Handel’s Messiah: Its Bible Words and Its 1742 Charity Premiere

Handel’s Messiah is a sacred oratorio whose words come entirely from the Bible. Charles Jennens chose the passages, from the King James Version and the Prayer Book psalms, Handel set them to music in about 24 days in 1741, and the work was first sung in Dublin on 13 April 1742 to raise money for prisoners and the sick.

The first words anyone heard in it were Isaiah’s, sung by a tenor: “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God.” Isaiah goes straight on, “Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned …” (Isaiah 40:1–2). On that first day in Dublin the comfort did not stay inside the hall. The audience’s money was shared among three charities, and one of them spent its year paying the debts of people held in the city’s prisons. A song made of nothing but Scripture began its life by helping to set prisoners free, and we who sing it every December are still singing those first words.

Charles Jennens compiled them. He was a literary scholar who edited Shakespeare’s plays, and he had already written the text of Handel’s oratorio Saul, yet for Messiah he wrote no verse of his own. In July 1741 he told his friend Edward Holdsworth that he hoped to persuade Handel “to set another Scripture Collection I have made for him.” Then he said what he hoped for: “I hope he will lay out his whole Genius & Skill upon it, that the Composition may excell all his former Compositions, as the Subject excells every other Subject. The Subject is Messiah.” He was asking a great composer for his best work on the grounds that no subject is greater than Christ.

Most of the time Jennens left the King James words as he found them, as in Isaiah 9:6: “For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.”

Where he did change a word, you can hear him reading the Old Testament as a Christian. Isaiah 53:3 in the King James Version begins “He is despised and rejected of men,” and Jennens put it in the past tense, as something already done: “He was despised and rejected of Men, a Man of Sorrows, and acquainted with Grief.” Psalm 69 in the Prayer Book says, “Thy rebuke hath broken my heart,” and Jennens moved the psalm into the third person so that it speaks of the one who suffers: “Thy Rebuke hath broken his Heart.” On the title page of the wordbook printed for London he set Paul’s words from 1 Timothy 3:16: “And without Controversy, great is the Mystery of Godliness.”

About three and a half weeks, from 22 August to 14 September 1741, working mainly at his house in Brook Street, London, and reusing some music from his earlier works. Handel dated his manuscript as he went, and the pages in his own hand, now in the British Library, let us follow him. Part One was done by 28 August. Part Two, which ends with the Hallelujah chorus, was done on 6 September, fifteen days after he began. The chorus that choirs have sung ever since was finished in the third week of a single summer.

Handel may have written it with Dublin in mind. BBC Music Magazine points to the modest scoring, which “suggests that Handel had it in mind for Dublin rather than for the more generous resources of London.” His last three operas had failed in London, and he arrived in Dublin on 18 November 1741 to give a season of concerts, possibly at the invitation of the Duke of Devonshire, then Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. On 29 December he wrote to Jennens that the nobility had subscribed for six nights, “which did fill a Room of 600 Persons, so that I needed not sell one single Ticket at the Door.”

Jennens had hoped for London. “It was some mortification to me to hear that instead of performing it here he was gone into Ireland with it,” he wrote on 2 December 1741. The Dublin notices of April 1742 went further and called the three charities the cause “for which this Oratorio was composed.” Horatio Townsend argued for that in 1852 from the dates, but no one has settled it.

When Faulkner’s Dublin Journal first announced the performance, on 27 March 1742, it put the poor ahead of the music. The notice began: “For Relief of the Prisoners in the several Gaols, and for the Support of Mercer’s Hospital in Stephen’s street, and of the Charitable Infirmary on the Inn’s Quay.” The concert was moved from Monday 12 April to Tuesday 13 April because, as the Dublin News-Letter explained, Monday was “Cathedral Day,” and the music began at noon.

The hall was the new Musick Hall in Fishamble Street, and it already belonged to the work of mercy. The Charitable Musical Society, which paid the debts of people held in Dublin’s prisons, had moved into it when it was finished in 1741. Mercer’s Hospital, founded in 1734, cared for the city’s poor, and the Charitable Infirmary was the first infirmary in Dublin. Singers from the choirs of both cathedrals, Christ Church and St Patrick’s, sang the choruses.

Tickets cost half a guinea, and Dublin went to some trouble to fit more people in. On 10 April the Journal asked that ladies “come without Hoops, as it will greatly encrease the Charity, by making Room for more company.” On the morning of the concert it added, “The Gentlemen are desired to come without their swords.” Handel had said the hall held 600. The Journal’s report afterwards said: “There were above 700 People in the Room, and the Sum collected for that Noble and Pious Charity, amounted to about £400, out of which £127 goes to each of the three great and pious Charities.” Seven hundred people squeezed into a room for six hundred, for the sake of prisoners and the sick.

As for Handel, the paper said he “generously gave the Money arising from this Grand Performance” to the three charities, and the choirs and soloists gave their work on the same terms. In January 1744 the Charitable Musical Society reported that “in the year 1742, they released out of the several Marshalseas in and about this City, 142 Prisoners,” whose debts and fees came to £1,225 17s 1d. Its £127 from Messiah paid about a tenth of that year’s total. A crowd heard Isaiah promise comfort to a people whose iniquity was pardoned, and the price of their tickets went toward opening a debtors’ prison door. Jesus counted such visits as done to himself: “I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me” (Matthew 25:36).

The review in the paper could hardly find words: “Words are wanting to express the exquisite Delight it afforded to the admiring crouded Audience.” A story told later says that when the contralto Susannah Cibber sang “He was despised,” the clergyman Patrick Delany stood up and cried, “Woman, for this be all thy sins forgiven thee!” The 1742 newspaper reports quoted here do not mention it, so we should take it as a story. Handel gave a second Dublin performance on 3 June 1742, and BBC Music Magazine records that this one was for the composer’s own benefit.

Messiah has three parts and no characters, and nobody plays Jesus. Soloists and chorus take turns singing the prophecies, the Gospel story and the apostles’ teaching, so that Scripture tells the whole story in its own words. Part One is the promise and the birth: after the tenor’s “Comfort ye,” Isaiah’s prophecies of a coming king lead to the chorus “For unto us a child is born,” to the shepherds of Luke 2 and the angels’ “Glory to God in the highest,” and at last to Christ’s invitation from Matthew 11, “His Yoke is easy, and his Burden is light.”

Part Two begins with John the Baptist’s words, “Behold the Lamb of God, that taketh away the Sin of the World,” and goes through the suffering servant of Isaiah 53 and the psalms of the passion to the resurrection and the preaching of the Gospel to the nations. Then comes the Hallelujah chorus, where Jennens took three verses from two chapters of Revelation and made them one shout of praise: “Hallelujah, for the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth,” “The Kingdom of this World is become the Kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever,” “King of Kings, and Lord of Lords.” John heard those cries at different moments of his vision, and in Handel’s chorus a whole hall sings them in one breath.

Part Three is the resurrection of the dead. It opens with Job, “I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter Day upon the Earth,” and Jennens ran Job straight into Paul, so that Job’s hope is answered at once: “For now is Christ risen from the Dead, the first Fruits of them that sleep.” The rest is built from 1 Corinthians 15 and Romans 8, the Bible’s long argument for the resurrection, and it ends in heaven with Revelation 5, “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain,” and the closing Amen.

Handel gave the London premiere at the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden on 23 March 1743, with two more performances that season, and the welcome there was mixed. The advertisement did not even use the work’s name. It promised only “A NEW SACRED ORATORIO.”

The quarrel was over the building, and it had broken out four days earlier, when a writer signing himself Philalethes asked in the Universal Spectator “if the Playhouse is a fit Temple to perform it in, or a Company of Players fit Ministers of God’s Word.” He was asking whether God’s Word belonged in a theatre, and Handel’s answer was to sing it there. Jennens wrote to Holdsworth the next day that the work had been sung “notwithstanding the clamour rais’d against it.” He was cross with Handel as well, for that January he had complained, “His Messiah has disappointed me, being set in great hast.” Yet in the same letter of 24 March he called it “in the main, a fine Composition, notwithstanding some weak parts.”

The Foundling Hospital in London took in abandoned children, and in May 1749 Handel gave a benefit concert to help finish its chapel, ending the programme with the Hallelujah chorus. The hospital made him a governor, and he gave the chapel an organ.

On 1 May 1750 the whole of Messiah was sung there for the first time, and a London paper counted “upwards of 1200 persons of distinction” in the audience. Handel gave it there every year until he died in 1759, and by the count of Coram, the hospital’s successor charity, the performances raised almost £7,000 for the children. So the comfort that began with Dublin’s prisoners went on to provide for children whose parents had left them, and the song that paid for it told of a child born for us. In a codicil to his will dated 4 August 1757, Handel left the hospital “a fair copy of the Score and all Parts of my oratorio called The Messiah.” They are on loan today to the Foundling Museum in London. On 6 April 1759, blind and ill, he went to hear Messiah at Covent Garden, and he died eight days later.

We stand because it became the custom, and it was already the fashion in England by 1780. The popular explanation says King George II rose to his feet at the London performance in 1743 and the audience rose with him. No record from 1743 places him at Messiah. He did go to Handel’s Samson at Covent Garden that February.

The earliest written version of the story is in a letter the Scottish poet James Beattie wrote in May 1780, nearly forty years later, passing on what he had heard from Lord Kinnoull. When the chorus began, he wrote, the audience “were so transported, that they all, together with the King, (who happened to be present,) started up, and remained standing till the chorus ended,” and “hence it became the fashion in England for the audience to stand.” Beattie gives no date or place, and his words “When Handel’s Messiah was first performed” could as well mean Dublin in 1742. In the same letter Kinnoull remembers Handel speaking to him some days after the first performance, and what Handel said is worth more than the story of the king: “I should be sorry if I only entertained them, I wish to make them better.”

The Handel and Haydn Society in Boston calls the royal version a long-standing myth and leaves the choice to each listener. Many of us rise anyway, because the chorus itself names a greater King than George: “King of Kings, and Lord of Lords.”

Jennens meant it for the season before Easter. In July 1741 he hoped Handel would “perform it for his own Benefit in Passion Week,” meaning the week before Easter, and the Dublin premiere fell in that very week, since Dublin kept Easter on 18 April that year by the old calendar Britain and Ireland still used. On the morning of the concert Faulkner’s Journal put off a society assembly with the words “This being Passion-Week.” Two of Messiah’s three parts are about the cross, the empty tomb and the resurrection of the dead.

Christmas claimed it later, through Part One, which tells of the birth of Christ. In the United States the first complete performance was given by the Handel and Haydn Society on Christmas Day 1818, at Boylston Hall in Boston. By the early nineteenth century, Smithsonian Magazine notes, Messiah had become a stronger Christmas tradition in America than in Britain, and the magazine calls it a fixture of the Christmas season. Neither season has to give it up to the other. A work whose first part sings “For unto us a child is born” and whose last part rises to “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain” holds the manger and the cross in one evening, as the Gospel does.

Dublin kept the charity going after Handel left Ireland in August 1742. The Musick Hall in Fishamble Street soon held yearly charity performances of Messiah, first led by the violinist Matthew Dubourg, who had led the orchestra at the premiere. Mozart rescored the work in 1789, and it has since been sung by small choirs and by thousands at once.

The hall is gone, and only its entrance arch still stands in Fishamble Street. BBC Music Magazine reported in 2024 that a choir has gathered there every 13 April since 1992 to sing from Messiah on the spot where it was first heard. They stand where a Dublin crowd once gave its half-guineas for prisoners and the sick, and the first words that crowd heard are still spoken to us: “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God.”

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