Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s Messiah
This book review was originally published on The Journal Gazette on December 13, 2024
Curious twists of observance announced the arrival of the 2024 Christmas season.
Despite efforts of retailers to launch advertising campaigns weeks if not months before Black Friday, families were often the first to declare the season’s arrival this year by decorating their trees. After noticing growing numbers of festive lights in front windows, I finally inquired with one neighbor who responded, “I just felt like I needed to do something positive.”
Thankfully, Christmas 2024 is not Christmas 2020. Regardless, exhaustion lingers, understandably stoked by grinding wars in Ukraine and the Mideast, to name only two, as well as an unending domestic election cycle.
The church calendar designated Dec. 1 as the first Sunday in Advent. The desire to begin a season defined by preparations to welcome the Prince of Peace in November or even October, however, proves understandable.
Music is a critical component of such preparations and, despite myriad options, no composition may prove more definitive of the season than George Frideric Handel’s “Messiah.”
For many, experiencing performances of Handel’s magnum opus is an inextricable part of that process. For many more, that process includes viewing holiday films such as “Christmas Vacation,” during which the end of Chevy Chase’s successful battle with the Christmas lights is announced by the Messiah’s “Hallelujah Chorus.”
The conditions surrounding Handel and his collaborators when he composed the Messiah were not too far afield from our own. Ongoing debate and armed conflict concerning who would rightly wear the British crown were foremost on their minds.
Charles King’s “Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times that Made Handel’s Messiah” proves indispensable to anyone seeking to understand the similarities in those conditions as well as how beauty, despite its complicated origins, sustains us.
King, a professor at Georgetown University, is no stranger to the comfort compositions such as the Messiah provide. As citizens of Washington, D.C. and its Capitol Hill neighborhood, King and his wife, Margaret Paxson, experienced lengthy lockdowns, health challenges and the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection. The search to explore the comfort the Messiah provided them fueled King’s motivation to write “Every Valley.”
That process led King to at least two ironic conclusions. First, King offers that if one listens when shopping, Muzak-ed versions of the Messiah may serve as background music in stores beckoning holiday shoppers. King also offers, however, that the Messiah is “a tool for rescuing the season from itself — an invitation to worry less about a missed flight or a last-minute gift and more about large, ultimate things.”
Second, King shares that the Messiah affords us with a means of engaging with the past and the beauty that came to define Handel’s own Baroque era. King also shares, however, that despite being 282 years old, the Messiah “is filled with questions that sound wholly contemporary. There is despair at the disorder of the world and exasperation at the lies gobbled up by a gullible public.”
Then again, “There are affirmations that we need not think of life as a solo act, that we are lodged inside a universe far vaster than we can understand.”
Handel understandably sits at the center of the story King offers. Narratives concerning other figures who played critical roles in the preparation and performance of the Messiah circle out and return in a historical arc covering the latter half of the composer’s life.
Comparatively unfamiliar figures such as Charles Jennens, Susannah Cinner, Ayuba Diallo and Thomas Coram play roles in a drama that allows readers to appreciate efforts made by a cast of characters who otherwise may drift into the recesses of history or even be lost.
Despite the enormous efforts Handel made to compose the musical score for the Messiah, King, for example, contends that “The original idea and the selection of sacred texts belonged not to Handel but to the emotionally tormented Charles Jennens, a country squire and political dissident who found solace in the elevating power of awe.”
Jennens’ story then makes for one of the narrative loops that gives him the credit he rightfully deserves for his efforts.
The purpose behind historical accounts often finding their way into books today is to deconstruct or debunk the efforts and character of our predecessors. In certain instances, such explorations are undoubtedly merited.
Today’s steady diet of self-righteousness, however, leaves one wondering whether anything good occurred prior to the arrival of artificial intelligence.
Part of the genius woven into King’s narrative and its 18 concise chapters is that they leave readers with an even greater appreciation for the Messiah. Readers meet characters who, despite their flaws, came together and offered one of the most inspiring musical offerings the world knows.
While not a message King overtly sought to share in “Every Valley,” the potential that flawed persons harbor should, as with the Messiah, ease the anxiety-fueled self-righteousness presently plaguing the human condition. Despite their flaws, people are capable of beauty.
As with Handel’s soaring score and Jennens’ timeless lyrics, bearing beauty is part of what affords humans with opportunities to express what it means to be created in the image of their creator.