are difficult to cram in between the beats, the passive voice, the crudity of the sentiment, the Marxist jargon.  "I curse poetry conceived of as a cultural luxury by the neutral ones."   *** So the rules of vocal setting so far:  alignment of beats / no enjambment / wordiness is awkward: a little text goes a long way.  Now I realize why I am a bad lyricist:  I was trying to write words to melodies with a lot of notes.