Like Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert and other supreme musicians Handel could create with a rapidity which ignominiously shames composers of our supposedly “speedy” age. Even bearing that fact in mind, the composition of “Messiah” between Saturday, August 22, 1741, and Monday, September 14, following remains one of the miracles of music. Shut up in a little room on the first floor of his home on Lower Brook Street, Hanover Square, none can say exactly what went on. Handel is supposed to have uttered afterwards the words of St. Paul: “Whether I was in my body or out of my body as I wrote it I know not.” Nobody seems to have dared intrude upon this mystic concentration. Food was left near him but usually found untouched when the servant came to remove it. He sat at his desk like a stone figure and stared into space. Sometimes his man stood in awe to see his master’s tears drop on the music paper and mingle with the ink. “When he was composing ‘He was despised’ a visitor is reported to have found the trembling composer sobbing with intense emotion.” And after the “Hallelujah Chorus” he uttered those historic words: “I did think I did see all Heaven before me, and the great God Himself!” The autograph score, with its blots, its angry erasures and general untidiness, offers fierce evidence of his tumultuous feelings and flaming ecstasies. Possibly between April and late August of 1741 he was shut up in his four walls planning the work, for we have no clear idea just what he did during this period. Sketches and fragments do not clear up what mystery there may be, for the composer destroyed all but some fugitive scraps. Handel appears to have “been reluctant to submit such music to the capricious taste of aristocratic London.” So when William Cavendish, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, invited him to visit Dublin and permit the public of “that generous and polite Nation” hear his oratorios Handel assented at once, the more so because it was a question of assisting three benevolent institutions of Ireland (one of them the Charitable Musical Society for the Relief of Imprisoned Debtors). With his usual impulsiveness he even agreed to present “some special oratorio” solely for the benefit of the unfortunates jailed for debt. And he was happy to shake the dust of London from his feet for a while. Before starting on his Irish journey, incidentally, he composed in a fortnight part of another oratorio, “Samson”, based on Milton’s “Samson Agonistes” and containing that noble air of lament, “Total Eclipse”, which was to affect him so poignantly some years later. For his Dublin productions he had two exceptional woman singers—Susannah Maria Cibber (also an illustrious tragic actress) and Signora Avolio, a highly trained Italian. The chorus was recruited from Dublin’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral and Christchurch.