HandelFest 2022: Bringing Messiah — and Dublin’s 18th-century music scene — back to life

There are Handel festivals in Halle (the composer’s hometown) and Göttingen, both founded around 100 years ago, and in London, where the composer spent most of his life. Dublin’s great Handel connection, as the city where the oratorio Messiah was premiered in 1742, has spawned all kinds of celebrations over the years, but not yet an enduring festival. Peter Whelan and the Irish Baroque Orchestra, whose new Dublin HandelFest runs over the weekend of Friday July 15th, may be about to change that.

“We feel we’ve got something more to say,” explains Whelan, whose idea is not just to focus on Handel, but to put him in the wider context of the music scene in Dublin before and after his time in Ireland. And he’s already got a clear idea of how to make Messiah a regular feature.

“There will always be an element of celebrating Messiah,” he says. “We’ve started that on a small scale this year. We’re doing a Messiah discovery day, where we look at some of the choruses in Messiah and where they came from — some of his early Italian duets. And then we’re going to do the first part of Messiah in a very scaled-down version with small forces in the Chapel Royal in Dublin Castle, which is a very beautiful venue.”

The hope, “especially when it comes to performances of Messiah, is that we can invite other groups, other nationalities, other people with a different take on Messiah, each year. So that, down the line, you have groups from all over the world coming and presenting their version, or new versions, or new interpretations of Messiah.”

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This time around, Dublin HandelFest’s wider reach into Dublin’s 18th-century musical life coincides with the release of a CD featuring music written for performance in Dublin by Henry Purcell and Johann Sigismund Cousser.

Whelan seems somewhere between fascinated and obsessed by Cousser. “He was a brilliant composer, a composer doing his job extremely well, travelled all over Europe, studied with Lully, introduced the Italian and French style across the German-speaking lands, and then came to live in Ireland for 20 years.”

There’s a snag. “We have very little information about his music. In fact we have only one piece that he wrote for Dublin Castle when he was Kapellmeister there, as he would have described it in German.” That’s his serenata da camera, The Universal Applause of Mount Parnassus, written for the birthday of Queen Anne in 1711, which will be paired in concert, as on CD, with Purcell’s TCD centenary ode, Great Parent, Hail!

Whelan talks with bubbling enthusiasm about Cousser’s commonplace book, “which tells you everything you need to know about the day-to-day life of a musician in Ireland at the time, coming from an extremely competent, international musician doing his job. It opens a grassroots view of how a musician worked in Dublin. It’s so fortunate that we have this one snapshot of him doing work in action.”

I remember as a child in primary school, we had a history book with a double-page spread on Handel, this man coming over to Ireland and that little picture of Fishamble Street

“Everything about him I find fascinating,” says Whelan. “He even has a little set of 22 instructions of what to do to put on a concert in Dublin, from hiring the venue, cleaning it out, booking two military guys to make sure nobody breaks in, nailing the doors shut so that nobody else can get through, hiring a guy to take the tickets, making sure your harpsichord is well tuned twice, getting somebody to carry the double bass in, and the measurements of the stage.”

Cousser also documented the everyday, “even just very banal details of his life. He documents everything that’s in his house in Dublin, which he wasn’t allowed to buy, so he had to rent it, probably on George’s Street, one of those Dutch Billy houses. It’s fascinating what he keeps in each room. In what he calls the middle room he has a new shotgun, a gold weighing scales, a perspective glass and a bed for his dog called Sharper. It opens the door to so much of Dublin life that it’s overwhelming, actually.”

Handel, of course, has been in Whelan’s life much longer than Cousser. He says Handel was like “a springboard for me into all of this discovery about Irish music. I remember as a child in primary school, we had a history book with a double-page spread on Handel, this man coming over to Ireland and that little picture of Fishamble Street. And for some reason that just spoke to me or sparked my imagination. I really wanted to listen to more of that kind of music at the time.”

He even mitched off school in 1992 to go to the 250th anniversary celebrations of the first performance of Messiah on Fishamble Street. “I felt I really needed to be there for that for some reason. That sparked a whole load of interest. It was quite a bleak space at the time around Wood Quay — my geography teacher was always furious about that site being built on — and there was the curiosity about what was there before the concrete jungle that’s currently there.”

He says that led to “lots of different kinds of research over the years about, I guess, trying to imagine, or recreate as much as possible, what Handel would have experienced when he came over. That led to exploring, especially that book by Brian Boydell, A Dublin Musical Calendar1700-1760, which is a source of massive inspiration. Then just slowly joining the dots together, to say, ‘What might this have sounded like?’”

He began from a position of not expecting to find many connections to surviving musical works. “But, bit by bit, you find more and more connections.” Currently in his sights is a singer you might never have heard of. “A big part of our discovery is the unheard voices of the past. I’m currently researching a soprano called Rachael Baptist. She was in Ireland about the same time as the castrato Tenducci, somebody else we’ve explored quite recently. She was a black soprano who identified herself as Irish and was known for wearing a yellow dress.”

Basically, he explains, “I’m trying to recreate the soundtrack to 18th-century Dublin, and also the soundtrack that I would have desired during my teenage years, this stuff I would never imagine you could hear, but now it’s there.”

Dublin HandelFest 2022 runs from Friday July 15th to Sunday July 17th www.dublinhandelfest.com