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-time 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, traveling 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. When he arrived in Chester,

he learned that the Irish Sea was so rough that he couldn't get a ferry for at least a few days.

So, Handel had to hunker down in Chester for a bit.

We decided to go to Chester for ourselves to see what that might have been like.

There was always this story about Messiah and Chester.

That is Philip Rushforth. I lived in a house in Abbey Street here

that had a school in the back garden. It was a room that was rather like a chapel, and it was rumoured

that Handel had been in this room in order to rehearse some of the Messiah. That rumor left an impression on Philip Rushforth.

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