For more than three centuries, German-British composer George Frideric Handel’s “Messiah” has been a staple of the classical canon during the holidays. It’s a vaulting oratorio, in English, of the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
But “Messiah” was born in a world of political turmoil, social unrest, and fear for the future, according to Charles King, a professor at Georgetown University and author of a new book called Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s Messiah.
King says “Messiah” stands out because it’s never had to be revived — in contrast to Johann Sebastian Bach, who “went out of fashion” and was later revived.
“Handel's ‘Messiah’ has been with us since 1742, in nearly continuous performance all that time. And I think people report finding something deep and meaningful and awesome in it, even if they don't share the theology or even get the religious connections of the music,” he says. “It's become associated with the Christmas season. … You go to virtually any performance, and you will see someone with tears in their eyes. And you can't say that about every piece of classical music.”
What makes it so moving? The unique pairing of words and music, King says.
“The words themselves are completely drawn from sacred texts, so from the Hebrew scriptures and from the New Testament. But they're rearranged to present a philosophical journey through not only the foundational principles of Christianity, but more broadly, the reason that we should hope in the world. ‘Messiah’ presents us with this problem through a series of questions that are all through the text. Why do the nations so furiously rage together? Why do people imagine a vain thing? Death, where is thy sting? All of this creates a package where in listening to the music, you're also experiencing, I think, some of the foundational questions of what it means to be human.”
King recalls being in his Washington D.C. home with his wife on January 6, 2021, after experiencing some of the toughest years of their lives, which included the COVID pandemic, and they happened to put on “Messiah.”
“From the first notes, we found ourselves just bursting into tears, and a lot of people do that with this piece of music, and so I wanted to follow that. Why is that the case? And that led me on this really amazing journey across multiple countries to find the origin story of this remarkable, classic piece of music.”
In his research, King found that the Book of Isaiah contained text telling people to be a comforter to others. “What a profound bit of wisdom from these ancient prophecies. … If you want to change the world, you start, you be the one to say that it's going to be alright.”
However, Handel himself only wrote the music for “Messiah,” and Charles Jennens assembled and arranged the text. King says Jennens was a wealthy landowner and proto-industrialist in the English Midlands. As a “Handel super fan” in the 18th century, he went to as many of the composer’s concerts as possible.
In the 1730s, King explains, Jennens experienced “an enshrouding sense of doom, of deep, inescapable despair.” So then he went to his library, turning to the King James version of the Bible. He identified texts and treatises on philosophy and theology; he looked at sacred scriptures and rewrote/rearranged them.
“There's nothing in the text of ‘Messiah’ today that is in the biblical order. It's all in an order that Charles Jennens created, and his purpose in doing that was to try to find a reason to be hopeful in a seemingly hopeless world.”
Jennens then tried to get Handel to write the music, but the composer put it off for years.
“Handel had no reason to turn to this very weird piece of music. … ‘Really, I'm gonna use the conventions of Italian opera, and set some sacred texts that this non-professional musician has sent me?’ … It just made no sense. And that's why ‘Messiah’ is totally unlike anything else that Handel ever wrote or ever would write in the future. … But he turned to it in 1741 because he himself was at a low point in his career. … And he was on deadline to do a series of concerts, not in London, where the crowds had started to snipe at him a bit, but in Dublin. He was going to go to Dublin, restart his career. He needed something new. Jennens’ text was there on his desk, and he finally turned to it, beginning on August 22, 1741. … And it only took him 24 days. In 24 days, he had produced the thing that we now know as ‘Messiah.’”
As for Handel’s personality, he loved to have a good time and eat and drink, could swear in at least four languages, and was a fun person to be around, King describes. He only became religious during the last decade of his life.
But the “shadowy corner of the Enlightenment” happened when Handel wrote “Messiah,” King notes.
“It was a time of increasingly lethal war-making. It was a time when children were abandoned to their fate on the streets of London. The infant mortality rate in London in this period was 75%. … Looming over all of it was this great, deep political divide in society, over who the legitimate government was. … That debate — who is the legitimate king of England — would run through British society for decades to come, and only be settled in 1745 when there was an armed rebellion that sought to overthrow the existing king in Scotland.”
After doing all this research, does King hear “Messiah” differently now?
“I'm still deeply moved by it,” he responds. “Of course, every performance is different. You'll hear these massive ones with huge choirs and huge orchestras. And then you'll hear more [a] historically-informed performance, perhaps on period instruments. And you'll hear others that are done by a community choir or a sing-along. … This is arguably the greatest piece of participatory art ever created, and it is that for a reason. It's because we can all feel the relevance and timeliness of the words that Jennens wrote down and the notes that Handel created.”