Time and place affect even the greatest works of art. The serendipitous composition of the music for George Frideric Handel’s most famous work has been told many times, but maybe never so engagingly as in “Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s ‘Messiah.’” Charles King masterfully interlocks the stories of the people and events that inspired and influenced the creation of Handel’s glorious “Messiah.
” The German-born composer first came to London in 1710 at the age of 25 but soon adopted England as his own, living and working there until the end of his long, productive life in 1759. While Handel is the star of “Every Valley” (the title comes from the oratorio’s first song, “Every Valley shall be exalted, and every Mountain and Hill made low, the Crooked straight, and the rough Places plain”), the supporting role played by the irascible librettist Charles Jennens, a wealthy political renegade, occasionally upstages him. King appreciatively recounts the casualness with which Handel took on grand projects, including the libretto by Jennens, which in 1741 Handel had had in his possession for months before deciding, during an engagement in Dublin, to give it a whirl.
Jennens, meanwhile, had no idea that Handel had, in a matter of about three weeks, fashioned the entire oratorio in his usual adroit way of recomposing airs from his own trove of Italian operas and bringing to life a bundle of new songs and choruses. Despite .
