Hallelujah – The story of a musical genius and the city that brought his masterpiece to life

George Frideric Handel's Messiah in Dublin

Jonathan Bardon

• Publisher: Gill Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780717163557
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

18 November, 1741. George Frideric Handel, one of the world's greatest composers, arrives in Dublin – the second city of the Empire – to prepare his masterpiece, Messiah, for its maiden performance the following spring … In Hallelujah, Jonathan Bardon, one of Ireland's leading historians, explores the remarkable circumstances surrounding the first performance of Handel's now iconic oratorio in Dublin, providing a panoramic view of a city in flux – at once struggling to contain the chaos unleashed by the catastrophic famine of the preceding year while striving to become a vibrant centre of European culture and commerce.Brimming with drama, curiosity and intrigue, and populated by an unforgettable cast of characters, Hallelujah tells of how one charitable performance wove itself into the fabric of Ireland's capital, changing the course of musical history and the lives of those who called the city home.

Chapter 1

‘Year of the Slaughter’: A Grim Prologue

BLIADHAIN AN ÁIR

Every year energetic Dubliners rise early to climb Killiney Hill, south of the city, to greet the dawn on midsummer’s day. As they look down to watch the first rays touch some of the most sumptuous private residences in the country and brighten a part of the Irish Sea, often compared with the Bay of Naples, only a few of them will know why there is an obelisk at the summit, or why there are remains of a huge wall surrounding the hill. These constructions are evidence of a great relief scheme to provide work for the starving in 1741, funded by John Mapas of Rochestown, one of the few wealthy Catholic landowners remaining in south County Dublin at the time. And close to a grand Palladian mansion in Co. Kildare, Castletown House, stands another obelisk – huge, elaborate and 70 feet high – erected by the orders of Lady Katherine, widow of a former Speaker of the Irish House of Commons, William Conolly. This too had been put up at the same time and for the same purpose – to provide work for the starving. Two years later in 1743 a Major Hall of Churchtown, south of the city, erected a very large conical stone building, broad at the base and narrow at the top, with a spiral stairway on the outside. This was no gentleman’s folly: known for a time as the ‘Inkbottle’ and later as the ‘Bottle Tower’, it had been built as a barn to hold such a large store of grain so that no one in the area would ever starve to death again.¹ These are modest reminders of what today is a little-known event, an episode which was nevertheless one of the greatest tragedies in the history of modern Ireland, a famine so terrible that it was recalled as bliadhain an áir, ‘Year of the Slaughter’.

It was also a crisis that persuaded members of the ‘Charitable Musical Society for the Release of Imprisoned Debtors’ in Dublin that an unprecedented step should be taken to raise the relief funds so desperately needed. As tens of thousands were perishing from hunger and fever, members of this charity joined forces with the governors of Mercer’s Hospital and the Charitable Infirmary in the city, to invite over from London the greatest composer they knew of, George Frideric Handel. They would ask him to conduct a benefit concert of compositions of his own choosing in the Society’s new Music Hall in Fishamble Street. It was in this way that the sacred oratorio, Messiah, came to be given its first performance in Dublin on 13 April 1742.

THE ‘GREAT FROST’

On 29 and 30 December 1739 ‘the most violent storm … for several years past’ brought with it bitter cold from the east. As the New Year began three ships foundered in Dublin Bay – a French vessel bringing in casks of brandy, a Riga fly-boat laden with flaxseed, and a Liverpool sloop with a cargo of salt and earthen ware. All the passengers on the sloop were drowned and the body of its captain was found on Merrion Strand ‘covered over with ice’.

Throughout January 1740 Arctic weather gripped Ireland, so intense that vast numbers of fish were found dead around the shores of Strangford Lough and Lough Neagh. In north Tipperary a whole sheep was roasted on top of 19 inches of ice on the River Shannon at Portumna, ‘at the eating of which they had great mirth, and drank many loyal toasts’.² Afterwards a hurling match was played on the ice between two teams of gentlemen. So sharp was the frost that people from Tyrone walked directly across the frozen waters of Lough Neagh as they travelled to the market in Antrim town.

Lasting seven weeks, this ‘Great Frost’ froze the sea around both English and Irish ports, halting the shipping of coal from Cumbria, Ayrshire and south Wales across the Irish Sea to Dublin. Desperate citizens tore up hedges and ornamental shrubs around the city, and 14 men were arrested for felling trees in Phoenix Park. At night Dublin’s streets were plunged into darkness: most street lamps had no fuel left since waterwheels could not turn to press enough rapeseed to replenish them with oil; and lamplighters found that the few still with oil were quickly extinguished by the extreme cold.³

Ireland was not alone: all of western Europe north of the Alps and the Pyrenees was gripped by this intensely cold weather. Air masses spread from northern regions of the Russian Empire as blocking anticyclones – an extension of the semi-permanent high-pressure region near the North Pole – reversed the direction of the usual south-westerly flow. The winter of 1739–1740 proved the longest and coldest in modern western European history. As early as the end of October 1739 ice had put an end to voyages in the Baltic. All the rivers in Germany were already frozen by the first of November. At Kew outside London measured rainfall for the last six months of 1739 had accumulated to an extraordinary 16.17 inches. Then bitter easterly winds, blowing at gale force without ceasing for a week at the end of 1739, caused temperatures to drop close to or below 0°F (-17.7°C) over most of England. The Denmark Sound froze solid in February 1740 enabling people to travel by sledge between Elsinore and Sweden. The Zuyder Zee in the Dutch Republic froze over completely. A million head of sheep perished in Bohemia; in Burgundy’s wine-growing region a third of the vines were killed; minimum temperatures of –18°F (-27.7°C) in Uppsala and –26°F (-54°C) in Warsaw were recorded; and even in Pavia in northern Italy temperature readings fell below freezing point every single day in February, on one occasion to 3°F (-16 °C). Scotland was more fortunate: there heavy falls of snow covered winter corn with a protective blanket, unlike in many other countries where frost killed the seed in the ground.⁴

‘THE MOST DREADFUL CALAMITY THAT EVER BEFELL THIS POOR KINGDOM’

Over nearly all of Europe the winters for the previous ten years had been exceptionally mild and generally harvests had been bountiful. This had not been the case for Ireland: here the Great Frost hit the ordinary people of the island particularly hard as it followed a succession of half a dozen years of abnormal weather severely reducing farm yields. The most vulnerable, found mostly in the southern half of the country, were those who depended on the potato both for food and as a cash crop. Now the temperature plummeted so greatly that potato stores in straw-covered clamps in the ground were turned to inedible pulp. As Michael Rivers, a Co. Waterford merchant, observed, the frost:

has already destroyed a great part of the potatoes that lie in the cabins that lodge them and most of the potatoes of our country that are in the ground, by which the poor are likely to suffer greatly.⁵

Three weeks later Richard Purcell wrote from north Cork:

The eating potatoes are all destroyed, which many will think will be followed by famine among the poor, and if the small ones, which are not bigger than large peas and which be deepest in the ground, are so destroyed as not to serve for seed, there must be sore famine in 1741 … If no potatoes remain sound for seed, I think this frost the most dreadful calamity that ever befell this poor kingdom.⁶

Around Upper and Lower Lough Erne the usual cost of a barrel of potatoes was between 8s and 10s; in 1740 the price had risen to 32s a barrel. The price asked in Dublin for a barrel of oats went up from 7s to 12s, and by May 1741 it had reached 15s.

In Dublin a fund was launched to deal with the crisis. Donations were collected in the more prosperous Church of Ireland parishes in the east of the city to provide relief to artisans and weavers in the Liberties. During the last week of January nearly 80 tons of coal and 10 tons of meal were freely distributed. The viceroy, the Duke of Devonshire, ordered that £100 be taken from the state coffers to be added to Dublin’s appeal fund.

So many wild birds had been killed by the cold that there was an eerie silence across the land. This poem appeared in Faulkner’s Dublin Journal:

No lark is left to wake the morn

Or rouse the youth with early horn;

The blackbird’s melody is o’er

And pretty robin sings no more.

No thrush to serenade the grove

And soothe the passions into love,

Thou sweetest songster of the throng,

Now only live in poet’s song.

Huge numbers of cattle and sheep had been killed by the extreme cold. On 3 February Jonathan Swift, Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, hoped that ‘we have almost done with this cursed weather’⁷ and, indeed, soon after the temperature began to rise. It was no longer safe to walk over the frozen River Liffey. But when the thaw set in the usual rains did not follow. In consequence, there was little or no grazing for those animals that had survived the frost. ‘The cattle are all dying,’⁸ it was reported from Lismore in Waterford at the end of March. In April a correspondent from north Wexford wrote to the Dublin newspaper, Pue’s Occurrences:

Without rain what is to become of us? The corn that is sowed is perishing, the corn we have in our haggards is so prodigious dear the poor cannot purchase it … As for flesh meat they cannot smell to it, they have lost all their sheep long ago, and now their last stake, their little cows are daily and hourly dropping for want of grass.⁹

This abnormal drought was not confined to Ireland. On 24 May the London Advertiser reported: ‘Grass and Corn were all burnt up, and the Fields looked as red as Foxes’.¹⁰ By the second week of June 1740 corn prices in Ireland were twice what they had been in January; at Drogheda a mob boarded and smashed up a vessel laden with corn; and in the capital at the end of May the Dublin News-Letter reported:

The bakers having made but little household bread, the populace were so greatly enraged that they broke open their shops that night and on Sunday; some sold their bread and gave them money, others took it away, and in this manner they went through the city.

On the following Monday the mob roamed out of the city to seize meal from mills in Harolds Cross and its neighbourhood. As they attempted to restore order, soldiers called out from the Royal Barracks killed several rioters. Troops had to patrol the markets and streets for the ensuing five days and nights. Fourteen men and one woman were charged with rioting and theft of food. Five were acquitted; three were publicly whipped; and three more were gaoled for three months each. The remaining four received seven-year sentences to be transported to the New World; however, all escaped from their prison ship off the coast of Waterford and one got back home to Dirty Lane in Dublin only to be re-arrested after assaulting a gardener – he was executed two months later.¹¹ The drought was so severe that the streams that usually turned the water wheels to power corn mills and woollen tuck mills dried up. In the tinder-dry conditions fires raged in many towns: 150 houses burned down in Carrick-on-Suir, Co. Tipperary, 53 in Wexford town, and 20 in the village of Moate, Co. Westmeath.

The harvest in the autumn of 1740, depleted though it was, brought some relief. Then bad weather returned. Violent gales blew in September, followed by blizzards along the east coast in October, covering Belfast in what were described as ‘prodigious’ quantities of snow. Indeed, the autumn of 1740 was probably the coldest in two centuries in all of Great Britain and Ireland. Two terrible storms hit the country in November, accompanied by more snow and frost. On 9 December the heavens opened with such force that floods were reported across the island, washing houses and ‘whole trees’ into the River Liffey, and one correspondent from Navan, Co. Meath, described ‘the greatest flood in the River Boyne that was ever known in the memory of man’.¹² On the following day temperatures dropped and the Arctic weather returned. A foot of snow fell in the Midlands on 13 December. Once again rivers froze over with ‘the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Chapter 1: ‘Year of the Slaughter’: A Grim Prologue
• Chapter 2: Handel: The German Creator of the English Oratorio
• Chapter 3: Charles Jennens, Messiah’s Librettist
• Chapter 4: Music in Dublin
• Chapter 5: Significant Encounters: ‘An Acquaintance Among the Wits’
• Chapter 6: The Duke of Devonshire Returns
• Chapter 7: ‘To th’Hibernian Shore’
• Chapter 8: Susannah Cibber’s Rocky Road to Dublin
• Chapter 9: ‘I Remember No Such Licence’: Swift Refuses His Choir
• Chapter 10: ‘A Species of Musick Different From Any Other’: The First Performance of Messiah
• Chapter 11: London’s Initial Verdict: ‘What a Profanation of God’s Name and Word is This?’
• Chapter 12: Messiah Secured for Posterity
• Epilogue: ‘An Idea of Heaven, Where Everybody is to Sing’
• Appendices:
•    Appendix 2: How Did Fishamble Street Get its Name?
•    Appendix 3: Fishamble Street Developers Help to Shape Georgian Dublin
•    Appendix 4: Dublin, Sweet City
•    Appendix 5: The Phoenix Park
•    Appendix 6: Badger Flambé, Anyone?
•    Appendix 7: ‘Did He Ever Blaze?’ Duelling in Dublin
•    Appendix 8: The Blasters: The Dublin Hellfire Club
•    Appendix 9: A British Sixpence … Half a Guinea … How Much?
• A Note on Dating
• Images
• Bibliography
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Copyright
• About the Author
• About Gill & Macmillan