Some people cleaned out their garages during the Covid-19 confinement. Some binge-watched streaming videos. Some took online classes.

Charles King wrote a book.

That’s not so unusual. One day, when an inventory is taken, thousands of books will be counted as Covid literature. But what is unusual is that King’s book, Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s Messiah (Doubleday, Oct. 29), grew not just from the pandemic but also from a needle-in-a-haystack treasure hunt.

“My wife and I were just looking for ways of feeling better, like everybody was,” King tells Kirkus, speaking from his office at Georgetown University, where he is a professor of international politics. “She’s a singer and a writer, and she loves Handel’s Messiah. What if I could find the oldest recording of this thing and put it on an old Victrola that we happen to have? I mean, it’s silly, but that was my magical solution.”

A century-old recording was acquired by way of an internet search, and the game was afoot. “We put it on, and we both just started weeping. We’d heard it many, many times before, as most people have. But it got me thinking about how weird this iconic piece of music is, and it took me from Christmas-shopping and pumpkin-spice-latte background [music] into a kind of philosophical journey—because, it turns out, the life and times of Messiah are very much like our own.”

Messiah, of course, is considered the greatest work of German composer George Frideric Handel, the product of an ingenious musical artist’s lifelong journey as it neared its end. But, as King discovered when he began to look into its origins, it was also the result of a confluence of events and personalities, some quite unlikely: a religious dissenter, an enslaved African prince, an abused woman, British and German monarchs, and many others, all of them figuring, one way or another, in Handel’s masterpiece.

That religious dissenter’s story is a small tragedy all its own. Charles Jennens, whom readers meet at the outset of Every Valley, was a timid, retiring man so afraid of the cold that he slept under four blankets in summer and six in winter. He lived a hermetic life, his one true love an older man in an era when such love could not be expressed, and he suffered from what today would probably be classified as bipolar disorder.

Jennens was also a brilliant scholar whose vast library, one of the largest in England, fueled endless writings, including a vast corpus that he called his “Scripture Collection,” an assemblage of snippets from the Bible and associated literature in which Jennens, King writes, “linked up one passage with another, editing and rearranging them, tying together themes that leaped out at him from the text.” In time, that text would evolve into the libretto for Messiah; Jennens, King holds, was “the person to whom the Messiah most properly belongs as an idea.”

Jennens was playing with fire in many of his writings, for early-18th-century England seemed on the verge of collapse, under tremendous stress on every front: religious, political, and cultural. Religious orthodoxy was inflexible, often lethal. Catholics were hunted, suspected of loyalty to foreign potentates. “Nonjurors” such as Jennens and his beloved dissident Protestants shielded their correspondence against the eyes of government agents. Whigs and Tories feuded, while a Jacobite rebellion brewed up north. Hatred, denunciation, calumny, division, and uprisings threatened to tear the nation apart. And then there was the question of who, in the end, would rule—times very much like our own, indeed.

Queen Anne, that last monarch of the House of Stuart, ascended the throne in 1702. In constant pain (and probably suffering from lupus), Anne “seemed to oscillate between despair and rage,” King writes. Pocked by sores, covered with bandages, she took to drink and overeating. Her one joy was music, and there Handel comes in, a German in nebulous self-exile from the Hanoverian court that employed him as its musical director. Anne liked what she heard, Handel obliged with a birthday-present cantata, and soon both Handel’s finances and reputation began to grow.

Handel enjoyed the freedom of England, his newfound home, and the luxuries that money bought. At least some of his growing fortune, though, was tainted. As King tells Kirkus, “All of British society was intertwined with empire, and empire rested on the trade in people.” Most of those people were anonymous, unknown to those they enriched, but one figure in Every Valley was an exception, an African prince, Ayuba Diallo, who was kidnapped and transported in chains to the colony of Maryland. After an escape attempt and his eloquent defense, Diallo was put on a ship for England, where he became something of a celebrity. After a time, freed, Diallo sailed back to Senegal, one of precious few enslaved Africans ever to return to their homelands.

Jennens, who himself had built a considerable fortune from the slave trade, knew Diallo’s story. He may even have known Diallo personally, for he shared membership with Diallo in a “Gentleman’s Society” made up of the country’s leading intellectuals. Diallo’s name, rendered as Jalla, appears very close to Jennens’ on the published membership roll—and when King, devouring archives and libraries to research Every Valley, laid eyes on it, he recalls, “I thought, here’s another one of those astonishing connections of these lives of torment and brokenness that all end up spinning into a monument to the idea of hope.”

That monument first took the form of a jumbled mountain of manuscripts that Jennens presented to Handel. More a tome than a libretto, Jennens’ text caught Handel at a time when he was eager for a meaningful project, having idled away a few years with his own eating and drinking binges. Handel, whom King likens to Sondheim as much as Bach, got to work, intent on reinventing himself musically even as, King says, “he recycled a few things that he’d tried out before,” paring down Jennens’ text to manageable length and pulling it together with the magnificent oratorio that, in its insistent repetition of “hallelujah,” speaks of glory to reward so much suffering.

The resulting score, with the basic shape that we know today, was slow to take hold. Handel premiered it in Dublin in April 1742, where, thanks to an emotive performance by yet another psychically wounded figure, the singer Susannah Cibber, it met with an enthusiastic reception. (Jonathan Swift was in the audience.) Handel staged it in London the following year, where “it met with sort of polite enthusiasm,” as King puts it. Polite or not, audiences grew, performances multiplied—as King notes in Every Valley, Handel performed it 36 times, “more frequently than any other oratorio he ever composed”—and soon Messiah was on its way to becoming a classic.

Few contemporary readers will know much of George II, Queen Anne, Charles Jennens, Ayuba Diallo, Susannah Cibber, or even George Frideric Handel himself—until, that is, they read Every Valley. More than the story of how a beloved musical work was created and entered the canon, King’s book speaks to how unlikely coincidences shape our lives and thoughts. “It’s a story, I think, about the way in which our own legacies are things not of our own making,” King says. “The things that live on after us are subject to forces far larger than ourselves.”

Gregory McNamee is a contributing writer.