In the year 1742 Handel's Messiah was first performed in Dublin and one could list many events from the first decades of this story of the arts since this first performance. Readers will find poetic and prose accounts of various types of artistic, musical and intellectual experience in the last two-and-three quarters of a century integrated into a Bahá'í and a personal perspective, 1740 to 2015.

The events and the themes discussed within these fields of the creative and performing arts continue until 1992, an auspicious juncture in the history of the Bahá'í community, the Holy Year commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Ascension of Bahá'u'lláh in 1892. These events then continue on (a) to the opening of the Terraces and the Arc on Mt. Carmel in 2001: the opening of the 21st century, the opening of the third millennium in the main calendar of western civilization, and (b) to the present, to 2016, as a new Bahá'í culture of learning and growth had been developing for two decades.

There is no attempt to be comprehensive, sequential or authoritative. For the most part what follows is a serendipitous and prose-poetic rendering of my own experience and interests as well as my little knowledge of the burgeoning fields of the arts and the Bahá'í Faith over the period in question up to this year: 2016.