“Mr. Handel’s head is more full of Maggots than ever. … I could tell you more … but it grows late & I must defer the rest until I write next; by which time, I doubt not, more new ones will breed in his Brain.”
The probably feigned harrumph about the composer was aired by one Charles Jennens, a wealthy 18th-century English country squire, art and book collector, music lover, hoarder of manuscripts and all-around aesthete who some years later would provide both the concept and the text for what would become the most popular and enduring musical work of all time: the oratorio that, despite Jennens’s contribution, we know as “Handel’s ‘Messiah.’” A solitary bachelor, self-described as “puny,” Jennens was subject to depression and “violent perturbations and anxieties of the mind.” Aside from his God in heaven, the moody and melancholic impresario had one overriding passion in life: the music of his German-born composer friend, he of the maggots in the brain. For Jennens, George Frideric Handel was “the Prodigious,” a genius whose talent, fecundity and theatrical acumen dominated English musical life for nearly a half-century.
Jennens is just one of an improbable list of characters who populate Charles King’s new book, “Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s ‘Messiah.’” King uses Handel’s famous oratorio, what he calls “the greatest piece of participatory art ever created,” as a hub the spokes of which radiate outward to a host of key historical forces and personalities that characterize 18th-century Britain. A work of vivid social and cultural commentary, it functions also as an in-depth study of artistic creation, not only of how “Messiah” came to be, but also of the unstoppable spigot that was Handel’s musical imagination.
Its melodramatic subtitle aside, King’s is a book rich with quirky characters living under strange circumstances: eccentric royals, visionary benefactors, financial collapses, theatrical triumphs and career meltdowns, legal shenanigans worthy of Dickens’s “Bleak House,” and even a Peeping Tom who spies on an adulterous tryst involving the young woman who years later Handel will choose to sing the alto solos in the premiere of “Messiah.”
King casts his net wide, finding links among signal names and events that, although they didn’t always impact Handel, are representative of the era. We are reminded that Handel was alive and composing in the England of Pope, Swift, Defoe, Fielding, Newton, Bonnie Prince Charlie; of smallpox and syphilis, public hangings and the longstanding dispute between the Catholic Stuarts and the Protestant Hanoverians. We are plunged into the hectic mayhem of London life, with the slave trade a sinister backdrop for an economy that kept class distinctions frozen, the nobility in comfort and commoners struggling to stay fed. Farther afield but affecting the fortunes of the wealthy were the restless American colonies and the rapacious South Sea Company, which alternately enriched and then ruined its investors. But there is also the moving story of “Messiah”’s connection to the creation of London’s famous Foundling Hospital, a humanitarian crusade that dominated the life of one sea captain turned philanthropist, Thomas Coram, determined to provide succor for the city’s shocking number of abandoned children.
At the center of King’s narrative is of course Handel, born in the eastern German city of Halle, who in 1710 at the age of 25 comes to London speaking barely a word of English but nonetheless is soon a musical megastar, eliciting commissions, command performances and generous patronage. Newly arrived, he composes the hugely successful opera “Rinaldo” at such breakneck speed that his librettist can hardly keep up with him. Within a year he’s written a birthday ode for Queen Anne that leads to a royal pension. Italian opera seria is the rage in London, and Handel, who has spent the previous four years living and working in Rome, Florence and Naples, is already confidently expert in the genre. From an early age he’s exhibited a strong sense of his own worth, declining offers from nobles, aristocrats and even Roman cardinals, all eager to patronize him.
This is a quality of self-valuation that he shares with his exact contemporary J.S. Bach, also born in 1685, although as individuals they could not have been more different: Bach the uxorious family man who spent most of his career employed by the church and whose work went into a decades-long eclipse soon after his death; Handel, by contrast, first and foremost a man of the theater, presumably gay and a cosmopolitan with sound business instincts and keenly aware of and adaptable to the whims of public taste. Unlike Bach he became wealthy by middle age (“overstock’d with money,” as Jennens described him), and his music remained immensely popular after his death. He found supporters to launch his own production company, coaxing celebrity singers from Italy to move to London as part of his ensemble. Most colleagues remembered him as generous, tolerant of religious differences, with a dry wit, a way of “making the gravest people laugh without laughing himself.”
“Messiah” in fact was premiered not in London but in Dublin in 1742. Jennens, drawing on his vast command of biblical narrative and imagery, had created a kind of script, a collection of quotations from the Old and New Testaments that ties together the essential Christian narrative from the prophecy in Isaiah through the Nativity to the Passion and Resurrection. He wasn’t even sure Handel would be interested, as his text lacked the familiar dramatic conventions, dialogue and stage action that usually whetted the composer’s imagination. Rather, it was a meta-narrative on the highest spiritual level. He could only hope that Handel would “lay out his whole Genius & Skill upon it.” And indeed he did. Although well into his 50s by then, Handel had lost none of his superhuman creative energy. Composing in a frenzy, he completed it in an astonishing 24 days, 260 pages of full score that looks as if he were writing as fast as his hand would allow: crammed notes, crooked bar lines, ink splotches, a tangle of scrawled hen scratches across the page — impossible to imagine that such a mess could translate into such sublime musical perfection.
A lasting irony is that Jennens had slight regard for “Messiah.” So disgusted was he with what he deemed Handel’s indifferent and hasty treatment of his text that he resolved never again to provide the composer with words “to be thus abus’d.” But soon they were at it again, this time with another biblical oratorio, “Belshazzar.” “I must take him as I find him,” Jennens grumbled in a letter to a friend, “and make the best use I can of him.”
Ask singers their favorite composer and chances are Handel will top the lists, even above Mozart or Schubert. The sensual curves and dips of his phrases, the expressive shifts of harmonies that go from shadow to light and from aching lament to explosions of joy are unlike any other music in the classical canon. Over time performances of “Messiah” veered toward the elephantine, with inflated orchestras and gigantic massed choruses, and were often burdened with ponderous tempos and vibrato-laden operatic soloists. But recently they have given way to more historically aware versions, fleet and luminous. A deeply moving performance from Trinity College, Cambridge, viewable online, by the Academy of Ancient Music, uses an orchestra of only 17 and a chorus of 20.
Charles King is a historian, not a musicologist. For in-depth discussions of the music, one would best start with brilliantly imagined books by Ellen T. Harris or those by Jane Glover and the late Christopher Hogwood, both influential conductors of Baroque-era music. King is better known for his books about Istanbul and Odessa and for “Gods of the Upper Air,” about a revolution in cultural anthropology. When he writes about Handel’s music it is from the point of view of an amateur, but “amateur” in the best sense of the word; that is, he loves “Messiah” with a passion and sense of gratitude and awe that is rare even among professional musicians. He experiences the biblical phrases chosen by Jennens and set to music by Handel as the supreme example of Enlightenment values. His summarizing words are worth quoting here: The Enlightenment’s “truly pressing theme in … art, music, theater, philosophy and theology was not, in fact, the triumph of rationality. It was instead how to manage catastrophe. … In this way, the ‘Messiah’ matters not just as an epic piece of music but also as a record of a way of thinking, an archive in song handed down from a period of profound anxiety about improving the world whose deepest message is that one nevertheless had to try.”
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