Twenty-Four Days in 1741

George Frideric Handel composed Messiah between August 22 and September 14, 1741, completing the full oratorio, overture, recitatives, arias and choruses, in just twenty-four days. The text was not his own: Charles Jennens, a wealthy English literary editor, compiled the libretto entirely from the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer's Psalter, arranging scripture into a three-part meditation on prophecy and birth, suffering and redemption, and resurrection and judgment, without ever dramatizing Christ as a speaking character. Handel had a commission waiting: a group of Dublin charities invited him to write a new work for a benefit concert that would help free men imprisoned for debt, and Messiah premiered at Dublin's Fishamble Street music hall on April 13, 1742 to raise exactly that money. London did not hear it until a year later, and its reception there was cooler at first; a religious subject performed in a theater rather than a church struck some contemporaries as improper. That unease faded within Handel's own lifetime, helped by annual charity performances he conducted for London's Foundling Hospital from 1750 onward, and Messiah has been performed somewhere in the English speaking world every year since without a documented gap, longer than almost any other work of Western art music.