Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Charles King calls Handel’s Messiah “the greatest piece of participatory art ever created”. Certainly, it occupies a unique place in the Western classical music canon. Dating from 1741, it is still a vigorously living work, brought into new being each time it is performed, whether in an amateur sing-a-long with a piano reduction in a local church or in a professional concert hall. The Messiah’s “Hallelujah Chorus”, meanwhile, has become a recognised soundtrack for celebration. Audiences still ritually stand for it, in supposed imitation of King George II, who, legend has it, rose to his feet in admiration when he first heard it.That, it turns out, is a myth. But, as this book reveals, there are more fascinating historical truths to be uncovered from beneath what is, on the face of it, a rather anomalous example of its genre. Other sacred oratorios by Handel, such as Saul, retell Bible stories. In contrast, the quotations from the Old and New Testaments that comprise the text of the Messiah add up less to a narrative than to a meditation on hope. Its first words, after all, are “Comfort ye”.Every Valley is not quite “the story of Handel’s Messiah”, as the subtitle has it, but of the stories behind it. King — a professor at Georgetown University whose acclaimed previous books include The Reinvention of Humanity — dives deep into its multifarious contexts. By following the links between individuals who are connected by varying degrees of separation with the work’s original creation and promotion, the author discovers that this one musical piece can stimulate joined-up insights into almost every significant aspect of its period: cultural, political, social, economic.Unlike ‘Rule, Britannia!’, the oratorio incorporates doubt and anxiety into its vision. Why, it asks, do the nations so furiously rage together?His technique is often cinematic, focusing in and then panning out. The book begins with a vignette of Messiah librettist Charles Jennens pulling books down from his library shelves to search out the texts that he will eventually select. A wealthy collector and cultural patron, he was a life-long sufferer from “the hyp”, as depression was then called. His melancholia, though personal, was not wholly disconnected from public affairs.Handel and Jennens become a springboard from which to explore, for example, the tensions surrounding the Hanoverian succession. Handel had worked for the Elector of Hanover in his native Germany, before the latter became George I, and he continued to enjoy royal patronage during his long expatriate years in London. Jennens, on the other hand was a “non-juror”, someone who refused to accept the legitimacy of the new monarchy.The decade that produced the Messiah also produced “God Save the King” and “Rule, Britannia!” in service to a new ideology of Britishness designed to paper over the national cracks. Unlike those triumphalist anthems, the oratorio incorporates doubt and anxiety into its vision. “Why,” it asks, “do the nations so furiously rage together?” Armed conflict, and a sense of perilous insecurity, were endemic. At the time of the Messiah’s first performance in 1742, for example, Britain was at war with Spain in the Caribbean, while the long-anticipated Jacobite rebellion would bring bloodshed to the British Isles just three years later.Although the early 18th century witnessed the birth of the Enlightenment, Jonathan Swift’s 1726 satire Gulliver’s Travels characterised the human race as brutish Yahoos. Swift himself turns out to be connected to the story of the Messiah: he was the curmudgeonly Dean of St Patrick’s in Dublin at the time it was premiered in that city in 1742. Similarly serendipitous connections allow King to delve into everything from the ugly economic underpinnings of the new Britannia in the shape of the slave trade to the disempowered agency of women in the society of the time. In every case the macro picture is made vivid through the micro stories of individuals.Anyone who has ever written a historical narrative will know how hard it must have been for King to keep all the strands so expertly in play. The result is a truly informative, imaginative and engaging work.Every Valley: The Story of Handel’s Messiah by Charles King Bodley Head £25, 352 pagesJoin our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and subscribe to our podcast Life & Art wherever you listen
