To Dublin, Fame in the Provinces and back to London again
Meanwhile, Handel’s popularity in the provinces continued to spread. The formation of the Three Choirs Festival in 1729 (a collaboration between the cathedral foundations of Hereford, Worcester and Gloucester), led to requests for Handel’s music. (This Festival has continued unbroken to this day making it the longest running music festival in the world.) There are also records of a musical society in Edinburgh paying Handel for copies and orchestral parts of the oratorios Deborah and Esther. Handel’s career took another unforeseen development in 1741 when he received an unexpected invitation to visit the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (3rd Duke of Devonshire) and to give concerts for charitable trusts. Handel hastily requested a new oratorio text from Jennens, by now his librettist of choice, and in the three short weeks between August and September composed a new work: Messiah. Handel travelled to Dublin with Smith and took lodgings. Messiah was extremely well received by Dubliners, and within weeks, Handel’s popularity was evident. He remained in Dublin for the rest of 1741 and throughout 1742, giving performances of oratorios and concerts of anthems and instrumental music for a personal subscription series and also for local Dublin charities.
By 1743 Handel was back in London and made an agreement with a newly-opened Georgian theatre in Covent Garden (the building we know today as the Royal Opera House) to produce a new oratorio: Samson. This was very well received, although Handel was dividing Londoners both politically and morally, there being a significant faction of the more prosperous middle classes who were by now predisposed to Evangelicalism, or the new Methodism, regarding anything hedonistic in art as suspicious. Indeed these people regarded the theatre as …a haunt of sin and moral laxitude, liable to contaminate anyone or anything with which it comes into contact. The oratorio, thinly disguised as theatre, was regarded as an act of religion: welcome in a church but totally unsuitable and inappropriate in a theatre. When Handel gave the first performance of Messiah in a London theatre he advertised it without any reference to its being a sacred work. The performance fell flat none-the-less, and it was to be almost another decade before the work eventually found favour in London, and then not in a theatre, but in the Chapel of the Foundling Hospital.
In April 1744, Handel suffered a second stroke, although the effects of this were more marginal than before. Later that year, he took the theatre at Covent Garden again for a subscription series opening with two newly written oratorios Semele and Joseph, moving on to revivals of Saul and Samson. In 1745, this time for the King’s Theatre, Handel composed two of his most ambitious oratorios to date, Hercules and Belshazzar, both with libretti by Jennens. He announced yet another subscription series with twenty-four performances planned. However, this went so badly, with audience numbers painfully low, that he gave only sixteen performances and was obliged to return money from ticket sales to some patrons. Miss Elizabeth Carter (1717-1806), a prominent London diarist and letter writer, wrote that … Handel, once so crowded, plays now to empty walls in that opera house where there used to be a constant audience. Following the collapse of this subscription series Handel never conducted oratorios again except during Lent and by invitation from Covent Garden.
In the spring of 1746, Handel visited the Earl of Gainsborough in Rutland for “quiet and retirement”. Further visits and extended stays are recorded to the Earl of Shaftesbury in Dorset, and the country seats of other aristocratic families in Bath, Cheltenham and Tunbridge Wells, whose favour Handel had previously found during his prosperous times in London. In April 1746, victory at the Battle of Culloden by the Hanoverian side over the Jacobites inspired Handel to write the oratorio Judas Maccabeus (from which comes the rousing chorus Thine be the Glory, Risen Conquering Son). From 1747, and seemingly at least partially out of retirement, Handel gave twelve oratorio performances per year during Lent at Covent Garden, invited by the theatre as a kind of composer/conductor emeritus. These were a mixture of revivals of earlier works, but also, with apparent renewed creative energy, a stream of new oratorios ensued: Alexander Balus (1748), Joshua (1748), Solomon (1749 – from which comes the well-known Arrival of the Queen of Sheba), Susanna (1749), Theodora (1750) and Jephtha (1752).