Handel Messiah

(Cambridge Music Handbooks) by Donald Burrows "...the music lover who would like to know more about Handel and Messiah will find succinct history of English oratorio, a genre that Handel himself invented under circumstances and for reasons that remain unclear to this day, and a concise survey of the evolution of the genre to 1741 (Ch. 1) . ...presents for the first time in English a clear and detailed chronology of the composition and the events leading up to the first performance of Messiah on 13 April, 1742." Charles Michael Carroll, The Eighteenth Century