The history of music is filled with failed premieres, when future masterpieces face uncomprehending critics and audiences that range from somnolent to riotously hostile. In a way, a bad reception, while unpleasant, might help reinforce a composer’s reputation in the long run: After all, what truly great work could possibly be loved and understood immediately? One answer, at least, is that inescapable holiday-concert favorite, Handel’s Messiah.
The best part of Georgetown professor Charles King’s Every Valley is the buildup to Messiah’s first performance in Dublin on April 13, 1742. (Messiah’s indelible connection with Christmas, and not Easter, was to emerge later.) Famously, once Handel got to work setting the text to music, he completed its 130-plus manuscript pages in only twenty-four days. To us, it appears a white heat of inspiration, which of course it was. But it was also just an example of how this prolific, professional composer worked. As he often did, Handel deftly reused a few tunes from his other works if they fit the words; for example, the hummable Messiah chorus we all know as “For unto us a child is born” is recycled from a vocal duet Handel wrote not long before, based on an entirely different text in Italian.
At the first performance, Handel probably conducted a chorus of only sixteen or so, with a few soloists, a local orchestra, and an audience of seven hundred packed into a music hall on Dublin’s Fishamble Street. (You can go online and listen to John Butt’s 2006 recording of Messiah, which tries to recreate the version of Messiah performed that day, and the number of musicians Handel worked with.) Word of its overwhelming audience reaction spread quickly: “The whole is beyond any thing I had a notion of till I Read and heard it,” wrote an Irish bishop who was there that day. Then as now, Messiah was also a moneymaker, often for charity: sales from its first performance helped release 142 debtors from prison. From 1750 onwards, annual Messiah performances in London cemented the work’s popularity, and benefited a hospital that evolved into what is now the oldest children’s charity in Britain.
As Every Valley points out, it was Handel’s greatest hit almost from the moment it premiered. After reading the story of its reception, you’ll immediately want to go listen to the whole thing, especially if (somehow) you haven’t heard it for a while. That in itself is a worthy accomplishment for any music book.
The book’s subtitle also promises stories of “desperate lives and troubled times.” This seems a bit of exaggeration perhaps worthy of a London playbill of the period, although in the buildup to Every Valley’s musical climax, there are certainly some colorful lives, if not desperate ones.
One is Charles Jennens, the wealthy, obsessive collector of music manuscripts (including many of Handel’s) who assembled the Scripture passages that Handel set to music as Messiah. When the cranky Jennens finally got his copy of the score Handel had premiered so successfully in Dublin, he disliked the music and had the gall to mark it up heavily with proposed changes. King also relishes the story of Susannah Cibber, a singer and tragedian who had been disgraced in a spectacular, long-running London sex scandal. Yet it was her intensely emotional singing of the aria “He was despised” at the Dublin Messiah premiere that moved the audience so deeply—even though she could not read music, and had to be taught the part by Handel himself.
Other attempts to paint a picture of “troubled times” are also entertaining, but seem more tenuously connected to Handel and music. We get a brief introduction to the life and work of Jonathan Swift, who as bishop briefly disrupted the production of Handel’s Dublin concerts for no good reason, but who seems more of a last-minute annoyance than an influence on Handel, even indirectly. We also meet Ayuba Diallo, a Muslim African prince taken into slavery in the United States, who after his release was briefly a celebrated figure in London, but who had no evident connection to Messiah or Handel, except that King speculates “it would not have been unusual” for Diallo to walk by librettist Jennens’s house. There are many such well-written vignettes of Georgian London, but to me they did not help shape a new understanding of how Messiah emerged as what it is.
In the end, the book’s greatest accomplishment is highlighting the lovable, adaptable Handel himself. Every Valley summarizes his training and career in Germany and Italy before his first visit to London in 1710, and follows his pivot to concert oratorios (arias and choruses often following a narrative, but non-staged) when his Italian-language operas began to fade as London tastes changed. Far from being a one-hit wonder with Messiah, Handel mastered a range of genres, and the works still in the active repertoire amaze—not just the perennial Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks, but endlessly tuneful concerti grossi and keyboard suites, tragic operas, plenty of other oratorios besides Messiah, and even Zadok the Priest, the anthem sung at every British coronation since the year it was written.
Yet is he the most underrated of great composers? His ability to write skillfully under pressure, relatively un-tortured by the creative process, can tempt us to see him as more productive than profound. Yet his skill and adaptability do not seem to have come at the expense of music that would stir deep feeling, whether tragic or patriotic or exuberantly joyful. Above all, he was a man of the theater: he knew what would work with an audience and what wouldn’t, and clearly, as a theatrical entrepreneur, he loved an audience. Perhaps Handel the showman would even be pleased (or at least wryly amused) that his London home at 25 Brook Street ended up next door to that of twentieth-century rock icon Jimi Hendrix, and that as a museum they are now marketed jointly as the Handel Hendrix House.
If you’re looking for a Christmas gift for a music lover who enjoys English history, this well-written, thoroughly researched book might be the choice. Or, you could just buy your friend two tickets to a local holiday Messiah. Surely Handel, who liked to see a full house, would approve.
Every Valley
The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s Messiah
Charles King
Doubleday
$32 | 352 pp.
