The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog.

Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s Messiah by Charles King is a delicious mix of history and music, against the backdrop of 18^th century England.  George Frideric Handel had grown up in Halle, Germany, worked for a while in Italy and moved to England, where he eventually became a citizen.  He was loyal to patrons in both England and Germany.

Politics and governance were fraught. To reward Handel’s growing prominence and productivity, Queen Anne provided him a steady pension. When she died and the Stuart dynasty ended, the throne was taken over by George I, who was the senior Protestant descendant of his great-grandfather King James.  George was also a German royal, and thus began the line of Hanoverian monarchs in England.  The Hanovers sponsored Handel’s Royal Academy and theater, providing him a healthy salary and commissions. But one of his other patrons was Charles Jennens, a wealthy English squire who happened to sympathize with those seeking to restore Catholicism to the British throne by replacing the Hanovers with James Stuart, late Protestant Queen Anne’s half brother.  Palace intrigue, with its quirky characters and often lurid scandals, is just part of what makes this book fascinating.

Eighteenth century England is teeming with larger-than-life characters out of the cultural and political worlds that we’ve either studied in college or heard about forever. Many of those characters drew artistic inspiration from the troubles in London: small pox and syphilis, crime, filth, infant and child mortality, pickpockets, murderers, executions leaving heads of the deceased on pikes on the outskirts of the city, intense child labor abuses, prostitution, drunkenness, gaping class differences, self-indulgent wealthy leading shallow lives. All these problems and foibles were represented pictorially by William Hogarth, satirized by essayist Jonathan Swift, savaged by poet Alexander Pope, amplified by writers Defoe and Fielding, reflected by Handel in his Water Music and captured by John Gay in A Beggar’s Opera, the first opera in English.

Gay turned out to present a competitive threat to Handel, who had thrived as the favorite of the royal family, running his own opera theater, writing new music for all royal commemorative events, creating oratorios to exploit religious themes and operas based on classical sagas. Gay became the shiny new thing, drawing significant shares of audience from Handel. After 20 years, the King’s Theater declined to renew Handel’s contract.

It was wealthy squire and prodigious art and literature collector Charles Jennens whose obsessions spurred Handel to create what may be, according to author Charles King, the world’s most frequently performed and vastly impressive piece, The Messiah. Jennens collected phrases and quotations from both Old and New Testaments, over time generating nearly 300 pages of scratchy, barely legible handwritten notes that he passed on to Handel, whom Jennens called The Prodigious. Those notes were the foundation of the libretto for The Messiah.

Historian King paints a graphic picture of the underbelly of London and presents cinematic profiles of both major and minor subjects. He digs deep to unearth the backstories of his characters, several of whom are stories of redemption. Philanthropist Thomas Coram who labored 17 years to build a home for abandoned children in London. Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, a multi-lingual West African prince kidnapped and enslaved in America, finally freed and becoming a successful entrepreneur in his native land.  Soprano Susannah Cibber, abused by her husband and scandalously fleeing to life with a married man, whose musical success redeems her reputation. Jonathan Swift, ostracized politically in London and demoted to St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, who becomes more notable by sponsoring the first performance of The Messiah.

The author includes in Every Valley significant paintings from the era as well as the actual libretto of the oratorio. This epic piece became the spiritual uplift to draw people out of the despair of 18^th century England and Ireland, a message of hope that lives today. No matter how often The Messiah is heard or who performs it, reading King’s back story can only expand the awe of Handel’s stellar accomplishment.