Every Valley: The Story of Handel’s Messiah review – hallelujah! A fresh take on the composer’s much-loved work | History books
[ad_1]
i i love the love chaos in handel’s operas, but i’ve always had my doubts about his oratorios, esp Messiah. First there is the compulsion of the boss to stand during the Alleluia chorus, only because a false tradition says that King George II did so in 1743; once you’re straightened out, you have to cycle through endless awkwardly misaccented iterations of “forever.” I am also puzzled by the oddities of the biblical text that are emphasized by musical repetition. The soprano rhapsodizes like a fetish about the “beautiful feet” of those who preach the gospel, and the tenor prophesies that “every valley will be exalted” by the savior: will salvation really recreate these sagging hollows in the landscape?
But after reading Charles King Every Valley: The Story of Handel’s MessiahI was converted. King doesn’t exactly explain the phrase he’s adopting for his title, but he points out that Martin Luther King often quoted it in his civil rights speeches, so I probably shouldn’t argue. More importantly, his book humanizes the sublime creators of the work and demonstrates that Messiah not a pompous manifesto of faith, but an anxious, often desperate search for solace. Despite these mournful hallelujahs, what drives King is the oratory’s prescription for overcoming personal misfortune.
King begins with librettist Charles Jennens, a wealthy but miserably hypochondriac book collector haunted by the suicide of a brother who slits his throat and then defenestrates himself in the Middle Temple for good measure. The biblical quotations that Jennens collected together for Handel had a secret psychological plot: they were “a confirmation of something that Jennens himself had always found difficult to believe.” Handel, too, as King sees him, is a worldly figure, an obese epicure “with jutting jaws and a chin that cascaded into his necktie.” His statue in Westminster Abbey shows him pointing a finger to the sky as he displays a page from Messiah a result that declares his faith in a redeemer; to us rises a trumpet ready to spread the godly message. But far from pleasing God, Handel had a diabolical temper and once silenced the uncooperative soprano Francesca Cuzzoni by telling her, “I am Beelzebub, the chief of the devils!” and threatening to throw her out of a window.
The soprano who appeared in the first performance of MessiahSusannah Cibber, was less boisterous in rehearsals than Cuzzoni, but even more striking off stage. She was trafficked by her husband, who sold her sexual services to a friend to cover his debts. Sneaky servants cut holes in the walls to watch her lover “put his private member between her legs”, and tabloids reported her sensational abduction from a country retreat by a group of armed bandits. After these outrages, her performance in Messiah was an attempt to revive her career and wash away her tarnished reputation: early audiences took her rendition of Handel’s solemn recitatives of Christ’s agony as a personal call for restitution, for she too had been “despised and rejected” and “acquainted with grief”. Equipped with this subtext, the oratorio becomes a kind of pleasantly insipid soap opera.
King, a professor of international relations at Washington, does a wonderful job of involving Handel in the conflicts and contradictions of a disordered society. He first traveled from Hanover to London in 1710, arriving in what appears to be a “failed state mired in revolution, political conspiracy, and murder.” Settled at the English court, he informally spied for his royal patrons at home in Germany while composing music to celebrate the local Hanoverians who had seized the crown from the Stuart dynasty in 1714: King claimed that the choir in Messiah which hails Christ as “Splendid, Counsellor, Prince of Peace,” was a coded tribute to George II. Handel’s colleague Thomas Arne, who happened to be the brother of Susanna Sieber, supplied the monarchy with its imperial anthem in “Rule, Britannia!”. Although the British here boast that they will “never ever be slaves”, they happily profited from the enslavement of others. Both Jennens and Handel were clients of the South Sea Company, whose “distinguished money-making enterprise,” as King noted, was the “forcible transportation of human beings” from Africa to the American colonies. Music, the most ethereal and spiritual of the arts, is darkly embedded in the realities of politics, commerce, and inhuman exploitation.
Still, King derives irreligious comfort from Messiah. He turned to it, he reveals, after a time of trouble — first, the painfully worrisome pandemic, then his wife’s serious illness, finally the terrible day in 2020 when, blocks from his house, Trump’s crazed vigilantes took over the Capitol of the USA. The “confused state of everything” left King longing for “healing light”; this was provided by Handel’s tenor, who, before praising the valleys, conveys God’s assurance by proclaiming, “Comfort ye, my people.” Listening to this at home on their antiquated record player, King and his wife burst into tears of gratitude.
After the recent election, they will need extra comfort. But on Messiahsays King, is a call “to live boldly in the face of disaster and defeat,” and I hope it will sustain him through the next four years of what the tenor rightly calls “lawlessness.”
after the promotion of the newsletter
[ad_2]
