The Weirdest Hit in History

Among the pedestaled titans of Western music, George Frideric Handel was the first composer whose work not only quickly became celebrated in his own time but has been heralded ever since. Before Handel, no real “repertoire” of enduring music had existed. Composers were considered craftsmen in an evanescent art, their creations regularly superseded by fresher work. Most music that got performed was relatively new. Claudio Monteverdi, the preeminent European composer of the early 17th century, was largely forgotten within decades of his death, in 1643. Johann Sebastian Bach amounted to hardly more than a cult figure after he died, in 1750, his major works unplayed well into the next century.

When Handel died, at 74 in 1759, he was already well fortified for posterity. A celebrity since his 20s, he had been the subject of grand portraits and was depicted as Orpheus in a 1738 statue in London’s Vauxhall Gardens. Whereas Bach earned an unmarked grave in Leipzig and one obituary four years after he died, Handel was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Handel stands apart in another way from the musical giants who have since been rediscovered and enshrined: Each of them is renowned for an array of often-performed pieces. His stature is owed above all to a single work—the oratorio Messiah. Among the towering masterpieces of Western music, the Messiah occupies a distinctive place: It is familiar to more people than any other work of its kind. Bach’s B Minor Mass and St. Matthew Passion and Monteverdi’s Vespers are comparable among supreme choral pieces, but they aren’t performed at your church or the high school down the street. The Messiah often is, trotted out during the Christmas season by amateur and professional choruses around the globe. A fair percentage of the world probably knows the “Hallelujah” chorus well enough to sing along.

[Arthur C. Brooks: Why music really does make you happier]

This skewed acclaim is unfair to Handel, who was as brilliantly prolific as any composer who ever lived. But it is also a tribute to the overwhelming effect of the Messiah, which is a feat of sustained inspiration arguably unsurpassed in the canon of Western classical music. “Comfort ye, comfort ye my People,” the libretto opens, pulling us in at the beginning, its flow of compelling melody and stirring choruses enthralling us for the next two hours and leaving us singularly exalted.

Reasons for the Messiah’s enduring power are manifold, though certainly they begin with the music itself, which manages to join the lofty and the populist, as does all of Handel’s work. In Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s Messiah, Charles King takes his cue from the oratorio’s ability to convey, era after era, “a transporting sense that something cosmic and profound was at stake, even when the cares of this world happened to intrude.” King, who embarked on the book during the pandemic, found renewed comfort in the Messiah’s arc, especially its message of hope in difficult times, starting with those first words: “Comfort ye.” He also felt moved to recover “the Messiah’s sheer weirdness” by exploring its origins in the murkier currents of what is remembered as the age of reason.

King, a professor of international affairs and government at Georgetown University and a splendid writer, has made a specialty of popular cultural history. A meticulous researcher, he delivers surprises, and his prologue is one of them:

Some days he would wander the manor house in a blank stupor, barely able to lift a foot … He was so afraid of the cold that he lay under six blankets in winter and four in summer. He never married, fathered no children, and made distant enemies more readily than close friends.

These fine and vivid sentences are not, as the reader expects, about Handel. They are about his exquisitely odd and obsessive acolyte, Charles Jennens, the Messiah’s librettist, a figure few listeners are aware of.

King proceeds to relay more about Jennens’s inner life and creative struggles than about Handel’s, of which firsthand reports are skimpy. Jennens’s story is indeed fascinating. A rich squire and crabbily conservative political dissident, he was “emotionally tormented,” but still managed to be a significant art collector, Shakespeare scholar, and patron of music. King’s resurrection of Jennens’s crucial role, laboring in private over a libretto that he hoped would inspire “the Prodigious” (as he called Handel) to new musical heights, helps illuminate how unusual Handel’s oratorio was and remains.

Here is the “weirdness” that King emphasizes. An oratorio is essentially an unstaged opera, a story told in music. The Messiah is a collection of gnomic scriptural passages that are prophetic in import but offer no story at all. “It has nothing that could be called a plot,” King observes. “Its form is more like that of a found poem, built from Bible verses that have been rearranged and, here and there, edited” by a depressive man struggling to find his way toward hope and a return to a pre-Enlightenment vision of religion. Jennens, for whom faith and kingship were imbued with mystery, endorsed the legitimacy of the deposed Stuart monarchy and rejected the rational Deist perspective. For his part, Handel—a generally agreeable though fiercely proud man, witty and gluttonous and gouty, and given to polylingual swearing—was probably indifferent to such political and sectarian matters. But he knew a good librettist when he saw one.

The form of King’s book is like an intricate collage, gathering very different characters with the goal of concentrating on the surround, the context. Not all of the figures are directly connected to Handel, and at times King’s deep background verges on the tangential. But a similar storyline links his cast of characters: They are coping with dire predicaments (of widely varying sorts), in a time of political flux and fear, all of them managing to carry on—a spirit of perseverance that runs through the Messiah.

For example, King delves at length into the outlandish marital travails of the contralto Susannah Cibber, whom Handel turned to as he rounded up singers for the Messiah premiere, in 1742 in Dublin, a propitious convergence for both. We learn, as a scandalized public did, all about her husband’s outrageous abusiveness, her lover’s and family’s efforts to protect her, the two lawsuits her husband filed against the lover (a creditor whom he’d initially welcomed into a ménage à trois). Cibber’s well-known suffering lent her musical lamentations in the oratorio a raw power—“He was despised and rejected of Men,” she sang, “a Man of Sorrows, and acquainted with Grief”—for a stunned opening-night audience and in many of her performances after.

Other lives and issues are more peripherally entangled in King’s tale of the Messiah’s emergence. A distressing chapter on the British slave trade, to which Handel had a minor financial connection, features an African Muslim named Ayuba Diallo who ends up enslaved in Maryland. Against all odds, he ultimately succeeds in returning to Bundu, in West Africa. His episodic journey includes an interlude in London, where “it would not have been unusual to see Diallo walking past Jennens’s townhouse in Queen Square”—though who knows if the two ever met. Several times in his absorbing narratives, King reaches for these sorts of indirect associations.

And what about Handel’s evolution, personal and musical? After all, he is the composer who made the Messiah, even if he didn’t do it alone, or have the originating idea for it. Handel sometimes gets a bit lost along the way in Every Valley. After a well-stocked chapter about the oratorio and its premiere, King understandably—he isn’t a musician or musicologist—doesn’t devote much space to exploring the particulars of Handel’s style and reputation, or the special place of the Messiah in his work as a whole.

The compositions that Handel churned out at a remarkable rate were simultaneously demand-driven and distinctive, convention-bound and transcendent. Working within the musical language of his time, he could conjure any effect: dancingly energetic, profound, aristocratic, folksy, eerie, heart-filling, comic. He could do it all, and he had an uncanny sense of how to grab an audience. (His effervescent Water Music is a familiar example.) Few could work faster; that Handel wrote the Messiah in 24 days has long stirred talk of divine inspiration, though in fact he was known to turn out a three-hour opera in three weeks. Some have speculated that he was manic-depressive and wrote when he was manic. Indisputably, his speed was abetted by liberal borrowing from his own work and generous pilfering from other composers’ (not illegal in pre-copyright times, but still regarded as a bit tacky). Four Messiah choruses are lifted from his earlier pieces, none of them sacred. About his plagiarisms, Handel was unapologetic, saying more or less that those people didn’t know what to do with their stuff.

He wasn’t wrong: Handel the enthusiastic copier was also a pioneer in developing the English oratorio. Born in Halle, Germany, in 1685, he settled in England in 1712 and concentrated on the genre of Italian opera seria, a London craze whose popularity later faded. Facing bankruptcy by the 1730s, Handel revived his career by turning from seria—courtly entertainment stuffed with mannered drama—to the pared-down English oratorio. Making use of his operatic skills and dramatic instincts, he transfigured this new musical genre with results that most choral composers you could name—Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms—are manifestly indebted to. By contrast, the artificiality of his operas, the major part of his output, has kept them from becoming repertoire staples.

[From the November 1946 issue: Handel]

In all of his work, Handel was among the greatest, most irresistible of tunesmiths. Like Bach, he believed in a union of word, meaning, and music. To that end, Bach often pursued esoteric symbolism and numerology, with vocal lines crossing in the music when Christ is mentioned, and the like. Handel wanted his illustration to be more on the sleeve. “Their land brought forth frogs,” the soprano sings in his oratorio Israel in Egypt, to an accompaniment that is hopping, hopping, hopping. When the chorus proclaims, “There came all manner of flies,” the strings break out in buzzing.

In those places, Handel plays the plagues of Egypt for laughs, but he does the same kind of thing in earnest in the Messiah. “Every Valley shall be exalted,” the tenor sings in a robustly rising line, which sinks for “and every Mountain and Hill made low.” Then “the Crooked” (jagged line), “straight” (held note), “and the rough Places” (jagged again), “plain” (long held note). Each word and image of the text is painted like this.

Meanwhile, you hear Handel lifting the music to mighty climaxes over and over, and it never gets old.

“For unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given,” the chorus sings, tossing that bit back and forth in dancing counterpoint. Momentum begins to gather, the notes climbing, the rhythm bouncing us joyously along: “And the Government shall be upon his Shoulder; and his Name shall be called.” Then we arrive at spine-tingling proclamations: “Wonderful, Counsellor, The Mighty God, The Everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace,” as strings race ecstatically above. What Beethoven, who considered Handel his only musical superior, particularly admired was his ability to get dazzling effects with simple means. As both composers knew, simple is hard.

Among the possibly apocryphal stories about Handel, one has him commenting to his servant, upon finishing the “Hallelujah” chorus, “I did think I did see all Heaven before me, and the great God Himself seated on His throne, with His company of Angels.” In fact, nothing indicates that he considered the Messiah his magnum opus at the time, or expected that this piece—with its grandeur, its gravitas, its power to be emotionally moving at nearly every moment—would be his ticket to immortality. Famous though he was, Handel was still a jobbing composer, and composers had never been endowed with an immortal aura.

[From the April 1885 issue: Handel 1685–1885]

Yet he was eager to share an awestruck response to the Dublin premiere. As King reports, Handel wrote a letter a few months after the event, enclosing an Irish bishop’s verdict: “The whole is beyond any thing I had a notion of till I Read and heard it,” the cleric reported. “It seems to be a Species of Musick different from any other.”

The letter was to Jennens, the Messiah’s librettist. Handel wanted him to know “how well Your Messiah was received in that Country.” One of the most inspired composers of all time might have been aware, in some sense, that he had transcended himself, but he could not claim to understand the alchemy that had worked this wonder. In the spirit of his oratorio, the goal of his letter to Jennens seems to have been not to blow his own horn but to give comfort to his companion in the endeavor.

*Lead image credit: Illustration by Paul Spella. Sources: Heritage Images / Getty; Photo12 / UIG / Getty; Geoffrey Clements / Corbis / VCG / Getty; Print Collector / Getty; Lebrecht Music & Arts / Alamy; CBW / Alamy; Album / Alamy.

This article appears in the December 2024 print edition with the headline “The Weirdest Hit in History.”