The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel's Messiah
July 22, 2024
The beloved Christmastime oratorio, with its sublime “Hallelujah Chorus,” was the cry of a wretched world yearning for enlightenment, according to this scattershot study. King (Gods of the Upper Air), a professor of international affairs at Georgetown University, recaps the career of Georg Frideric Handel (1685–1759), the German-born musician who became Britain’s court composer and wrote the music for the Messiah in 1741. Though Handel enjoyed acclaim, his masterpiece was built by “a time, place, and... individuals” enmeshed in the oratorio’s themes of suffering, justice, and redemption, King posits. Among those profiled are Susannah Cibber, a lead singer at Messiah’s premiere, whose love affair with an aristocrat led to a scandalous court case; Charles Jennens, the author of the oratorio’s biblical libretto; and Ayuba Diallo, an African man who was kidnapped, sold into bondage, and rescued by Englishmen. Though Diallo had no direct connection to Messiah, his story casts a light on how slavery underpinned artistic organizations such as the Royal Academy of Music (Handel’s employer), many of whose investors had stock in slave trading companies. Unfortunately, King doesn’t always convincingly connect his character sketches back to the oratorio, which makes his central insight (“It took a universe of pain to make a musical monument to hope”) feel somewhat forced. Despite the intriguing historical trivia, this doesn’t quite hang together.
September 1, 2024
King (international affairs and government, Georgetown Univ.; Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century) offers up the best kind of music lovers' book. It's like a romp through the teeming literary and musical world of mid-18th-century London as George Frideric Handel, already famous, seeks more fortune in England. Eccentric Englishman Charles Jennens supplies Handel with texts for his operas, but by the end of the 1730s, Italianate operas were falling out of fashion. Then Jennens sends Handel a new text, an oratorio drawn wholly from the words of the Scriptures: a story of hope and resurrection, a message that Jennens feels the world sorely needs during those unsettled times. Out of their fractious collaboration comes the most often performed vocal work in the classical corpus: the Messiah. In 2023, there were more than 200 Messiah concerts in the United States alone. First performed in 1741, its path to success was uncertain until 1750, when the composer conducted it for the Foundling Hospital benefit in London. By the time of his death, nine years later, he had performed it 36 times. VERDICT King loves his music and knows his history. The result is a lively, informative book on the birth and nurture of a classic.--David Keymer
Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
Starred review from November 1, 2024
A ringing history of George Frideric Handel'sMessiah and its turbulent birth. Composed for Easter but long associated instead with Christmas, theMessiah is one of the world's most widely performed oratory pieces: As King writes, there were some 200 performances in the United States in 2023, many of them mass audience singalongs. His wide-ranging history begins not with Handel but with the eccentric Englishman Charles Jennens, whose "smallest agitations could balloon into obsessions." A bibliophile and independent scholar with a huge library, Jennens made one such obsessive project out of what he called his "Scripture Collection," a massive gathering of biblical quotations and his own notes that he delivered to Handel, "approaching sixty and edging toward the final stage of his career," who would not live to see most of the fame that would come from his composition. King is a professor of international relations at Georgetown, but he writes with a musicologist's insight into Handel's methods. Closer to his own discipline, King writes winningly of the history surrounding Handel's life and times; of his effectively fleeing the Hanover court where he was employed only to have that court become the rulers of Britain, where he had decamped; of the support of the unfortunate Queen Anne, who "seemed to oscillate between despair and rage," an admirer of Handel's work who put him on the path to wealth; of the disruptions of larger events such as the Jacobite Rebellion and the War of the Austrian Succession; and much more. Ever present onstage is Handel, a fantastically handsome young man grown obese in middle age ("He was known for overindulgence, even among the gentlemanly set that expected a full table and free--flowing port"). In a long but fascinating aside, King also traces Handel's unexpected financial involvement in the slave trade. A swiftly moving, constantly engaging portrait of a beloved masterpiece.
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