656. How Handel Got His Mojo Back

In part one of the series, we visited Dublin, the unlikely site of George Frederick Handel's first performance of Messiah. I say unlikely because Handel lived in London, the capital of the music world. Dublin was far away and relatively provincial. And Handel was a longtime superstar, hugely popular as both composer and performer with a royal patronage on the side.

So why did he decide to go all the way to Dublin to put on a series of concerts? Well, because they asked, and importantly, they offered to pay. The Irish would cover all his expenses, and Handel would get a cut of the ticket sales, except, interestingly, for Messiah. That was the one new composition he was bringing to Dublin and it would be performed as a charity event. In any case,

In November of 1741, an aging and not very healthy handle left for Dublin. The first leg of the trip would take several days, travelling by horse drawn coach up to Chester, an old city in the north of England. From there he would take a shorter coach ride up to a ferry port on the English coast. The ferry would take another day or three, depending on the wind, to get across the Irish Sea to Dublin. But his trip didn't go exactly as planned.

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