Handel drafted Messiah in 1741 for a Dublin Easter premiere
George Frideric Handel’s English oratorio Messiah, HWV 56, sets a Charles Jennens libretto drawn from the King James Bible and Coverdale Psalter. Dublin heard it first on 13 April 1742; London followed a year later. The autograph sits in the British Library.
Settled in London since 1712 and naturalized in 1727, Handel had built fame on Italian opera. As taste shifted after hits like The Beggar’s Opera, he turned to English oratorio; Messiah was his sixth. Structure echoes opera without staging, using modest forces he left flexible with optional versions. Born in Halle in 1685, he had introduced Italian opera to London with Rinaldo in 1711 and staged more than 40 of them. By 1741 he held a royal pension and the post of Composer of Musick for the Chapel Royal, and, unusually for a living man, had a statue in Vauxhall Gardens. When The Beggar's Opera of 1728 set off a fashion for ballad operas mocking Italian pretension, and the rival Opera of the Nobility appeared in 1730, he spent heavily from his own pocket. There are no characters or direct speech: Part I moves from Isaiah's prophecies to the shepherds, Part II centres on the Passion and closes with the Hallelujah chorus, and Part III turns to resurrection.
After his death it swelled to giant forces of up to 800 performers, and Mozart's Der Messias began a line of reorchestrations. Late twentieth-century musicians moved back toward Handel's leaner design, though big productions still appear, and a near-complete recording was issued on 78 rpm discs in 1928. Jennens, a wealthy literary patron, had already supplied Saul; Messiah cemented their collaboration.
The path there ran through earlier experiments. In Rome in 1707 and 1708, when a papal decree briefly banned opera, he wrote two Italian oratorios, and his first English one, Esther, was composed for a private patron around 1718. Its expanded revival at the King's Theatre in 1732, attended by the royal family, led to Deborah and Athalia; at Oxford in 1733 students reportedly sold furniture for five-shilling tickets. Messiah itself met a modest first reception before becoming one of the most performed choral works in Western music.
Source: Messiah (Handel)
