George Frideric Handel; drawing by David Levine
Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s Messiah
by Charles King.
Doubleday, 335 pp., $32.00
Across the English-speaking world, thousands of people are looking forward to Handel’s Messiah at Christmas—booking tickets, rooting out scores, or preparing to sing “the Messiah from scratch” for the first or the fiftieth time. Originally intended to be performed at Easter, for many people it is now as much a part of Christmas as a carol or a tree. What is it that thrills audiences and lifts the hearts of singers?
In Every Valley Charles King, a professor of international affairs and government at Georgetown University, sets out to explain the oratorio’s enduring popularity. He begins his quest at a dark time shadowed by Covid, his wife’s illness, the chaos of the attack on the Capitol, the warming planet, wars overseas, and the wash of misinformation. Seeking a way “to slice through the gloom, to let in a bit of healing light,” he finds it in playing old shellac discs of Sir Thomas Beecham’s 1927 recording of the Messiah, the earliest recorded full performance and one less bombastic than Beecham’s usual interpretation. Hearing the “lone, high voice” of the tenor declaring “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people,” King and his wife burst into tears.
Nothing dims the ’s power to move. Its three parts—matched by King’s arrangement of his book into three sections, “Portents,” “Sorrows and Grief,” and “Resurrection”—turn from ancient prophecies of a redeemer and the shepherds’ welcome of the Christ child to suffering and persecution and then to redemption through sacrifice and resurrection. Though deeply embedded in Christian doctrine, like all great pieces of sacred music it reaches out regardless of creed. Powerfully dramatic, it is, in King’s words, “a work of anguish and promise, of profound worry and resounding joy, all expressed in ingenious, irresistible melodies.” It offers, he suggests, a way of coping with catastrophe. But to understand this we must see the world afresh, embracing a vision where “every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill