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

King (international affairs and government, Georgetown Univ.; Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century) offers up the best kind of music lovers’ book. It’s like a romp through the teeming literary and musical world of mid-18th-century London as George Frideric Handel, already famous, seeks more fortune in England. Eccentric Englishman Charles Jennens supplies Handel with texts for his operas, but by the end of the 1730s, Italianate operas were falling out of fashion. Then Jennens sends Handel a new text, an oratorio drawn wholly from the words of the Scriptures: a story of hope and resurrection, a message that Jennens feels the world sorely needs during those unsettled times. Out of their fractious collaboration comes the most often performed vocal work in the classical corpus: the Messiah. In 2023, there were more than 200 Messiah concerts in the United States alone. First performed in 1741, its path to success was uncertain until 1750, when the composer conducted it for the Foundling Hospital benefit in London. By the time of his death, nine years later, he had performed it 36 times.