Book review: “Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Time That Made Handel’s ‘Messiah’ ” by Charles King

Handel’s Messiah: An Oratorio is such a glorious jewel in the treasury of Western music that its story should be grand enough to fill an entire book.

But think about it:

Sometime between autumn, 1739, and summer, 1741, Charles Jennens, a reclusive landowner of great culture and great money, created the libretto by piecing together and, in some cases, paraphrasing sixty short biblical quotations — about 1,500 words in all — from the King James Version and the Book of Common Prayer. And then, as he had done with other writings, he shipped it over to his friend George Frideric Handel.

Handel began writing music for the text on August 22, 1741, and had it finished thirty-three days later on September 12.  Messiah premiered in Dublin more than half a year later on April 13, 1742.

That’s the story.

 

Not a lot of action

Creativity is boring to watch. It doesn’t happen in a flash, and it doesn’t involve a lot of action. Jennens’s pen moved across the paper as he wrote out a clean copy of his wordbook which, I suspect, he’d assembled from many scraps of paper on which he’d written one or more of biblical snippets.

Handel’s original score still exists, and, in Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Time That Made Handel’s “Messiah,” Charles King uses reproductions of some of the pages as endpapers. He also includes photos of two of the pages — one showing a huge ink spill (which hints at a tiny piece of action, such as the awkward movement of an elbow) and another showing the Messiah chorus.

About that chorus, King writes in his 2024 book:

For the biblical words “Hallelujah” and “forever,” he applied rhythms just enough at odds with the English to be interesting. His “Hallelujah” stressed the first syllable, rather than the more natural third, and then hammered the others like a tocsin.

He approached “forever” with the insight of a foreign-language speaker reveling in the sound of a favorite English word. He created a syncopated phrase that started on the offbeat and then emphasized the middle syllable — for-ev-er and ev-er….

Handel added two beats of silence. And, then….

His quill then inked fat, round circles onto the paper, the chorus’s final notes. Below the staff lines, his handwriting now became broad and open, taking up half the page as he copied Jennens’s libretto, with plenty of space between the letters. When he wrote out the final word — “H-a-l-l-e-l-u-j-a-h” — it was the musical equivalent of a long, full exhale.

At the bottom of the page, Handel noted that the day was Sunday, September 6.

 

“Forever” and “Hallelujah”

That’s a stirring account of the writing of the chorus page, and it’s rooted in the many times that King has listened to the oratorio, particularly this scene.

When he describes Handel writing “forever” and Hallelujah,” King is hearing the music in his head (and so, most likely, is the reader) and he’s signaling that, as Handel wrote the notes, he was hearing the music as well.  This is a very writerly way of bringing action of a sorts into play.

He does a similar thing with the description of Handel’s writing of the final notes of the chorus and the final words. He has the original page, and he describes the note-writing and handwriting in a way that communicates the excitement that King is sure that Handel felt as he completed this stirring piece of music.

 

“An erupting chorus”

Similarly, King exults in Handel’s musical mastery when he tells the story of Messiah’s first performance.

Handel’s score connected the many disparate threads [of Jennens’s libretto]…When the text spoke of valleys being raised up, the singer climbed higher and higher, as if scaling a cliff face, then traveled back down when mountains and hills were cut low. “And I will shake all nations,” another soloist sang, turning the word “shake” into a long run of rumbling seas and tumbling edifices.

Yet when Isaiah predicted the birth of a redeeming prince, Handel set the prophet’s vision not as a solemn declaration by a wizened seer but as an erupting chorus — “Wonderful, Counsellor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace” — like the blasting entrance of the full choir and orchestra at the coronation of George II.

 

“Desperate Lives and Troubled Time”

This is wonderful stuff, and it’s an example of what King can do when he’s able to engage with the oratorio’s text and music.

But there’s only so much he can do on the oratorio as a work of art in a book written for the general public.

Conceivably, a book could be written that would dissect the religious meanings and interactions of the biblical snippets that Jennens created. Similarly, a book might take a deep dive into the musical antecedents of Handel’s music in the oratorio and how his Messiah may have influenced later composers. But those would be specialized books for certain narrow audiences.

The subtitle for Every Valley indicates how King has solved the problem: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Time That Made Handel’s “Messiah.”

 

“Anguish and promise”

Throughout Every Valley, King frames Handel’s Messiah as a response of faith and hope in a dark age — and not only in that dark age, but in every age (all of them dark) ever since, including our own.

Indeed, King began his book in the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic isolation, and, at one point, as he and his wife sat to listen to a century-old recording of the music, they were so moved that they burst into tears.  He writes:

The Messiah is a work of anguish and promise, of profound worry and resounding joy, all expressed in ingenious, irresistible melodies. Its three parts, or acts, run through ancient prophecies of the birth of a rescuer for the world, then his brutal suffering at the hands of oppressors, then his atonement for the sins of humankind and the promise of eternal life for the redeemed — a set of ideas that, for the Christians who made up Messiah’s first audiences, represented the essence of their faith.

The text confronts a mid-eighteenth century world of seemingly endless wars, incredibly deep poverty, conspiracies to overthrow the government and an economy heavily invested in the enslavement of dark-skinned people — an investment that was a financial foundation of many of the figures in Every Valley, including Handel.

No wonder the text, as King writes, feels contemporary with its depiction of a disordered and misled world.

Take heart, the text says, because real power doesn’t lie in force or violence…Even without the theology, the core messages come through. To remake the world, start by rethinking it. This moment is not eternity, this particular misery part of a bigger story…An experience that feels like defeat may turn out to be the most glorious moment in your life.

 

Disorder and unrest

King’s examination of the Messiah is set within the context of several people whose lives were touched heavily or lightly by Handel’s oratorio, including the Irish satirist Jonathan Swift; the scandal-tainted actress Susannah Cibber; Ayuba Sulayman Diallo (Job, son of Solomon), a West African slaver who was enslaved and became the toast of London society; and Thomas Coram, a sea captain and friend of the wealthy who was the moving force behind the establishment of the Foundling Hospital.

The stories of each of these people take up twenty or more pages and draw the narrative, at times, pretty far from the oratorio. Yet, King uses them to detail the disorder and unrest of the Messiah’s age.

Coram, for instance, gives King a chance to look at dire situation of lower-class children in an era without any safety nets. He gives a close look at Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels as a detailed critique of British society.

 

“To sing openly of suffering”

Cibber’s life is almost biblical in its lows and highs.

In return for money, her husband Theophilus, a comic actor, gives her as a sex partner to a rich young William Sloper, even escorting her to Sloper’s door each night. But Susannah and Sloper fall in love and flee Theophilus. So he files suit, several times, each time sparking extensive newspaper coverage, ruining her career as an actress.

In 1742, when Handel was in Dublin gathering musicians and singers for the premiere of Messiah, he reached out to Cibber, and there she was on stage as the public first heard Handel’s oratorio.

She stepped forward near the start of the second part “to sing openly of suffering and its consequences,” and essentially everyone in the audience knew her story of a hopeless marriage and scarlet scandal. She sang, from the Book of Isaiah, about Jesus as “despised, rejected of men.” And King writes:

The tension built at the end of the next phrase — “a man of sorrows acquainted with grief — then circled and resolved, settling calmly into the end of a musical idea. Over the next several minutes, Cibber returned again and again to the same bleak description of an outcast life, before plunging into the graphic details of pain and disgrace.

 

“Strangest possible formula for hope”

The text was about Jesus, but, for the audience, it was also about Cibber.

The effect must have been wrenching. By the end of the aria, it was wholly possible to believe that the greatest heroism was simple survival, that transcendence might even depend on knowing horror from the inside. It was the strangest possible formula for hope but one that, by the final notes, one could begin to see clearly: that the way to overcome one’s enemies was to shock them into witnessing their own cruelty — to force them, like Swift’s Gulliver, to confront their worst, ugliest selves.

King is writing here about Handel’s Messiah.  He’s writing here about Cibber’s singing at the premiere in a performance that, for the public, wiped her slate clean and set her on the road to a highly successful career on the stage.

He is also writing about himself.

For him, and for millions of listeners to the Messiah over nearly three hundred years, the words and the music are a beacon of hope and a roadmap to better times.

Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

 

Patrick T. Reardon

8.8.25