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

Charles King argues that Handel's Messiah, the most widely performed piece of classical music in the world, was not the product of a lone genius but of a group of individuals whose desperate lives and troubled times shaped a work that still resonates nearly three centuries later. By weaving together the stories of the Messiah's librettist, its most famous early performer, its composer, and several figures whose lives intersected with theirs, King presents the Enlightenment not as an age of triumphant rationality but as an era consumed with the challenge of remaining hopeful when the evidence pointed toward despair.

King opens with Charles Jennens, a wealthy but emotionally volatile English squire at his country estate of Gopsall Hall in Leicestershire around 1739. Jennens was prone to deep depression, unmarried, childless, and convinced that his life coincided with his country's decline. During one troubled season, he began copying passages from the Hebrew prophets and New Testament epistles, linking them into a "Scripture Collection": not a dissertation but a dramatized philosophy he hoped an aging London composer he called "the Prodigious," George Frideric Handel, might set to music.

King traces Handel's rise from provincial Germany to the center of British musical life. Born in 1685 in Halle, Saxony, in the aftermath of the Thirty Years' War, which had devastated central Europe, Handel left home for Hamburg and then Italy, where he immersed himself in the musical revolution later called the Baroque. His opera Agrippina ran for 27 nights at the Venice Carnival in 1709, and he was soon appointed Kapellmeister, or music director, to Georg Ludwig, the prince-elector of Hanover, one of the German rulers who elected the Holy Roman Emperor. In 1710, Handel arrived in London, where his opera Rinaldo was a spectacular success. After the Hanoverian succession brought Georg Ludwig to the British throne as George I in 1714, Handel's pension was doubled. His 1727 coronation anthem "Zadok the Priest" for George II has been performed at every British coronation since.

Jennens's tragedies deepened his engagement with Handel's work. His younger brother Robert died by suicide in 1728 after a crisis of religious doubt. Jennens was a nonjuror, one who refused to pledge allegiance to the Hanoverian crown, a stance that barred him from Parliament and public life. His closest friend, Edward Holdsworth, a classical scholar, had likewise sacrificed his Oxford fellowship rather than swear loyalty to George I. Holdsworth traveled Europe collecting art and music on Jennens's behalf, and together they followed Handel's career with consuming devotion, referring to him in letters as "the Prodigious" to shield the composer from association with Jacobite intrigue, the movement to restore the exiled Catholic Stuart dynasty to the throne.

King sets these stories against a broader intellectual landscape. Philosophers from Thomas Hobbes to David Hume grappled with how to cultivate hope amid suffering, while Jonathan Swift, dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, offered his own response through Gulliver's Travels (1726), whose final voyage teaches its narrator that acknowledging one's brokenness is the first step toward correction. Swift disliked music intensely, yet his life would intersect with the Messiah's premiere in unexpected ways.

Handel's mid-career troubles drove a pivotal creative shift. John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728), a hilarious English-language parody of Italian opera, undercut the fashion for Handel's work. Audiences dwindled, a rival company stole his singers, and his health faltered. He pivoted to English-language oratorio, a form cheaper to produce and easier for audiences to understand. Jennens began sending libretto ideas in the mid-1730s, resulting in oratorios such as Saul and Israel in Egypt, but most productions closed quickly.

King introduces Susannah Cibber, born Susannah Maria Arne in 1714 near Covent Garden. She learned music from her brother Thomas Arne but never mastered notation, memorizing scores by ear. Her father arranged her marriage to Theophilus Cibber, son of the celebrated actor Colley Cibber. Theophilus controlled Susannah's finances and career, introducing wealthy young men to her in exchange for financial favors. When Susannah fell in love with one of them, the country squire William Sloper Jr., Theophilus sued Sloper for damages. The 1738 trial became a public sensation. Susannah described her married life as "dying by inches" (116) and fled with Sloper and their daughter Molly.

Running parallel is the story of Thomas Coram, a sea captain consumed with the plight of foundlings, children abandoned by parents who were still alive. Coram spent over a decade gathering signatures from women of rank, and in 1739 George II signed the charter for the Foundling Hospital. When it opened in March 1741, hospital staff noted that the children were frequently described as "very neatly dressed," evidence they had been given away out of love rather than indifference.

King also narrates the story of Ayuba Diallo, a privileged Muslim man from the West African region of Bundu, who in 1731 was seized and sold to a British slave ship. After enduring enslavement on a Maryland tobacco plantation, Diallo composed a letter in Arabic insisting on his identity. The letter reached James Oglethorpe, deputy governor of the Royal African Company, a firm that controlled much of Britain's trade in enslaved people, who arranged Diallo's freedom. Diallo returned to Bundu in 1734 but became an informal agent of the Company, facilitating trade in goods and in people. King uses Diallo's story to show how deeply the slave trade permeated British society: Isaac Newton and John Locke held shares in slaving companies, and Handel himself received portions of his salary through accounts held by such firms.

These threads converge in the Messiah's creation. Before midsummer 1741, Jennens sent his scripture collection to Handel at Brook Street. On August 22, Handel began composing, following Jennens's three-part scenario: prophecy and the promise of a redeemer, suffering and the passion of Christ, and triumph over death. He recycled melodies from earlier compositions and completed the full score on September 12. Without telling Jennens, Handel departed for Dublin that autumn, invited to stage concerts to lift public spirits amid failed harvests.

The premiere took place on April 13, 1742. Over 700 people crowded into William Neale's music hall on Fishamble Street. Swift, now in his mid-seventies and experiencing worsening deafness and mental confusion, had tried to prohibit his cathedral choristers from participating but eventually relented. Handel recruited Cibber, who had arrived in Dublin, lowering keys to accommodate her voice, which had deepened from soprano to alto. Near the top of the second part, Cibber stepped forward to sing "He was despised, rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief," words from Isaiah whose description of rejection and sorrow mirrored her own life. The cleric Patrick Delany reportedly exclaimed: "Woman, for this, be all thy sins forgiven!" (208). The concert raised 1,223 pounds for charity, freeing 142 debtors from local jails. Handel visited Swift at St. Patrick's, where the dean exclaimed "O! A German, and a Genius!" (210) in what was apparently his last intelligible conversation. Returning to London, Handel wrote to Jennens referring to "Your Messiah" (210), the last time nearly anyone would call it anything other than Handel's alone.

The London premiere in March 1743 drew a lukewarm reception, and the Messiah was rarely performed over the next several years. The Jacobite rising of 1745, in which Charles Edward Stuart, the Stuart claimant to the British throne, marched an army into England before being defeated at Culloden in April 1746, convulsed the nation. Holdsworth died in December 1746, and Jennens never again collaborated with Handel.

The Messiah's resurrection came through the Foundling Hospital. In 1749, Handel held a benefit concert for the hospital; in spring 1750, he performed the full Messiah in the completed chapel to an overflow audience. Annual concerts through the 1750s raised nearly 7,000 pounds for charity, and the work's association with rescuing children gave it a moral authority that secured its place in British public life. Coram, marginalized by the hospital's governing board, died in March 1751.

Handel's eyesight failed in his final years. He died on April 14, 1759, the Saturday before Easter. Cibber became the most celebrated tragedienne in English theater history before her death in 1766. Jennens died in 1773; his burial memorial made no mention of the Messiah. King concludes that the work's central message endures: The foundation of hope is not the will to look past awfulness but the habit of seeing clearly in the middle of it. Every performance since 1742 has begun with the same two words from Isaiah, which Jennens chose to place at the very start: "Comfort ye."