If you’ve ever been in a concert hall, a church, or honestly just a shopping mall in December, you’ve probably heard it — that surge of voices and brass, everyone suddenly standing. The Hallelujah chorus.
I suspect most people couldn’t tell you who wrote it, or why, or what the rest of the piece sounds like. They just know that when it hits, something happens.
I wonder if they’d be interested to know that the man who wrote it was 56 years old at the time, had recently recovered from a stroke that had partially paralyzed his right hand, and was seriously concerned that he might end up in debtors’ prison.
George Frideric Handel had been one of the most celebrated composers in Europe. He’d moved to London in 1712 and conquered it — writing and staging more than 40 Italian operas, accumulating royal pensions and aristocratic patrons, becoming so famous that a statue was erected in his honor in Vauxhall Gardens while he was still alive.
Then London’s taste changed, Italian opera fell out of fashion, his productions failed, and his finances collapsed.
Think of it like being a writer in 2026 who finds he’s suddenly being replaced by AI.
Things got worse: In April 1737 Handel suffered a stroke. He recovered, but the humiliation didn’t — his last opera, staged in early 1741, ran for three performances before closing. He gave what he believed was his final concert that April and essentially prepared to retire in defeat.
Then, Deus ex Machina:
First, a poet named Charles Jennens handed him a libretto — passages stitched together from the Bible, tracing the life of Jesus from prophecy to resurrection.
Then, a group of Dublin charities — the Irish had always been warmer to him than London — invited him to Ireland for a season of benefit concerts, offering him a commission to write something new.
On August 22, 1741, Handel locked himself in his London home and started composing, working in a state that people around him described as almost frightening — barely eating, barely sleeping, moving from one section to the next without stopping.
In 23 days he produced a 260-page oratorio, weeping — by some accounts — as he wrote the Hallelujah chorus. Whether or not that’s true, when he finished he reportedly said he felt he had seen God.
He traveled to Dublin that November, where he found enthusiastic audiences, no jadedness, no rival factions. The premiere was set for April 13, 1742, at the Great Music Hall on Fishamble Street — a venue built, almost poetically, to raise money for the release of imprisoned debtors.
More than 700 people crowded into a hall designed for 600. The management had taken out newspaper advertisements beforehand asking ladies not to wear hooped skirts, and gentlemen to leave their swords at home, so that more people could fit.
He owned the room, as we’d say today. The Dublin Journal, reviewing the premiere, wrote that words were insufficient to describe the delight it had given the audience — that the sublime, the grand, and the tender had combined to transport and charm every heart in the room.
When Handel was asked where the proceeds from the night should go, he replied: “I have myself been a very sick man, and am now cured. I was a prisoner and have been set free.”
The money raised that night freed 142 men from debtors’ prison.
I like this story because who doesn’t like Handel’s Messiah? Especially the Hallelujah chorus?
But also because when I heard this story I filed it immediately with other writers and creators who had to work fast to produce groundbreaking work — because their families would be in dire financial straits if they didn’t pull it off.
A hundred and forty years later, former President Ulysses Grant, diagnosed with terminal throat cancer in 1884 and nearly broke after a fraudulent investment scheme wiped him out, spent his final months writing his memoirs through excruciating pain — sometimes unable to speak, reduced to scribbling notes when his voice gave out entirely. He finished the manuscript days before he died. Mark Twain published it. The book is considered one of the finest military memoirs ever written, and it made his family the equivalent of roughly $15 million in today’s money.
Dostoevsky did something similar, under circumstances almost too strange to believe.
By 1866 he had gambled away nearly everything he had, and in desperation signed a contract with a predatory publisher: deliver a complete novel within 26 days, or forfeit the rights to every book he had ever written — and every book he would ever write — for the next nine years.
He hired a 20-year-old stenographer named Anna, dictated the entire novel to her, and submitted the manuscript two hours before the deadline. The novel was about a compulsive gambler, and he later married Anna; without her, by most accounts, we would never have gotten The Brothers Karamazov.
But back to Handel. His piece is 283 years old, and it has been performed every year since its premiere — through wars, revolutions, and the rise and fall of every musical fashion imaginable. Mozart reorchestrated it and said of Handel, “He knows better than any of us what will make an effect.”
Beethoven called Handel the greatest composer who ever lived. When the Hallelujah chorus was first performed in London, King George II stood up — nobody knows exactly why — and the tradition of standing has continued ever since.
Most people who stand have no idea they’re honoring a 56-year-old man who wrote the whole thing in 23 days, convinced his career was over, in a last desperate act of creation that turned out to be the most performed choral work in history.
Hallelujah.
7 optimistic moments from history this week
April 12: “I could have gone on flying through space forever.” — Yuri Gagarin, Soviet cosmonaut, who on this day in 1961 became the first human being to leave Earth, orbiting the planet aboard Vostok 1 in 108 minutes. He was 27 years old.
April 13: “Today, in the midst of a great war for freedom, we dedicate a shrine to freedom.” — President Franklin D. Roosevelt, dedicating the Thomas Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., on this day in 1943 — Jefferson’s 200th birthday.
April 14: “It is humbling for me, and awe-inspiring, to realize that we have caught the first glimpse of our own instruction book, previously known only to God.” — Dr. Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Project, announcing on this day in 2003 the completion of the full sequencing of human DNA — a 13-year effort involving more than 1,000 scientists across six countries, finished two years ahead of schedule.
April 15: “A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.” — Jackie Robinson, who on this day in 1947 took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers, becoming the first African American to play in Major League Baseball in the modern era.
April 16: “I was annoyed from the start by the attitude of doubt on the part of the spectators that I would never really make the flight. This attitude made me more determined than ever to succeed.” — Harriet Quimby, American aviator and journalist, who on this day in 1912 became the first woman to fly solo across the English Channel, navigating by hand compass through heavy fog in an unfamiliar plane. Her achievement went almost entirely unnoticed — the Titanic had sunk the same night.
April 17: “We don’t claim the Mustang can be all things to all people. But we do believe it will be more things to more people than any other automobile on the road.” — Lee Iacocca, Ford Division vice president, at the public debut of the Ford Mustang on this day in 1964 at the New York World’s Fair. Ford sold 22,000 Mustangs that opening weekend and more than 400,000 in the first year.
April 18: “The regulars are coming out!” — Paul Revere, Boston silversmith and Son of Liberty, who on the night of this day in 1775 rode from Boston through the Massachusetts countryside to warn colonial militias that British troops were marching toward Lexington and Concord. The battles fought the next morning became the opening shots of the American Revolution.
WOW you did it again. You found a subject l know little about & expanded my knowledge.
Thank you. I really enjoy reading Big Optimism (& Understandably). It's not just the subjects l find interesting, l also like the way you write (style?).
(I have written a book which l have yet to get published. So l do know a little about the subject, also, my mother & one of my sisters are both published authors)
Beautiful share! Thank you for directing attention to your liner notes. Happy Monday!
~ Susan I. Wranik