Every valley The desperate lives and troubled times that made Handel's Messiah

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. (Oct.)

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