In Dublin the instrumentalists had already begun tuning up, adjusting gut strings and cane reeds sensitive to spring mists and chill. Handel took his place at the organ and arranged the conducting score. Matthew Dubourg, the concertmaster, eyed Handel for a cue to begin. Dubourg was to oversee the instrumentalists while Handel concentrated on Susannah Cibber, the other singers, and Jonathan Swift’s choristers. With seven hundred people rustling and settling, Dubourg lifted his bow, and the music stirred into motion.
The performance began with a dark, hesitant processional in a minor key, a “sinfony” as Handel had named it, pitted with moments of silence. From there, it drifted into an insistent fugue, rippling, wavelike, and wholly familiar to anyone who had ever heard a Handel opera. Next came another short introduction, more stately, building toward what seemed like an expected entrance.
A singer stepped forward from the choir.
Charles Jennens had based the first portion of his libretto on the fortieth chapter of the book of Isaiah. In the passage he copied down, Isaiah had been in the middle of a finger-shaking rebuke of Hezekiah, king of Judah, attacking him for his complacency and greed. But then his words changed. They became less thunderous and more composed, like the sayings of a confident oracle. They had been rendered by the King James translators as a stream of images and analogies. There are things that wither and things that remain. All princes will one day be brought low. Whirlwinds will shake every field into stubble. But the universe offered a pathway through, Isaiah had prophesied, a way to walk without fainting and to run without growing weary. Humans, too, could feel what an eagle felt: the moment when its wings spread out on the wind, taking flight.
A wisp of a tenor voice arced over the musicians. He pronounced two words crisply, more spoken than sung, and now in the brightest possible major key. He then reached up toward a longer, higher note, not so much soaring as summoning, addressing his listeners directly, and pulling the rest of the orchestra along with him. The strings entered again, as if lifting his arms to urge him on.
To tell the greatest story he could imagine—of a love so powerful it not only conquered death but promised to return to the scene of the crime—Jennens had decided to lead not with a complication or a predicament but with a resolution. If you could envision a future world where warfare was finally accomplished, where iniquity was pardoned and valleys exalted, it might just be possible to live as if this world worked that way, too. He had borrowed the words from an ancient text, yet to those who recalled being there in Fishamble Street, they seemed wholly urgent and original—built both from and for the time in which they were now being sung.
Everyone in Neale’s music hall had lived through war or disease. A seething political conspiracy threatened to upend the established order or, depending on one’s politics, to restore it. An unexpected change in the weather had recently left families frozen and starving. Many of the women would bury more children than they saw into adulthood. But onstage Susannah Cibber would soon help proclaim that death had been swallowed up in victory. Back in London, Thomas Coram, who had nearly resigned himself to being a voice crying in the wilderness, would soon have proof that a single life really can repair a corner of the world. And thousands of miles away, Ayuba Diallo, back from an unimaginable odyssey, was still recounting the story of how his bonds, against all hope and expectation, had been broken asunder.
It took a universe of pain to make a musical monument to hope. Some of the early Enlightenment’s foremost philosophers were refugees dreaming about what a just government might yet bring. The Baroque era’s art and music were things of shards and tempests that would be remembered for their power to calm and awe. Great powers leveled civilizations while also building one. Their naturalists and mathematicians perfected a style of thought that, in generations to come, would make the whole of the cosmos more knowable but also more mysterious and beautiful. Their principal religions placed suffering, rejection, and brokenness at the core of their teachings yet still clung, knuckle hard, to the promise of something better. Their merchants shipped other humans into bondage, people whose descendants would, again and again, bend the powerful toward justice.
In line after line of song, the Messiah’s main message still comes through: a key to living better is practicing how to believe more. The cynics are wrong, but so, too, are the naive optimists, a point that Jennens emphasized over and over again in his selection of scriptures. There is no sorrow like this sorrow, no heaviness like the one that only we can know. Darkness really does sometimes cover the face of the earth, and we are all, in our ways, astray. But the route out of despair, he concluded, lay on the pathway toward it.
His method was to take the words of the prophets seriously, the essence of which soloists and choirs have been proclaiming, in Handel’s version, for nearly three hundred years. Be not afraid. Dwell among your fears and enemies long enough for them to lose their sting. Take captivity captive. Precisely at the point when all seems lost, rejoice greatly. Arise—and then shine.
Hope begins to fail when it becomes no more than wishful thinking, unmoored from reality, but even then, Jennens once wrote, it can be “physick’d”—enlivened, buttressed, brought back to health—by seeing reality in a new light. The Messiah was one example of such a cure in action. It was a Christian’s account of the purpose of this life and the promise of a world to come. But it continues to move listeners because its lessons are universal. The things we live through are part of figuring out what we live for. If you can imagine the opposite of misery not as joy or happiness but as grandeur and awe—“Blessing and honor, glory and power,” as the singers declare together in the final chorus—survival has a bonus. It is the redemption that comes of reasoning not from experience but against it.
“Let us sing of greater things,” Jennens had written at the top of the original Messiah wordbook. The foundation of hope, he sensed, was not the will to look past awfulness. It was the habit of seeing clearly in the middle of it. In the face of everything life might bring, the truly radical way to forecast the future was to put an assurance up front.
Since 1742 every performance of the Messiah has started out with the same two words. Even today, they still sound startling and revelatory—a proclamation, a challenge, and a deliverance all at once, like a coachman’s horn on a fogged-in coast road:
Comfort ye