Tempesta di Mare Book Club, an occasional series: Charles King’s Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s “Messiah”.
It’s not often a book about early music gets a New York Times “Notable Book” and a Book Review “Editors’ Choice” nod, along with a glowing review from no less than composer John Adams, and kudos from The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and more. Yet such was the happy fortune of Charles King’s Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s “Messiah” (Doubleday) when it appeared last fall.
And Every Valley just happens to center around Handel’s first version of Messiah, the one that premiered in Dublin in April 1742 and the one that Tempesta di Mare loves and is inspiring the performances this holiday season. Sweet Tempesta synergy!
Desperate Lives and Troubled Times
True, with a subtitle like that, Every Valley is not on its face a sweetness-and-light holiday read. It is, though. The troubled times of King’s reference were very real. But they engendered new kinds of ways to think about troubles and new solutions. King’s book weaves together life stories of about a dozen people from very different areas, all of whom made their mark on the era in their own ways, all of whose stories link in unsuspected ways to Messiah.
King is not a musicologist—in fact, he’s professor of international affairs and government at Georgetown—but he’s an accomplished writer of narrative non-fiction with a string of successful books behind him on subjects as far-ranging as Istanbul during the Second World War and pioneers of American cultural anthropology.
Still, a chronicle of Britain in the 1740’s is a challenge: it was an eye-rollingly complicated historical moment across all areas of society, politics and music. But King’s mastery of character, plot and sumptuously telling detail makes its story not just intelligible but compelling. Moving, in fact. Every Valley is a riveting read.
Ayuba Diallo is in it, the native Senegalese who became a cause célèbre in London in the 1730s and whose memoirs constitute very early slave memoir. So is Thomas Coram, whose tireless lifelong social betterment campaigns resulted in London’s Foundling Hospital.
Who’s Who behind Handel’s Messiah
But Every Valley’s principals include Handel’s royal patrons, George I and George II, unpopular German-born kings who barely condescended to learn English and, although Protestant, were considered by many to have usurped the throne. And James and Charles Stuart (a.k.a. Bonnie Prince Charlie, the lad who the song says was “born to be king” and who just two years after Messiah’s Dublin premiere went “over the sea to Skye”), the Catholic father and son pretenders who contrived to take it back.
There are the fierce partisans on both sides of the religion and succession issues who roiled English society for decades with rebellion, bloodshed and—as described by King—a perpetual, pervasive sense of unease.
One of those partisans, on the pretenders’ side, was the wealthy arts patron, littérateur, documented depressive and fervent Handel fan Charles Jennens (behind Handel’s back, he humble-bragged his friend as “The Prodigious”). It was Jennens who as a passion project pulled together a collection of scripture texts and presented it unsolicited to his hero for use as a libretto—notwithstanding that it lacks such seemingly essential elements for commercial theater as characters, story and plot.
There’s Handel himself, aging, unwell, so out-of-favor in London that he’d run to the hinterlands, so worried that he’d become irrelevant that he was willing to pull Jennens’ weird property out of the slush pile and gave it a chance. Not that big a chance, mind you: he gave himself less than a month to pull it together, only 24 days. But as it turns out, chance enough.
Enter: The Heroine
And then there’s Susannah Cibber, the Dublin Messiah’s contralto soloist. And in many ways, Cibber is the beating heart at the center of Every Valley.
Cibber had been a promising actress and singer, widely admired for her natural-seeming emotiveness on the stage. At age 19, she was Handel’s Deborah in his Jael. In her twenties, though, her career fell apart in the worst way possible for a woman in 1730’s London: with a sex scandal.
Susannah had been trapped in an arranged marriage with actor/promoter and, as it turned out, complete sleazebag Theophilus Cibber. Cibber robbed his talented young wife and then literally pimped her out to raise funds for his projects. When she tried to escape him, he kidnapped her and then, unbelievably, sued her for damages in a very public, very ugly trial. He even hired a peeping tom (yes, the man actually drilled a hole in the wainscoting to get a really good view of the goings-on that Theophilus himself had brought about) to provide evidence for his side in open court. He won. Everybody knew about it. London was agog. Susannah was destroyed.
She fled, of course, disappearing for some time and finally resurfacing two years later, as luck would have it, in Dublin where she and Handel reunited. He’d been having trouble finding good soloists (another story, and it involves Gulliver’s Travels) and hired his old Deborah immediately. He adapted the contralto solo he’d already written to fit her lower range. She triumphed.
And her success in Dublin gave her the chance for a truly magnificent comeback. Not only did she crawl out of the abyss of notoriety, but she worked her way up into the highest echelons of Georgian theater, frequently co-starring with the legendary David Garrick. When she died at a sadly young 52, she was buried in Westminster Abbey—right around the corner from her old friend and champion, Handel.
The way Susannah Cibber wrested triumph from disaster mirrors Charles King’s bigger picture of Messiah’s story and is an example of why he feels it continues to reach so poignantly to audiences now. In his introduction, he talks about how he was drawn to Messiah during the worst months of the Covid pandemic. It spoke to him about hope and the belief that wrongs can be righted, that darkness and chaos can be allayed, that, as Messiah’s first aria, selected by Jennens from Isaiah, puts it:
Every Valley shall be exalted, and every Mountain and Hill shall be made low, the Crooked straight, and the rough Places plain.
The arch is only remaining detail of Neal’s Music Hall; National Library of Ireland; Picryl.
The climax of Every Valley is, naturally, the Dublin premiere. But the climax of the climax is when in Messiah’s Part II, Susannah Cibber finally stepped forward from the chorus. She must without doubt have been excruciatingly aware of everybody’s eye on her, excruciatingly aware of what was on everybody’s mind. But she used it, throwing herself into “He was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief,” making the heart-wrenching aria her own. And everybody else’s, too.
By the way, when she went back to London, she sued the bejasus out of Theophilus.
So much good storytelling, it’s no wonder that Hollywood has discovered Charles King. His book about Istanbul inspired two seasons of the Netflix series Midnight at the Pera Palace (2022-’24). And so, of course, an Every Valley movie is already in development, adapted for the screen by Christopher Hampton (Les Liaisons Dangereuses play and Glenn Close movie, the Atonement and The Father movies).
What do you think? Gary Oldman for Handel? But who for Susannah Cibber? Hmmm. It’s a great part…
Anne Schuster Hunter is a writer and art historian living in Philadelphia, www.anneschusterhunter.com.
