The Contemporary Music Centre marks the anniversary of Handel’s visit to Dublin with a number of special events this year.

Tying in with its own 20th anniversary season, the Centre will participate in the annual outdoor Messiah celebrations with a talk on Handel’s time in Dublin and a historic walking tour of the area.

If Handel were alive today he would be one of CMC’s best clients, making use of the library and sound archive just like present-day composers do. And if CMC were in existence in 1742 when Messiah was first performed in Fishamble Street beside the Centre, it would have been involved in promoting and running the performance.

On Thursday, 13 April 2006 the historic premiere of Handel’s Messiah, a very significant occasion in Irish (and European) music history, will be marked with an illustrated lecture by Dr Barra Boydell, an expert on Dublin’s musical history and senior lecturer in music at NUI Maynooth.

The talk, ‘Handel’s Visit to Dublin 1741-2’, will be followed by the annual performance by Our Lady’s Choral Society of excerpts from Messiah outdoors on Fishamble Street, organized by Temple Bar Properties.

At 2.30 pm CMC will host a walking tour of Handel’s Dublin, again led by Dr Boydell, visiting a number of locations associated with Handel and with music in mid-18th century Dublin.

Handel’s Messiah, one of the most popular works of all classical music, was first performed in Dublin on 13 April 1742. But why in Dublin and what was Handel doing here?

Handel had settled in London 30 years earlier but his earlier success as an opera composer was declining by the 1740s under political and artistic opposition. As one of his acquaintances in London commented, ‘'He wou'd do very well to ly quiet for a year or two'.

Dublin was the second largest city in the British Isles after London and an important musical centre where Handel’s music was already popular. A visit to Dublin gave Handel the opportunity to ‘lie quiet for a year’ while also benefiting from a new and enthusiastic audience. His stay in Dublin lasted from November 1741 to the summer of 1742 and was a huge success. Handel spoke highly of the Dublin audiences and praised the standards of the singers and musicians who performed his music.

The New Music Hall which had just opened in Fishamble Street (beside where the Contemporary Music Centre is now located) was one of the very first concert halls built anywhere in Europe. Here Handel gave a series of concerts culminating in the first performance of Messiah, which he had composed the previous summer in London.

So many people came to hear Messiah that ladies were asked ‘not to come with hoops’ and gentlemen ‘without their swords’ in order to increase the numbers able to fit in the hall. After the performance one bishop in the audience wrote that Handel had ‘excelled himself’ and that the music would ‘please all who have Ears and will hear, learned and unlearn’d’. Mrs Delaney, whose letters are such a rich source of information about life in Ireland at the time, later wrote that Handel’s ‘wonderful Messiah will never be out of my head; and I may say my heart was raised almost to heaven by it’.

However, not everybody was happy. Some choir members from Christ Church and St Patrick’s cathedrals sang in Handel’s concerts but Jonathan Swift, dean of St Patrick’s cathedral, complained that they had ‘presumed to sing and fiddle at a Club of Fiddlers in Fishamble-street’ without his permission!

Dublin has changed radically over the intervening 250 years but a number of the venues associated with Handel’s visit still survive or can be identified in the changed streetscape of the modern city.

The walking tour commences in Fishamble Street outside the site of the first performance of Messiah on 13 April 1742. From there it will pass Christ Church cathedral, which provided a number of singers for Handel’s concerts and beside which some of Dublin’s leading music shops were located, and cross the Liffey to St Michan’s church which contains an important organ built in 1725 and which Handel is likely to have played. The tour passes Abbey Street where Handel lived while in Dublin before returning across the Liffey to visit sites associated with the great Italian composer Geminiani, who lived for many years in Dublin where he died in 1762. Visiting Crow Street and Smock Alley theatres, both important venues for concerts during Handel’s time, the tour ends where it started in Fishamble Street.

Barra Boydell, an expert on Dublin’s musical history, is a senior lecturer in music at NUI Maynooth. Author of A History of Music at Christ Church Cathedral, he is a Government of Ireland (IRCHSS) Senior Research Fellow and is editor of the forthcoming Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland.

The lecture and walking tour take place on Thursday, 13 April 2006 from at 11.00 am and 2.30 pm at the Contemporary Music Centre, 19 Fishamble Street, Temple Bar, Dublin 8. Both events take place as part of a Handel Festival presented by the Temple Bar Cultural Trust (formerly Temple Bar Properties).

Admission is free but space is limited for both events so booking is advised. Please contact Karen Hennessy, Promotion Manager, email khennessy@cmc.ie or telephone (01) 673 1922. For further information on the Handel Festival contact Roisin McCarthy at Temple Bar Cultural Trust, telephone 01-677 2255 or rmccarthy@templebar.ie.

Posted: 27 March 2006