14 
To the Hibernian Shore
“I can’t help telling you I don’t like your Winter Journeys,” Jennens wrote to Holdsworth in early December 1741. “You have recovered your Health beyond all reasonable Expectation, and now you are going to put it again to the Hazard.” For almost as long as Jennens had known him, Holdsworth had suffered a string of recurring ailments—“faintness, lowness of spirits, want of sleep, pain in my back, and the rest of that dismal catalogue of Horrors which that filthy town of London brought upon me.” Treatments regularly drew him to spa towns, from which he would regale Jennens with stories of the characters he happened to meet along the way. “And I am lodg’d in the same house with a famous Presbyterian preacher,” he once wrote from Bath, “and our chambers join so close, that when the Spirit moves, I can hear him belch & fart as I am in bed.” Now Holdsworth was planning a trip across the Alps, to spend another winter in Rome and southern Italy, and Jennens was concerned that the severe weather en route would do him in.
He had good reason to worry. The winter of 1739–40 had been arctic, the coldest and longest in modern European history. The next two were nearly as bad, with early snowfalls and heavy rains. The Thames froze over. Coal shipments were blocked from reaching their distributors. Prices for heating fuel soared. In Scotland cows and sheep perished for lack of fodder, heightening a food crisis brought on by floods and harvest failures. More time indoors meant a quicker spread of seasonal respiratory illnesses, such as influenza, and raised fears of another outbreak of plague. In Ireland people in the countryside had given their suffering a name: bliadhain an áir in Gaelic—the year of the slaughter.
Back in London, Jennens was steeling himself against the wet, ache-inducing months to come. But he had also experienced quite a different shock to the system earlier that autumn. “I heard with great pleasure at my arrival in Town, that Handel had set the Oratorio,” he wrote to Holdsworth. Many months had gone by since Jennens had sent his pages to the Prodigious, with apparently no word about what had happened to them.
What he learned next, however, was devastating: Handel was nowhere to be found. He seemed to have fled the capital without warning. What was even more galling was that he had taken Jennens’s new text, and whatever music he had written for it, along with him. “It was some mortification to me to hear that instead of performing it here,” Jennens wrote indignantly, “he was gone into Ireland with it.”
Although Jennens did not know it at the time, Handel had in fact sat down that summer in his house in Brook Street to see if something could be made of Jennens’s unsolicited scripture collection.
Handel usually worked on small, horizontal sheets of paper, roughly nine by twelve inches. A printer or one of his assistants lined the pages, front and back, with staffs, the five horizontal lines of musical notation. The preparer first drew two vertical lines on the page in pencil, to mark the margins, and then used a rastrum, a device with ink quills or nibs set to draw multiple staff lines at once. Each page had enough space to write out up to ten musical parts, but Handel needed only four or so to set his ideas for the strings, for the vocalists, for the basso continuo musicians who would improvise around the underlying chordal structure of the piece, and for any special instruments that might be required.
Handel had a habit of noting on his manuscripts when he started and finished specific portions, all in a clear, compressed script and in a liberal mixture of languages. In the late summer of 1741, he had gathered a sharpened quill, an ink pot, and a sheaf of staff paper. On August 22, according to his own annotation, a Saturday, he began to write.
He prefaced the new work with a short overture, a “sinfony” as he called it. On the pages that followed, he unrolled fresh melodic lines to be sung by soprano, alto, tenor, and bass voices. He sketched original violin parts and chordal figures to be realized by a harpsichord or other instruments in the basso continuo. Handel’s speedy hand caused the stems of the notes to slope severely to the right, his crotchets and demisemiquavers—quarter notes and thirty-second notes—curling up like weevils. When he had an idea that would not fit fully on the prepared staff, he hand drew five new lines himself, corralling the notes before they could scurry away. Sometimes he would just place a dot on the staff to indicate a musical pitch, without completing the full notation, a reminder to himself or a copyist of the basic idea, with the expectation it would all be filled in later.
As the days went by, Handel followed Jennens’s scenario closely, dividing the music into three distinct parts, or acts. He interspersed arias to be sung by soloists with short, free-flowing recitatives, a wisp of transition to connect the longer pieces. Here and there he provided choruses, built for a number of voices, that emphasized a major scriptural passage or gave a bit of dramatic contrast to a work that had no real narrative line.
From time to time, he did what he had always done as a composer: thinking back to motifs that had worked well before and putting them to new use. On occasion he recycled melodies from lyrics originally sung in Italian, nudging the English of the King James Bible into the available rhythmic space. For the words “For unto us a child is born,” which Jennens had selected from the book of Isaiah, Handel repurposed a duet he had written earlier that summer, “Nò, di voi non vo’ fidarmi,” or “No, I will never trust you,” a self-borrowing that placed a strange emphasis on the first English word, “for,” rather than the more natural “us” or “child.” When he matched an Italian musical line from the same duet to another phrase from Isaiah, “All we like sheep have gone astray,” the ready-made melody ended up with a pause after the fourth English word—which could make the scripture seem less a metaphor for humanity’s sinfulness than a declaration of affection for livestock.
On August 28, Handel completed work on the first part of Jennens’s text and turned his attention to the second. In the first week of September, he was designing a chorus to fit material Jennens had drawn from several chapters in the book of Revelation: a grand moment of rejoicing when the kingdoms of heaven and earth unite in rightness and glory. For the biblical words “Hallelujah” and “forever,” he applied rhythms just enough at odds with the English to be interesting. His “Hallelujah” stressed the first syllable, rather than the more natural third, and then hammered the others like a tocsin. He approached “forever” with the insight of a foreign-language speaker reveling in the sound of a favorite English word. He created a syncopated phrase that started on the offbeat and then emphasized the middle syllable—for-ev-er and ev-er. Handel repeated it over and over, just as he had done years earlier in his coronation anthem “Zadok the Priest,” measure after measure, until he sensed the musical point had been made.
Next, he added two beats of total silence, drawing rest marks through all the parts on the page. His quill then inked fat, round circles onto the paper, the chorus’s final notes. Below the staff lines, his handwriting now became broad and open, taking up half the page as he copied Jennens’s libretto, with plenty of space between the letters. When he wrote out the final word—“H—a—l—l—e—l—u—j—a—h”—it was the musical equivalent of a long, full exhale. The text stopped well shy of the page’s edge, as if he had finished the longest leg of a race with time to spare. He jotted a note that he had reached this point on September 6, along with a circle and a dot in the middle, the astrological symbol for a Sunday.
Fables would later circulate about Handel’s recollection of that moment. “I did think I did see all heaven before me, and the great God himself,” he is supposed to have recalled, according to a source from nearly a hundred years after the fact. But even if Handel had a sense of divine inspiration—and there is no evidence he felt that way at the time—he still had work to do. A full third of Jennens’s text had yet to be set to music. Handel carried on composing for another week. He added abbreviated instructions for John Christopher Smith Sr. or another copyist to repeat a section or fill in missing notes, expecting him to know what was intended.
At one point, in the hurly-burly of Brook Street, a maid, trying to tidy up, might have bumped into his writing table. Perhaps Handel himself, in the throes of composition, was careless in laying down a new sheet of staff paper. In any case, someone knocked over a pot of ink onto the manuscript. Whoever was there immediately reached for a piece of cloth or paper and tried to wipe up the mess. Their quick thinking saved Handel’s work. The fat black smudge stained the page, but the ink never fully soaked into the paper. The underlying notes were still just visible underneath.
After twenty-four days, nearing mid-September, Handel had filled up both sides of at least 130 pages, a stack of paper around two inches high. On the reverse of the last page, at the bottom, he wrote “Fine del oratorio.” He had completed it, by his own assessment, on September 12, 1741, a Saturday, with the missing sections filled in, or “ausgefüllt,” as he noted, two days later.
There was no title page or florid introductory note, nor did Handel ask Smith to bind the sheets together. They remained a loose sheaf, the top page eventually bearing the grime of sweaty fingers and perhaps the traces of more than a few dinners. At the top of the first page of music, near the left margin, he scribbled an unceremonious title: Messiah, an Oratorio.
Handel had spent his entire adult life working quickly and fiercely. Composing for the theater required speed, especially when a deadline loomed—as one did now.
In the months since Jennens had delivered his new libretto, Handel had received an unexpected invitation. It possibly came from William Cavendish, Duke of Devonshire, who also held the title of lord lieutenant of Ireland, the viceroy of the British king. The request was apparently that Handel come to Dublin to stage a series of concerts to lift public spirit in the face of failed harvests and bitter cold. There would be no shortage of devoted listeners, who would be afforded the rare opportunity of hearing the great master perform outside London.
The timing could not have been more fortunate. Handel had planned nothing new for the coming season. He now had Jennens’s libretto, which, given its theme of suffering and resurrection, could play well in Passion Week, the period just preceding Easter, if the initial Dublin run warranted extending into the spring. And if the pull of Dublin wasn’t enough, there was always the push of London’s artistic factionalism and society infighting. “At a Time when Party runs so high, and Politicks seem to have taken up not only all our publick Papers, but the Attention also of the Bulk of Mankind,” a letter in the London Daily Post had claimed that spring, Handel was suffering “the cruel Persecution of those little vermin, who, taking advantage of their Displeasure, pull down his Bills as fast as he has them pasted up, and use a thousand other little Arts to injure and distress him.”
Handel decided to leave. As the autumn chill set in, Peter le Blond packed Handel’s traveling trunks with warm clothes and a woolen overcoat. Smith turned the new composing manuscript into a full score, rendering page after page of rushed handwriting into neat, careful notation, with plenty of space for future amendments and conducting notes. Other copyists created parts for singers and instrumentalists. Smith might have overseen arrangements for a carrier to transport musical scores, a chamber organ, and other requirements for a trip expected to last at least a few months, perhaps even longer.
In early November, Handel set off by coach, probably bringing Smith and at least one other assistant, and headed north. It would be weeks before he got around to telling Jennens about the music that now lay somewhere in his baggage.
Handel’s first destination was Chester, four days by coach from London and the normal stopping place for travelers catching the Dublin packet boat. He took up residence at a local inn, the Golden Falcon in Northgate Street.
While in Chester, according to a story later circulated by the music historian Charles Burney, Handel supposedly polished the vocal parts for Jennens’s new oratorio. Burney, then a boy, reported seeing Handel rehearsing singers he had drafted from Chester cathedral, just down the street from his lodgings, using amateur singers and musicians to sight-read passages that he and Smith were still in the process of editing.
“You shcauntrel!” Handel was said to have screamed at one wobbly bass, a printer named Janson. “Tit not you dell me dat you could sing at soite?”
“Yes, sir,” came Janson’s reply, “but not at first sight.”
Burney’s story was perhaps too good to be true, but Handel might well have had time on his hands. It was not uncommon to wait in Chester for days or even weeks, especially in late autumn and winter, for favorable winds to allow passage to Ireland. The city was unusual in having most of its medieval walls still intact, and visitors passed their time promenading along the ramparts among half-timber Tudor homes, taverns, and market squares, all in various states of disrepair. “The church and clergy here, no doubt, / Are very near a-kin,” wrote a testy Jonathan Swift, who had come through Chester years earlier on his way to find a London publisher for Gulliver’s Travels. “Both weather-beaten are without, / And empty both within.”
The packet boats to Dublin ran from Parkgate on the river Dee, twelve miles from Chester, and from Holyhead, more than eighty miles away in Wales, “a straggling confused Heap of thatched Houses, built on Rocks,” according to one traveler. The choice of port depended on time, money, and where the winds appeared more cooperative, as well as one’s ability to handle a horse. Jonathan Swift had journeyed with a guide along the “rough, rocky, broken road” to Holyhead, a mountain path whose “sudden inequalities” left backs sore and legs aching. Handel likely opted for the easier journey to Parkgate, where he would have boarded the small ship waiting to take on passengers.
From the crossings he had earlier made between Holland and England, Handel knew what to expect on a packet journey, but the sailing would nevertheless have been arduous. Icy winds sliced across the Irish Sea. Storm clouds could rise up on the western horizon with shocking speed. Ships could founder in high swells, even under the hand of an experienced captain.
Since the packet boats carried the Royal Mail and other valuable cargo, they were obvious targets for French privateers in times of war, which is why government officials usually chose to take an armed Royal Navy vessel rather than the unarmed commercial packets. If everything went smoothly, an uneventful crossing still meant at least a full day of tossing, tacking, and thumping. For Handel and his traveling companions, the ordeal finally came to an end, perhaps on November 18, when the packet safely reached the Irish coast.
Around 120,000 people lived in Dublin, “a fair and well built City, of great Antiquity, pleasantly seated near a large Harbour,” according to a contemporary survey. It was the second-largest urban space in the British Isles after London. Four stone bridges stretched across the river Liffey, which separated the older districts from the newer northern suburbs. South of the river, two Protestant cathedrals, Christ Church and St. Patrick’s, rose near the castle, seat of the lord lieutenant, Ireland’s governor. Other landmarks lined the quays or defined the skyline on the low hills above, from the Customs House and Four Courts, the main legal complex, to the Royal Hospital for injured and aging soldiers and the gray edifice of Trinity College, “all noble Buildings, and aptly contrived for their several Purposes.”
It was the first time Handel had ever been to Ireland. Yet despite the grand and picturesque scene that greeted him, it would have been hard not to think of the journey as a kind of self-banishment, a season in the provinces for a performer who had spent the last thirty years mainly in the seat of empire. In the capital his departure was the subject of gossip and worried conversations among his friends and admirers, all of whom seemed uncertain about exactly how long this unusual absence was supposed to last. “Till He comes, this Town will be a very dull place to [me],” Jennens remarked. Charles Burney would later attribute Handel’s flight to “the joint effects of anxiety, mortification, distress, and disappointment.” Alexander Pope offered a more poetic explanation in one stanza of his Dunciad. It was simply the dullness and bad taste of London society, he wrote, that “drove him to th’ Hibernian shore.”