“I would uncover my head and kneel on his grave,” Ludwig van Beethoven once remarked about George Frederic Handel. And even as Beethoven lay dying, he venerated Handel as the greatest composer who ever lived. Holding a copy of Handel’s work, the dying Beethoven proclaimed, “There is the truth.”
He was not alone among great historical figures in revering Handel. Abigail Adams, who saw a performance of Messiah in 1785 while she and her husband, John, were in London, said that she felt “one continued shudder from the beginning to the end of the performance.” After attending a concert in Boston in 1843, Ralph Waldo Emerson noted that Handel’s Messiah had somehow captured the essence of wonder, recapitulating even the enormousness of existence itself.
In his smartly written new book on the work, Every Valley, The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s Messiah, Charles King calls Messiah the “greatest piece of participatory art ever created.” It is heard and sung by more people every year since its creation almost 300 years ago, he observes, than arguably “any other piece in the classical repertoire.”
What is behind its staying power? Exploring that question is the subject of King’s social history, which focuses on 1740s England and the people who contributed to Handel’s masterpiece. George Frederic Handel and characters surrounding him — Charles Jennens, Susannah Cibber, Thomas Coram, and Ayuba Bin Diallo — lived in “a worried age,” King says, with troubles like war, slavery, poverty, disease, and religious persecution.
Susannah Cibber, a famous actress and singer, was embroiled in a scandalous love affair. She was also a favorite of Handel, who wrote several arias for her in Messiah. Ayuba Bin Diallo, an educated African prince and slave, was captured, enslaved, and sent to work the tobacco fields of Kent Island, Maryland. He was finally freed from bondage after prominent Londoners took up his cause. King believes that Handel may have been among them. Thomas Coram, a philanthropist and shipbuilder, started the London Foundling Hospital, an institution for poor and orphaned children whose auditorium was home to many performances of Messiah that helped further its reputation.
These are interesting figures to discover, but the key players are librettist Charles Jennens and, of course, Handel himself. Unfortunately, few people know that Charles Jennens was the force behind Messiah. Amazon shows only one book devoted to Charles Jennens, and that one is out of print. King begins with a despondent Jennens gathering Bible quotes because they seemed to bring him comfort. A devout Christian, Jennens was a biblical scholar and a devotee of fine art and music. He was also Handel’s friend and often collaborated with him on pieces like Saul, and Belshazzar.
Jennens spent days copying quotations from sacred scripture. Soon he was adding notes, linking various passages together, “editing, and rearranging them, tying together themes that leaped out at him from the text.” Deciding his “Scripture Collection” should be set to music, Jennens wanted Handel to take on the job, though he was afraid that Handel, whom he called Mr. Prodigious, wouldn’t have the time to adequately perform the task. As Jennens confided to a friend, “The maestro’s ‘head is more full of maggots than ever.’”
Fortunately, Handel did write the music to Jennens’s text. Handel was a gifted musician even as a child. He was born in Germany, spent several years writing operas in Italy, then went to England, where he became a British citizen and an internationally acclaimed composer.
Handel was in a creative passion when he wrote the musical score for his Messiah in London in the summer of 1741, arranging Jennens’s quotations into solo songs, duets, and choruses. King is excellent when he gets into Handel’s head. Explaining Handel’s composing process, for instance, he writes, “He created a syncopated phrase that started on the offbeat and then emphasized the middle syllable–for-ev-er and ev-er.”
After only 24 days, Handel was finished. He took his composition to Dublin, and Messiah premiered for Easter in the spring of 1742 in Neal’s Music Hall on Fishamble Street, not in a church. Handel believed it would attract a larger audience that way.
As King explains, an oratorio, Messiah is a musical composition that has no scenery and is based on a religious text. There are three sections: the first promises that there is reason for hope; the second shows the traditional story of the passion of Jesus Christ; the third is a hymn of thanksgiving for God’s triumph over death.
Messiah contains reused choruses and a duet from Handel’s earlier work. It also contains material that Handel borrowed from other musicians. At the time, borrowing was considered a way of paying tribute to another artist.
Ultimately, King writes, this musical composition has become the most sacred act that a mass secular audience will ever undertake together. Although its message is religious, Messiah is more like a long lyric poem than it is a creed or a sermon. Its repetition, rhythm, imagery, and metaphors have a hypnotic effect. Jennens’s and Handel’s meticulous arrangements resonate with the Biblical text and make it compelling.
King says Messiah “is a piece of music that people not only admire or enjoy but in which they also report finding something like truth — intimate, magnetic, awesome.”
In explaining the social and biographical background of the story of Messiah, King brings the masterpiece to life — and keeps it alive.
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Diane Scharper is a regular contributor to the Washington Examiner. She teaches the Memoir Seminar for the Johns Hopkins University Osher program.