Messiah

Handel wrote Messiah in twenty-four days in the late summer of 1741, on a libretto Charles Jennens had compiled entirely from scripture, and gave the first performance in Dublin on 13 April 1742 at the Musick Hall in Fishamble Street, for the benefit of a debtors' prison, an infirmary and a hospital. Ladies were asked to come without hoops and gentlemen without swords so that more people could fit in the room. London took longer to accept it; the annual charity performances at the Foundling Hospital from 1750 established it there. In London the title itself gave offence and the playbills announced the work simply as A Sacred Oratorio. Handel heard it for the last time eight days before his death. On the continent it circulated through much of the nineteenth century in the arrangement Mozart made for Vienna in 1789.