Handel’s ‘Messiah’ wasn’t meant to be Christmas music, but it still became a Chicago holiday staple

For nearly a century and a half, voices have rung out in Chicago each December, proclaiming: “Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah!”

The German-British composer George Frideric Handel’s “Messiah” is a fixture of the winter holiday season, although Handel didn’t originally intend for his 1742 oratorio to serve as Christmas music. He had written the score for performance shortly after Easter.

A choral group called the Chicago Musical Union performed it at Chicago’s Metropolitan Hall in April 1859, marking the centennial of Handel’s death. The group hoped this concert would “make the performance of Oratorios a permanent feature in the Musical Entertainments of our city,” the Tribune noted.

But two decades passed before the next noteworthy Chicago rendition of “Messiah