Handel's Messiah premiered in Dublin

On April 13, 1742, George Frideric Handel presented a brand-new oratorio, Messiah, at Neale’s Great Music Hall on Fishamble Street in Dublin, not London. He had been invited across the Irish Sea for a season of concerts, and chose the Irish capital for the work’s first hearing.

The hall held about 700 people, and demand was so fierce that the organizers asked gentlemen to leave their swords at home and ladies to come without hooped skirts, squeezing in every body they could. Handel had drafted the score with astonishing speed, finishing the bulk of it in roughly three weeks.

Dublin loved it from the first note, while London would take years to warm up.

The premiere was a charitable benefit, and proceeds helped free imprisoned debtors. Critics reached for words like sublime and grand. Only later, after Handel tied Messiah to London’s Foundling Hospital, did it harden into the seasonal fixture choirs everywhere now sing.