Handel’s Messiah is often imagined as divinely dictated, but this episode shows it was written by a German-born theatrical composer in the middle of a financial collapse. It traces Handel’s rise as the king of Italian opera in London, with over 40 operas and a life-size statue in Vauxhall Gardens, and his fall as audiences turned to English ballad operas like The Beggar’s Opera while he poured his own fortune into lavish productions the public no longer wanted.

The episode covers his pivot to the cheaper oratorio format, Charles Jennens’s libretto assembled from the King James Bible and Book of Common Prayer as an argument against Deism, and the 24-day composition from August 22 to September 14, 1741. It debunks the all-heaven-before-me legend, reveals how Handel retrofitted his own Italian love duets into choruses like For Unto Us a Child Is Born, and follows the April 1742 Dublin premiere, the London flop of 1743, and the Foundling Hospital performances from 1750 that rehabilitated the work.

• Why organizers asked gentlemen to leave swords at home and ladies to skip hoop skirts to fit 700 people into the hall
• Scandal-plagued contralto Susanna Cibber, the clergyman who forgave her sins mid-concert, and 142 people freed from debtors’ prison
• Why London critics called biblical text sung in a playhouse sacrilegious
• Mozart’s 1789 re-orchestration and Victorian performances with 2,000 singers
• The King George II standing myth and the modern return to historical performance practice