Review - Every Valley: The Story of Handel’s Messiah (By Charles King)

Lindsay Kemp
Friday, November 29, 2024

The Bodley Head, HB, 352pp, £25, ISBN 978-1-84792-845-0
The Bodley Head, HB, 352pp, £25, ISBN 978-1-84792-845-0

A different author, or perhaps a different publisher, might have called this book ‘Messiah: an oratorio in five people’, but thankfully Charles King and The Bodley Head have rejected that once appealing but now hackneyed format. Every Valley plays a longer-range game than that, giving us more of a read and more to think about.

Professor of International Affairs at Georgetown University, Washington DC, King is an award-winning writer on history and politics, but in his introduction recounts how in early 2020, amid the dark threats of the pandemic, he and his wife found themselves moved to spontaneous tears by the solace of hearing the oratorio’s very first words: ‘Comfort ye’. Prompted to consider this familiar old work afresh, King was struck not just by the music but by the continuing resonance of its text, not in a specifically doctrinal sense but in that of more universally felt predicaments – ‘the meaning of suffering, the possibility of justice, the sources of redemption’. So while the work’s most obvious purpose may be a kind of route map to salvation as shown by the Christ, ‘its substance is the struggle to think ourselves towards hope’.

King explores his premise by tracing some of the stories that shaped Messiah’s creation in 1741. The early chapters give an adroitly threaded account of Handel’s life and achievements, chiefly as a composer and promoter of Italian opera in London until the time of his adoption of the English oratorio form in the late 1730s. From this it opens out to a colourful gallery of 18th-century personalities who played a part in making Messiah what it was – which is to say not just by Handel. First among them is of course the librettist Charles Jennens, whose idea it was to base an oratorio entirely on extracts from the Bible. Jennens had messages he wanted to get across. As a firm defender of traditional church doctrine he was concerned about questions of rightful kingship and trust in the word of God, and historians have not always warmed to him, but King draws a gently sympathetic portrait of a man for whom dogged amateur scholarship and artistic partnership with Handel were consolations from a profoundly melancholic nature, the traumatic suicide of his brother and the sheer boredom of having to spend so much time on his country estate.

Then there is Susannah Cibber, star of the London stage, whose reputation took a dive after her extramarital affair was turned to his own financial advantage by a venal and abusive husband. King’s account of the scandal – which included a landlord spying on the actress and her lover through a hole in a closet door and clinically relating in court what he witnessed – makes for lively reading. Cibber famously found redemption, however, when (in what sounds like a stroke of casting genius on Handel’s part) her acting skills overcame a fragile singing voice in a moving performance of ‘He was despised’ at Messiah’s premiere. And there is Thomas Coram, the retired sea captain whose project to establish a foundling hospital took 10 years of fundraising, but who within one year of its rather chaotic opening found himself sidelined by the society nobs who had taken over its administration. Yet it was the charity performances of the oratorio in the Hospital chapel in the 1750s that began to turn it into the national treasure it is now.

King has others in his cast, though more in the background. Pope, Swift and other philosophising men make appearances, helping to paint a picture of an age that was more existentially troubled than we might think, more ‘pain and muddling through’ than smooth path to Enlightenment. Another figure given substantial space is Ayuba Diallo, the Muslim prince and freed slave who during a brief stay in London on his journey back to Africa wowed the local intelligentsia with his manners and erudition. The connection with Messiah is not so apparent here – presumably Diallo’s troubles are an example of triumph of hope over adversity – but King’s use of statistics ensures that the story’s main impact is as a reminder that so much of Georgian Britain’s wealth and achievement was tainted by the trade in human beings, and so many of its most admired luminaries, too.

King’s writing is readable, well researched and rich with detail. Although he is not a musicologist, his professional research skills and historian’s vision of the bigger picture are well in evidence, so one does not doubt his word. He fashions an engaging narrative by introducing his characters one by one and leaving teasers as to how they will figure later on (significantly, the word ‘Messiah’ does not reappear after the introduction until Jennens writes it on the top of his manuscript on page 185). When it comes to the music, he consistently grasps the right end of the stick and uses no empty words – indeed, his jargon-free attempt to explain not just what Baroque music does but what it actually sounds like is full of understanding, setting a good example for any who would write about music.

He concludes this thoughtful and wide-ranging study by re-emphasising the earnestness of Jennens’s project, and its lesson that ‘darkness really does sometimes cover the face of the earth, and we are all, in our ways, astray’. ‘The route out of despair’, it tells us, ‘lies on the pathway out of it.’ 

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