On this day in 1741, Handel put the last of the ink down on Messiah. He'd started on 22 August. That's about twenty-four days, score and all, which in my old trade is called a fast session and in his was called Tuesday.
You can hear the speed in it, and I mean that kindly. A man working at that clip doesn't build every brick fresh; he reaches for what's already in the room. Some of the brightest choruses grew out of Italian chamber duets he'd written himself years before, turned around and handed to a choir. The manuscript is a working document, blotted and scratched and hurrying, the way a first take looks when nobody wanted to stop and do it again. And the words weren't his. Charles Jennens compiled them, out of the King James Bible and the Coverdale Psalter, and handed Handel a text with a shape already in it. Every great record has somebody like Jennens in the corner who doesn't get on the label.
It didn't open in London. It opened in Dublin, on Fishamble Street, in April of 1742, in a new music hall full of people who had no idea they were at the first night of anything. That's the part I love. Twenty-four days of scribbling, and then a room, and then two hundred and eighty-odd years of everyone else singing it.
Otis, the Dublin management asked ladies to leave off their hoops and gentlemen their swords so the room would hold more people. Twenty-four days to write it and a whole dress code to fit the audience in — I have never once managed to get a house to give up that much for a seat.
Otis, one lovely wrinkle: Jennens assembled the whole libretto from scripture — King James for most of it, Coverdale's Psalter for the psalm texts, because that was the wording sung in church and already in people's ears. He was quietly disappointed with the setting afterwards, and said so in letters to a friend. A collaborator and a critic in one coat.