Book Review: Every Valley

Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s Messiah by Charles King (Doubleday, 2024).

Every Valley was both less and more than I expected. What I expected was a book focused on George Frideric Handel and the circle around him during the time he was composing his most famous and beloved oratorio. Charles King’s new book is not that. Rather, it’s a history of an entire period, touching on everything from battles over royal succession to the slave trade to high infant mortality rates in the turbulent Georgian era. Instead of just the story of Handel’s Messiah, it aims to give us the story of the times that produced it, and show us how it was the perfect response to those times—and to our time as well.

As King explains in his introduction, the Enlightenment period we now think of as an “age of reason” was, for the vast majority of people, a period of just as much tension, conflict, and difficulty as any other period. The ideas that it’s known for took a while to circulate and take effect; they didn’t make a lot of difference in the day-to-day life of the 1700s, at least not right away. Thus, King tells us, “The Enlightenment as most people actually experienced it had fewer wigs and masked balls than we might imagine today, and far more pain and muddling through.”

As a result, he goes on to write, “The truly pressing theme in their art, music, theater, philosophy, and theology was not, in fact, the triumph of rationality. It was instead how to manage catastrophe.”

This sobering but, yes, enlightening introduction sets the tone for the world, the lives, and the music we’re about to explore. It’s a lot to tackle in one book, but King is consistently compelling as he takes us through multiple decades and continents, here and there zeroing in a few particular figures of interest.

There’s the philanthropist whose charitable schemes were always ineffective—until they weren’t. There’s the educated Muslim man, kidnapped and sold into slavery, who ended up an unlikely celebrity. There’s the singer-actress with a past so salacious I can’t believe it’s never been made into a really juicy movie. There’s the depressed gentleman who fanboyed Handel to an extent we might consider unhealthy, but who actually managed to turn his fanboying into something constructive and meaningful. And of course there’s Handel himself, navigating his way through a rapidly changing foreign society where he was adored one moment and forgotten the next. All these figures and more would have their parts to play in the story of the Messiah.

But, sadly, King George II probably was not actually at the work’s London premiere and so did not start the tradition of standing up for the “Hallelujah Chorus.” Charles King is not afraid to debunk some of our best-known stories about Handel’s great work, but he has so many new, interesting, and well-researched stories to tell us that it doesn’t really matter. We’re given fresh insight on why the Messiah has been so significant to so many generations of listeners. Part of the reason, in King’s telling, is simply that the story it tells us through its glorious music resonates with everyone who has ever suffered—which is to say, everyone who has ever lived.

“It took a universe of pain,” he observes, “to make a musical monument to hope.” His book is a welcome reminder that, however dark things may appear, the kind of hope offered by Handel’s Messiah is worth trusting.

(Cover image copyright Doubleday. Thanks to NetGalley for the advance review copy. All quotations have been checked in the published version.)

Book Links:

Every Valley on Amazon
Every Valley on Bookshop

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Note: I’ll be taking Christmas and New Year’s off, and then extending my break so that I can focus on finishing my book manuscript. I’ll miss you all and hope you enjoy your holidays (and that you get a lot of reading done). See you in February!