Every Valley: The Story of Handel’s Messiah review – hallelujah! A fresh take on the composer’s much-loved work

By revealing the murky circumstances in which it was created, Charles King’s fascinating history of the oratorio shows it in a new light

I love the amorous mayhem of Handel’s operas, but have always had my doubts about his oratorios, especially the Messiah. First there’s the bossy compulsion to stand during the “Hallelujah” chorus, just because a spurious tradition says that King George II did so in 1743; once hoisted upright, you have to fidget through endless awkwardly mis-accentuated iterations of “for ever and ever”. I’m also puzzled by the quirks of the biblical text, which are underlined by musical repetition. The soprano rhapsodises like a fetishist about the “beautiful feet” of those who preach the gospel, and the tenor prophesies that “every valley shall be exalted” by the saviour: will salvation really reflate those sagging hollows in the landscape?

But after reading Charles King’s Every Valley: The Story of Handel’s Messiah, I have been converted. King doesn’t exactly explicate the phrase he takes for his title, but he points out that Martin Luther King often quoted it in his orations about civil rights, so I probably shouldn’t quibble. More importantly, his book humanises the work’s exalted creators and demonstrates that the Messiah is not a pompous manifesto of faith but a troubled, often desperate quest for consolation. Despite those hectoring hallelujahs, what moves King is the oratorio’s prescription for overcoming personal misery.

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