Does anything ever truly happen in the Messiah? This extraordinarily popular tripartite choral work, first performed in Dublin in 1742, consists almost entirely of saying rather than of doing. Circling around the redemptive power of Christ, it combines declarations with questions, prophecies, injunctions and exhortations (‘Who is this King of Glory?’, ‘Behold, I tell you a Mystery’, ‘Daughter of Sion, shout’, ‘He shall speak’). Full of urgency, tribulation and momentum, the Messiah nevertheless lacks a plot – unless we class the perennial human emotions of hope and fear, and the movement between the two, as dramatic action. 

The oratorio is sometimes described as a commentary, but it is a compilation of sources rather than a work of analysis, its text splicing words (along with the occasional paraphrase) from the King James Bible. The passage with which it begins comes from the fortieth chapter of the Book of Isaiah, where the prophet – who has been denouncing the greed and moral turpitude of Hezekiah, king of Judaea – suddenly moves into a different register entirely. Not only will the mighty and elevated be brought low, but human sin and sorrow will be redeemed; death itself shall be vanquished. The climactic message of Part I is ‘ye shall find Rest unto your Souls’.

We nowadays habitually refer, as does the title of this book, to ‘Handel’s Messiah’, but Charles King’s engaging and enthusiastic study returns to a rightfully equal place the depressive, devout and captious author – or rather, since he did not actually write the texts in question, the compiler – of the libretto, Charles Jennens. The Irish bishop Edward Synge, having witnessed (unlike Jennens himself) its first performance, wanted to record his astonishment not only at the music, but also at the words of the Messiah: ‘The whole is beyond any thing I had a notion of till I Read and heard it.’ On this view of the work, it was Jennens as much as Handel who had created ‘a Species of Musick different from any other’. 

Their collaboration was a testing one, Jennens (a wealthy landowner) by turns venerating and antagonising the composer. Since 1735 he had been sending Handel unsolicited libretti inspired by biblical and religious subjects, but there was no guarantee that anything would come of them. Handel was notoriously irascible and unpredictable in his working methods. His score for the Messiah seems to work both with and against the grain of Jennens’s chosen sources, sometimes emphasising odd parts of English words or sentences so as to muddle the meaning (in Part II, the phrase ‘we, like sheep’, as in ‘we, who resemble sheep’, is stressed and isolated in such a way as to make it sound like the expression of a preference: ‘we like sheep’ as opposed to, say, cows or pigs). Jennens did not entirely approve of the score, writing to a friend that Handel had ‘made a fine entertainment … though not near so good as he might and ought to have done’. The two men later quarrelled about revisions that Jennens repeatedly insisted on making to the musical setting. But the intimacy and pathos of the Messiah, combined with the fact that profits from its first performances went to charitable causes, magnified the sense of its ability to improve as well as to move its listeners. 

The 18th-century oratorio must have sounded much quieter than versions to which modern audiences have become accustomed. Susannah Cibber, the actress and singer for whom Handel had sparely orchestrated his contralto arias, possessed by all accounts a small and rather quavering voice. She was adept, however, at conveying grief, pity, supplication and passionate agony, a gift that was honed through experience. One biographer has written that Susannah’s ‘life was spent gratifying men’, and much of Every Valley is devoted to charting the miserable aftermath of her marriage to Theophilus Cibber, a man who pimped her to another, richer man and then sued her for adultery. He continued to benefit for as long as possible from her considerable earnings on stage, abducting her when she refused to comply with his demands, before committing the most welcome act of his life in drowning en route to the Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin.

The Messiah premiered in London in March 1743; this time, Jennens was present. Handel’s combination of sacred and profane elements (he had recycled some tunes from earlier, secular compositions) met with a rather muted reception, certainly compared with that given by the rapturous audiences in Ireland. He was also very unwell. The work was put to one side and remained relatively neglected until the end of the 1740s, when the opening of Thomas Coram’s Foundling Hospital gave the composer and his oratorio a new lease of life. It was now performed for the first time in a chapel, one which was dedicated to the rescue of children. By the end of the 1750s, what had become known as ‘the Annual Musical Festival of Messiah’ had earned the charity the enormous sum of almost £7,000.

King handles a very large cast of characters and source materials with energy, intelligence and aplomb. However, the effect of including so many people and stories in the book is that Handel himself often disappears from view, and we are more than two hundred pages into the narrative before we reach the first performance of the Messiah. (The American subtitle to Every Valley, ‘The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s Messiah’, suggests more accurately than its English equivalent the bustling atmosphere and frequent digressions of the volume.) A long interlude recounting the dramatic life and adventures of Ayuba Suleiman Diallo – a Muslim prince, former slave and slave trader from Senegambia – is fascinating but of only peripheral relevance to the Messiah.

Jennens’s motives in assembling his cento-like composition, or ‘found poem’ (as King describes it), were partly therapeutic, a response to constitutional melancholy and personal loss – a sustained exercise in imagining why and how anyone might succeed in staying hopeful in the face of endless human pain, conflict and disaster. Throughout Every Valley, the author remains alive to Jennens’s and Handel’s masterpiece as ‘a record of a way of thinking’, in which generation after generation has discovered not the triumph of enlightened reason but rather the capacity to endure.