Charles King, Every Valley

Charles King, Every Valley, The Story of Handel's Messiah (The Bodley Head) 

While Charles King's title lifts a suitably inspirational phrase from Messiah, it could also point us towards how he explores every valley of the contemporary cultural context that brought Handel's most famous work about. It might seem like a long preamble to make for a substantial book but stick with it and it does all contribute to the whole story as it comes together.

In the early pages I was put off by some elements of King's writing. It only takes a couple of minor objections to set one against an author. Even though he knows it's Messiah and not The Messiah, he insists on calling it 'the Messiah' when we don't call other such things 'the Israel in Egypt'. He also says,

In most fighting seasons, some part of the Italian peninsula was overrun by armies, beset by pirates, or ravished by plague or smallpox.

and though 'ravished' is admissable, one can't help thinking he might have meant 'ravaged'. However, a few such trivial objections are soon overcome and, securing his footing, the narrative is soon convincing. 

The book is organized into three parts, entitled Portents, Sorrow and Resurrection, and they parallel the thematic scheme of Messiah in Charles Jennens' hither and thither selection of biblical texts. It might seem to us, especially with regard to Handel's music that the early C18th was a time of great confidence, 'enlightenment' and luxury but that takes no account of the world as drawn by Hogarth and satirized by Swift. It was and age of anxiety, with the house of Hanover insecure in the face of Jacobite pretenders, war and pestilence all of which was underwritten by the prosperity of some being largely dependent on the slave trade. It's an entirely coherent way of understanding Messiah in all its context and glory as a beacon of hope. 

Not much of the book is about the oratorio itself, really. While the account of African Muslim, Diallo, is in some tangential way a sub-text to the main theme, his life's adventure through slavery in America to high social standing in England has very little directly to do with Handel. But we are offered a glimpse of an early possible girlfriend in Georg Freidrich's life, one Vittoria Tarquini, when he was widely thought to have had none. It is also suggested that in his early days in London he was suspected of spying for Germany. Much more relevant to Messiah is the story of Susannah Cibber, the star performer, whose irregular marital arrangements all but finished her reputation before she, too, as per the general theme, achieves not only redemption but greater glory, as does the book itself.

It's not quite what it says on the tin but in many ways it's more than that, a survey of an uncertain and difficult world - and we can understand that- in which hope is achieved, some good is done and things of lasting value are put in place.

That might be the point of it and, appearing now as it does, it might serve to make us think our own times might do something comparable. Charles King doesn't get everything right but he does enough to show he's on the right side in such asides as,

If women later seemed sparse in the historical record, lost amid generals on the battlefield and savants thinking up Western civilisation, it was because male historians worked very hard to miss them. 

I read it mostly to the accompaniment of the opera Alcina. The counterpoint thus achieved between Handel's imperious light and glory and the less glorious reality of what the human character can often be like and how the world is really run was most instructive.