Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s Messiah

The beloved Christmastime oratorio, with its sublime “Hallelujah Chorus,” was the cry of a wretched world yearning for enlightenment, according to this scattershot study. King (Gods of the Upper Air), a professor of international affairs at Georgetown University, recaps the career of Georg Frideric Handel (1685–1759), the German-born musician who became Britain’s court composer and wrote the music for the Messiah in 1741. Though Handel enjoyed acclaim, his masterpiece was built by “a time, place, and... individuals” enmeshed in the oratorio’s themes of suffering, justice, and redemption, King posits. Among those profiled are Susannah Cibber, a lead singer at Messiah’s premiere, whose love affair with an aristocrat led to a scandalous court case; Charles Jennens, the author of the oratorio’s biblical libretto; and Ayuba Diallo, an African man who was kidnapped, sold into bondage, and rescued by Englishmen. Though Diallo had no direct connection to Messiah, his story casts a light on how slavery underpinned artistic organizations such as the Royal Academy of Music (Handel’s employer), many of whose investors had stock in slave trading companies. Unfortunately, King doesn’t always convincingly connect his character sketches back to the oratorio, which makes his central insight (“It took a universe of pain to make a musical monument to hope”) feel somewhat forced. Despite the intriguing historical trivia, this doesn’t quite hang together. (Oct.)