Across the English-speaking world, thousands of people are looking forward to Handel’s Messiah at Christmas—booking tickets, rooting out scores, or preparing to sing “the Messiah from scratch” for the first or the fiftieth time. Originally intended to be performed at Easter, for many people it is now as much a part of Christmas as a carol or a tree. What is it that thrills audiences and lifts the hearts of singers?
In Every Valley Charles King, a professor of international affairs and government at Georgetown University, sets out to explain the oratorio’s enduring popularity. He begins his quest at a dark time shadowed by Covid, his wife’s illness, the chaos of the attack on the Capitol, the warming planet, wars overseas, and the wash of misinformation. Seeking a way “to slice through the gloom, to let in a bit of healing light,” he finds it in playing old shellac discs of Sir Thomas Beecham’s 1927 recording of the Messiah, the earliest recorded full performance and one less bombastic than Beecham’s usual interpretation. Hearing the “lone, high voice” of the tenor declaring “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people,” King and his wife burst into tears.
Nothing dims the Messiah’s power to move. Its three parts—matched by King’s arrangement of his book into three sections, “Portents,” “Sorrows and Grief,” and “Resurrection”—turn from ancient prophecies of a redeemer and the shepherds’ welcome of the Christ child to suffering and persecution and then to redemption through sacrifice and resurrection. Though deeply embedded in Christian doctrine, like all great pieces of sacred music it reaches out regardless of creed. Powerfully dramatic, it is, in King’s words, “a work of anguish and promise, of profound worry and resounding joy, all expressed in ingenious, irresistible melodies.” It offers, he suggests, a way of coping with catastrophe. But to understand this we must see the world afresh, embracing a vision where “every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill made low, the crooked straight, and the rough places plain.”
To grasp the background of the Messiah’s creation, King interweaves the lives of several people directly or tangentially connected with it: in addition to Handel, the librettist Charles Jennens, the singer Susannah Cibber, the satirist Jonathan Swift, the sea captain and philanthropist Thomas Coram, and the freed slave Ayuba Diallo. Their varied biographies illustrate different forms of suffering: depression and loneliness, the position of women, child poverty, and slavery, in which all people of means were complicit. King accompanies these with analyses of Georgian life and thought, and the result is a densely textured history of the era and particularly of London, then on its way to becoming the largest city in Europe.
Handel arrived in London in 1710 at the age of twenty-five, having just been appointed Kapellmeister to Georg Ludwig, prince-elector of Hanover, after four years in Italy, where composers were reshaping the forms of Baroque music—cantata, opera, sonata, concerto—in ways that were startlingly fresh and bold. In Italy Handel had written two operas, and he brought to London Italian sprezzatura—the trick of making something difficult look effortlessly light—with his opera Rinaldo, thrilling audiences with “more than two hours of trumpet blasts and timpani, delicate arias and martial entrances, cracking thunder and swirling Furies.”
After a brief return to Hanover, he was back in London in 1712, writing more operas and obtaining a royal pension. Two years later, Georg Ludwig was crowned as Britain’s King George I, and soon Handel became “Composer of Musick for His Majesty’s Chappel Royal”: his commissions included the Water Music for a river outing in 1717 and the spine-tingling “Zadok the Priest,” sung at George II’s coronation in 1727 and at every British coronation since. A stream of operas—Radamisto, Giulio Cesare, Rodelinda—sealed his fame, provoking wild applause as well as mouth-watering gossip about stars like the castrato Francesco Bernardi, known as Senesino, and the rival sopranos Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni.
King sets Handel’s success against a darker view of Britain—this “shattered and giddy nation,” as John Locke had called it. Few societies, King writes, “placed suffering and cruelty so fully on public display.” He examines the corruption of public life, the muckraking of Grub Street, and the satire of the Scriblerus Club, whose members, including Alexander Pope, John Gay, and the royal doctor John Arbuthnot, Handel knew in his early years in the capital. The keenest of these critics was Jonathan Swift. In Gulliver’s Travels (first published as Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World in 1726), the king of Brobdingnag, aghast at Gulliver’s description of his home country, declares it
only an heap of Conspiracies, Rebellions, Murders, Massacres, Revolutions, Banishments, the very worst Effects that Avarice, Faction, Hypocrisy, Perfidiousness, Cruelty, Rage, Madness, Hatred, Envy, Lust, Malice, or Ambition could produce.
In the final stage of his travels, Gulliver encounters the stinking, hairy Yahoos, images of the ugliest kind of humans, while the elegant Houyhnhnms, whom he so admires, come to seem sinister in their arrogant assumption of power. Confronting his broken illusions, seeing himself uncomfortably poised between the brutally sensual and the coldly rational, Gulliver concludes that the first step is to know himself, “to behold my Figure often in a Glass.”
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Handel was forced to question his confident self-esteem when the vogue for Italian opera was dented in 1728 by the success of Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, which transposed Italian operatic conventions to London streets, entrancing audiences with its English libretto, satirical low-life plot, and songs borrowed from street ballads, as well as some from Handel’s own works. In response Handel began using English texts, starting with an adaptation of his earlier opera Esther, which was produced in 1732 as a concert rather than a staged performance and billed as “an oratorio, or sacred drama.” It was immensely successful, and from then on Handel deftly adapted and developed the tradition of sacred Italian oratorios for his Protestant public, turning to the Old Testament in particular for dramatic narratives. But a second blow came from the new Opera of the Nobility (named after the aristocratic clique that founded it), which gradually absorbed most of his singers and orchestra.
Even at his lowest point he was bursting with ideas, including some proposed by his fanatical admirer Charles Jennens, the wealthy owner of Gopsall Hall, a grand Georgian country house in Leicestershire. Portrayed by King as “a ledger book of worries,” Jennens was hypochondriacal in the eighteenth-century sense of suffering from “the hyp”—agitating depression and feelings of “entrapped hopelessness.” This was perhaps a family trait; his younger brother Robert committed suicide in 1728. Tormented by arguments about the divine, Robert had concluded that
priests of all religions were the same, tyrannical in their dogma and self-interested in their theology…. What remained of faith was no more than superstition. God was a scheming malevolence.
In contrast, Charles Jennens explored the Scriptures for their mystery rather than malevolence, their promises rather than warnings. He also found solace in music, art, and passionate collecting, helped by his devoted friend the poet and translator Edward Holdsworth, who sought out treasures for him in Europe, including paintings and sheet music. (Vivaldi put his prices up briskly when a rich collector hove into view.) Both Jennens and Holdsworth were “nonjurors,” having refused to swear allegiance to the Crown, and holding that the Stuart dynasty remained the rightful rulers. (The Messiah has sometimes been interpreted as a disguised Jacobite dream of the return of James and his heirs.) Handel, by contrast, was a loyal Hanoverian. But politics were irrelevant. To Jennens, Handel was simply “the Prodigious.” He bought every available piece of his music, in print and manuscript, and had them bound in leather. By the time of his death in 1773 he had 368 volumes. From the mid-1730s on he deluged the composer with ideas and scripts.
Alongside his account of Handel and Jennens, King places three stories of suffering and persecution. The first is operatic in itself. In 1732 a small troupe, led by the Arne family, had begun staging operas; the principal singer was Susannah Arne, sister of the composer Thomas Arne. Handel gave her a small part in his oratorio Deborah, and after she married Theophilus Cibber, son of the actor and theater manager Colley Cibber, the “Antichrist of wit” of Pope’s Dunciad, her career both as a stage actress and as a singer flourished. Her gift, despite her thin voice, was her expressiveness. One commentator noted, “In grief and tenderness her eyes looked as if they swam in tears…in rage and despair they seemed to dart flashes of fire.”
But then came disaster. Theophilus was an abusive drunkard and gambler, and to pay his debts he arranged to share a house with a major creditor and married man, William Sloper—and, it seems, to share his wife as well. They lived as a ménage à trois, and after they left their shared house, Susannah and Sloper carried on their affair without Theophilus’s knowledge. Then, in 1738, Theophilus craftily sued Sloper for £5,000 in damages for “Assaulting, Ravishing and Carnally knowing” his wife. He won, but in view of his collusion and violence he was awarded only a nominal £10. Within a week of the trial, a booklet about the case circulated, with graphic details and pornographic engravings. Despite having a prenuptial agreement, Susannah was powerless, her reputation in ruins. She felt, as she put it in a letter to her husband, that she was “dying by inches.”
King presents Cibber as emblematic of women’s legal and social disadvantages. “A woman who could channel the pain of others so powerfully that she could move an audience to tears,” he writes, “had disappeared inside a character wholly scripted by the men around her.” But Cibber did have some agency. She picked up her life with Sloper: after losing one child they had a daughter, Molly, and she continued her career as a singer. By 1741 she was engaged at the Aungier Street Theatre in Dublin.
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In his analysis of contemporary misery, King turns next to those who tried to salve it, notably to Thomas Coram, whose numerous philanthropic campaigns began with the colony of Georgia (originally planned for Nova Scotia), which would, he hoped, recruit farmers and smallholders but also imprisoned debtors, in order to create “an egalitarian society founded on principles of charity and common assistance.” After other failed schemes Coram focused on the agonizing situation of London infants, many of whom were abandoned and left to die when their mothers could not keep them—a problem exposed in William Hogarth’s print Gin Lane and in Ireland in Swift’s excoriating A Modest Proposal. For seventeen years Coram campaigned for a refuge, enrolling first the support of the wives of the nobility and then their husbands, until in 1739 George II finally granted a charter for the Foundling Hospital. It opened in Hatton Garden in 1741, later moving to a larger site in Bloomsbury.
Many grandees who contributed to or became governors of the hospital drew their wealth from holdings in the South Sea Company. The net spread wide: Jennens and Holdsworth held annuities from the South Sea Company, while Handel’s salary was paid through the similar Royal African Company. Until private shipping companies muscled in, these two companies monopolized the triangular trade, shipping manufactured goods to West Africa, transporting captured Africans to the Caribbean and the Americas, and bringing sugar and tobacco back to Europe. In 1734 over 50,000 people were crammed into British slave ships, around eight thousand of whom died at sea.
To deepen this perspective, King follows the life of Ayuba Diallo, a Muslim prince from Bundu (now part of Senegal)—a life that was full of complexities and ironies. In early 1731, traveling to the coast to buy supplies and sell two of his own slaves to the traders, Diallo was captured, sold, and shipped to Maryland, where his name was changed to Job Ben Solomon. When he was permitted to write to his father, his letter landed by chance on the desk of James Oglethorpe, the deputy governor of the Royal African Company. Intrigued by Diallo’s aristocratic birth, Oglethorpe had him brought to London in 1733.
There, like Ignatius Sancho and Olaudah Equiano after him, he became a celebrity, of special interest as a Muslim. His portrait was painted, he was received at court, he translated Arabic scripts for Hans Sloane, and he was accepted into the scholarly Spalding Gentlemen’s Society. With the price of his freedom paid by fashionable admirers, in late 1734 Diallo returned home to Africa. An account of his experiences, Some Memoirs of the Life of Job by Thomas Bluett, was published that year. Diallo might be seen, King hints rather dubiously, in relation to the Messiah as a type of “returning prince,” his bonds broken and his place restored, but in West Africa he worked as “a fixer and facilitator inside Britain’s network of iron traders, shippers, gold merchants, and slavers.”
A year after Diallo’s return, Handel was reported to be in a deep melancholy, even raving in despair, as opera audiences were shrinking. He was often ill, and despite composing furiously, he met with little success: in 1738 his opera Serse folded after five performances. Yet although he was mocked for his accent, his big wigs, and his occasional tantrums, he was still a hero: in the same year as Serse, Louis-François Roubiliac’s sculpture of him holding a lyre—a “modern Orpheus”—was erected in the popular Vauxhall pleasure gardens.
Jennens kept up the flow of suggestions, providing texts for the powerful oratorio Saul—“a king beset by worries”—as well as for Israel in Egypt and the new third section L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, based on the Miltonic pastorals. But at the time these works were performed, from 1739 to 1740, Jennens was planning a very different piece. Poring over the King James Bible, the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, and new works on the Christian faith, he took extracts and lines from Isaiah, the Psalms and lesser prophets, and the Gospels and Revelation to draw out “the explicit connections the theologians had made between the prophecies contained in the Hebrew scriptures and, as he understood it, their fulfillment in the New Testament.” He organized these in three parts: the promise of a benign future, the suffering and tribulation of the world, and the final triumph over sin and death.
In the early summer of 1741 he sent his compilation to Handel. “The Subject,” he said, “is Messiah.” On August 22, Handel began writing, following Jennens’s scenario closely. As was his habit, he worked fast, reusing familiar motifs and recycling melodies, and finished the piece by September 12, leaving the text to be filled in by his copyist, John Christopher Smith. It had taken him just over three weeks.
That autumn he was invited by William Cavendish, Duke of Devonshire and lord lieutenant of Ireland, to give a series of concerts in William Neale’s fine new music rooms in Fishamble Street in Dublin. Once there he collected his singers and players, persuaded the soprano Christina Maria Avoglio to join him, and was ably helped by the brilliant violinist Matthew Dubourg, master of the lord lieutenant’s orchestra. For the chorus he could draw on the singers of Dublin’s two cathedrals, St. Patrick’s and Christ Church. The six hundred seats sold out fast, but the concerts were nearly halted in January 1742 by the intervention of Swift, the dean of St. Patrick’s, who denied that he had ever given a license for his singers “to assist at a Club of Fiddlers in Fishamble Street.”
With diminished resources, Handel forged on with a second series, including the Messiah, planned for Easter. For this he brought in Susannah Cibber from Aungier Street, lowering the keys of some arias, creating an alto version to suit her voice, and teaching her patiently, note by note, as she could not read music. In March, Swift backed down, perhaps because the Messiah’s profits were promised to charitable causes—the relief of prisoners and the support of two hospitals. The two men met once, the following June, just before Swift fell into the delirium of his final years.
The premiere of the Messiah on April 13 was so keenly anticipated that women were asked not to wear hoops and men to leave their swords at home in order to minimize the crush. Dublin’s reception of the oratorio, mingling “the Sublime, the Grand and the Tender,” was ecstatic, and “at every turn,” King suggests, “it would have been impossible to miss the connections between the cosmic and the contemporary.” One instance was Cibber’s aria, “He was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief”: after her last note, Patrick Delany, the chancellor of Christ Church, rose from his seat exclaiming, “Woman, for this, be all thy sins forgiven.” In King’s view, “she was living the very admonition Jennens had found in the ancient prophecies: to gain a new life, face forward and speak into being the world you want to see.”
From that point, Cibber’s fortunes turned. On the boat home to England she met David Garrick and later became his leading lady and the principal tragedienne of the London stage. As a singer she took the part of Micah in Handel’s Samson and sang in the Messiah’s London premiere at the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden in March 1743. Over the years she and Handel became close friends.
The response to the Messiah in London was lukewarm. Handel reworked the oratorio, adapting it to the different singers and players and to the demands of the irritated Jennens, who felt his script had been trivialized by melodies reused from the operas. Over the next few years there were only two more performances, in 1745. Then, at the end of the decade, a month after the Music for the Royal Fireworks was played in April 1749 at the celebrations of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, which ended the War of the Austrian Succession, Handel reworked part of the Hallelujah chorus in an anthem for the Foundling Hospital. The following year, when the entire oratorio was included in the hospital’s concert program, thousands crowded to the door. From then on, the spring performance became one of London’s most fashionable events, raising huge sums. At first Handel himself conducted the choir, but he was often ill, and soon his eyesight began to go. He died on April 14, 1759. Three thousand people came to his funeral at Westminster Abbey.
The annual performances at the Foundling Hospital continued until 1777. Seven years later, to commemorate the centenary of Handel’s birth, a three-day festival was held at Westminster Abbey, ending with the Messiah. After that, wrote the musicologist Charles Burney, it was
heard in all parts of the kingdom with increasing reverence and delight; it has fed the hungry, clothed the naked, fostered the orphan, and enriched succeeding managers of Oratorios, more than any single musical production in this or any country.
When part of those riches swelled the coffers of the Fund for Decay’d Musicians, which Handel had always supported, the fund’s managers “promptly invested the money in the South Sea Company.”
The dense social background and intertwining strands of Every Valley sometimes take one far from Messiah itself, but they vividly evoke its origins, creation, and impact on eighteenth-century society, while also suggesting the message it conveys to our own. We can all respond today to the bass’s fierce question in Part III: “Why do the nations so furiously rage together, and why do the people imagine a vain thing?”
Listening to the Messiah, we never quite leave the daily world, but we almost do—a juxtaposition of mundane and sublime nicely evoked by Abigail Adams, who attended a performance in 1785. She could have fancied herself “amongst a higher order of Beings,” she wrote to Thomas Jefferson, “if it had not been for a very troublesome female, who was unfortunately seated behind me; and whose volubility not all the powers of Musick could still.” At the Hallelujah chorus, when the entire audience stood—as still happens today—she wrote, “I could scarcely believe myself an inhabitant of Earth.”
I am not wholly convinced that the Messiah’s power lies in a particular spiritual “truth,” as King puts it, or that it asks us to look at life in a new way, but it does give us that heady uplift, the exuberant “whoosh” of being carried into a better world. Its greatness comes from the way it also asks us to face, head on, the bleakest aspects of human life and need. The oratorio is illuminated by Handel’s genius for expressing the range of our feelings, from longing, grief, and rage to triumph and ecstasy, in music that speaks to us all.
