EVERY VALLEY

A ringing history of George Frideric Handel’s Messiah and its turbulent birth.

Composed for Easter but long associated instead with Christmas, the Messiah is one of the world’s most widely performed oratory pieces: As King writes, there were some 200 performances in the United States in 2023, many of them mass audience singalongs. His wide-ranging history begins not with Handel but with the eccentric Englishman Charles Jennens, whose “smallest agitations could balloon into obsessions.” A bibliophile and independent scholar with a huge library, Jennens made one such obsessive project out of what he called his “Scripture Collection,” a massive gathering of biblical quotations and his own notes that he delivered to Handel, “approaching sixty and edging toward the final stage of his career,” who would not live to see most of the fame that would come from his composition. King is a professor of international relations at Georgetown, but he writes with a musicologist’s insight into Handel’s methods. Closer to his own discipline, King writes winningly of the history surrounding Handel’s life and times; of his effectively fleeing the Hanover court where he was employed only to have that court become the rulers of Britain, where he had decamped; of the support of the unfortunate Queen Anne, who “seemed to oscillate between despair and rage,” an admirer of Handel’s work who put him on the path to wealth; of the disruptions of larger events such as the Jacobite Rebellion and the War of the Austrian Succession; and much more. Ever present onstage is Handel, a fantastically handsome young man grown obese in middle age (“He was known for overindulgence, even among the gentlemanly set that expected a full table and free-­flowing port”). In a long but fascinating aside, King also traces Handel’s unexpected financial involvement in the slave trade.

A swiftly moving, constantly engaging portrait of a beloved masterpiece.