On the 18th November 1741, George Frideric Handel arrived in Ireland to work in the city of Dublin, where he enjoyed a creative sojourn that lasted nearly nine months until his return to Brook Street, London, on 13 August 1742. During his time in Dublin, Handel worked with many of the city’s local singers, actors and musicians from the two cathedrals; and also artists from England who sang in his concerts at the New Music Hall on Dublin’s Fishamble Street. In the eighteenth century, Dublin was a thriving musical city and desirable a place to live for people of wealth, fashionable in every way, and due to the patronage of the arts by the colonial Protestant governing class. By 1750, Dublin was regarded as the second largest city in the British Isles after London and eleventh on the list of European cities in size, with music firmly established as an integral part of the daily and social hierarchy. Yet, despite the Kingdom of Ireland having a...