Review of Every Valley: The Story of Handel’s Messiah – Hallelujah! A new look at the composer’s popular work | History books

I I love the love chaos of Handel’s operas, but have always had my doubts about his oratorios, especially the Messiah. First, there is the imperious compulsion to stand during the “Hallelujah” chorus simply because a false tradition says that King George II did so in 1743; Once you get it up, you have to fight through endless, awkwardly misaccented repetitions of “forever and ever.” I am also surprised by the peculiarities of the Bible text, which are underlined by musical repetitions. The soprano enthuses like a fetishist about the “beautiful feet” of those who preach the gospel, and the tenor prophesies that “every valley will be exalted by the Redeemer”: will redemption really bring these sagging dips in the landscape back to life ?

But after reading Charles Kings Every Valley: The Story of Handel’s MessiahI have been converted. King doesn’t specifically explain the phrase he uses for his title, but points out that Martin Luther King often quoted it in his civil rights speeches, so I probably shouldn’t argue. More importantly, his book humanizes the work’s outstanding creators and shows that the Messiah is not a pompous manifesto of faith, but a restless, often desperate search for consolation. Despite these haunting hallelujahs, King is moved by the oratorio’s recipe for overcoming personal misery.

King begins with librettist Charles Jennens, a rich but woefully hypochondriac book collector, haunted by the suicide of a brother who cut his throat and then, for good reason, stabbed himself in the Middle Temple. The Bible quotations that Jennens compiled for Handel had a secret psychological plot: they were “a confirmation of something that Jennens himself always found difficult to believe.” Handel, too, is, as King sees it, a worldly figure, an obese bon vivant “with prominent cheeks and a chin that gradually reaches into his tie.” His statue in Westminster Abbey shows him pointing his finger to the sky while showing a page of the book Messiah Score declaring his faith in a savior; A trumpet comes towards us, ready to amplify the pious message. But far from ingratiating himself with God, Handel had a devilish temper and once silenced the uncooperative soprano Francesca Cuzzoni by telling her, “I am Beelzebub, the chief of the devils!” and threatening to throw her out the window throw.

The soprano who appeared in the premiere of the MessiahSusannah Cibber, was less turbulent in rehearsals than Cuzzoni, but even more obvious backstage. She was trafficked by her husband, who sold her sexual favors to a pal to pay off his debts. Treacherous servants drilled holes in walls to watch her lover “stick his penis between her legs” and scandal sheets reported her high-profile kidnapping from a country estate by a gang of armed thugs. After these outrages, her appearance in the Messiah was an attempt to relaunch her career and clear her tainted reputation: early audiences viewed her performance of Handel’s solemn recitatives on Christ’s agony as a personal call for reparation, since she too was “despised and rejected” and ” “familiar with grief.” . Equipped with this subtext, the oratorio becomes a kind of pleasantly cheesy soap opera.

King, a professor of international affairs in Washington DC, does an excellent job of entangling Handel in the conflicts and contradictions of a troubled society. He first traveled from Hanover to London in 1710, arriving in what appeared to be a “failed state, mired in revolution, political conspiracy and murder.” Installed at the English court, he unofficially spied for his royal patrons back home in Germany while composing music to glorify the local Hanoverians who seized the crown from the Stuart dynasty in 1714: King argues that the choir in the Messiah which honors Christ as “Wonderful Counselor, Prince of Peace,” was a coded homage to George II. Handel’s colleague Thomas Arne, who happened to be Susannah Cibber’s brother, delivered the monarchy’s imperial anthem in “Rule, Britannia!” Although the British here boast that they will “never never be slaves,” they have happily profited from the enslavement of others. Both Jennens and Handel were clients of the South Sea Company, whose “signature money-making enterprise,” as King notes, was “the involuntary transportation of people” from Africa to the American colonies. Music, the airiest and most spiritual of arts, is darkly embedded in the realities of politics, commerce and inhumane exploitation.

Yet King draws an irreligious comfort from it Messiah. He turned to it, he reveals, after a period of difficulty – first the morbidly frightening pandemic, then his wife’s serious illness, and finally the terrible day in 2020 when Trump’s crazy vigilantes, just blocks from his home, destroyed the U.S. Capitol overrun. The “disorganized state of everything” gave King a desire for “healing light”; This was ensured by Handel’s tenor, who, before glorifying the valleys, expresses God’s assurance by proclaiming “Comfort, my people.” When King and his wife heard this on their antiquated gramophone at home, they burst into tears of gratitude.

They will need further comfort after the recent election. But that Messiah“,” says King, is a reminder to “live courageously in the face of disaster and defeat,” and I hope it supports him through the next four years of what the tenor rightly calls “injustice.”