His music was inseparable from a cause as well as a moral sensibility: helping indigent children and knowing the deep tangibility of hope. After the London premiere of the Messiah in 1743, Handel is supposed to have told a noble patron, “My Lord … I should be sorry if I only entertained [an audience]; I wished to make them better.” [loc. 4459]
The American edition's subtitle, 'The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s Messiah', gives an idea of King's broad approach. Instead of focussing only on Handel, King examines the circumstances surrounding the composition of Messiah, and the broader social context into which it was born. He shows us that the Enlightenment was as much 'a period of profound anxiety about improving the world' as a glorious revolution of political, social, intellectual and cultural life.
The book opens with Charles Jennens, whose lifelong depression inspired him to produce a libretto that focussed on hope and faith. King moves on to Handel and his early years, when he was the handsome and gifted toast of European musical society. Then there's Susannah Cibber, a singer with a scandalous history of her own -- her husband was not only abusive but insisted that she sleep with another man as a way of paying off his debts -- who sang the contralto role in the Dublin premiere of Messiah. Also featuring is Jonathan Swift, Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, who prohibited church musicians from participating in Handel's composition, but changed his mind when he learnt that proceeds from the performance would be used for worthy causes, such as paying off the debts of imprisoned paupers.
That philanthropic urge contrasts with the fact that 'the era’s art, wealth, and power all rested on a common source --enslavement -- an abstract word for wrecked families and shattered fortunes' [loc. 584]. Both Jennens and Handel were clients of the South Sea Company, which profitted from the transatlantic slave trade. As counterpoint, King explores the history of Thomas Coram, a philanthropic sea-captain who founded the Hospital for the Maintenance and Education of Exposed and Deserted Young Children, usually known as the Foundling Hospital. Coram's Hospital benefitted immensely from Messiah, receiving over £7,000 from performances. King also recounts the story of Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, a Muslim prince enslaved in Senegambia, sent to America, and finally freed. I'm not altogether clear on Diallo's connection with Handel, other than as an example of the rise of philanthropy and the abolition movement...
And of course King explores the life of Handel himself, from his glorious Baroque operas to the piety of his later years, when he was afflicted by failing eyesight and paralysis. King gives a good account of the process of composition, and the sensibility that underlaid it. His own experience of Messiah -- listening to 'the earliest recorded full performance... from 1927, with Sir Thomas Beecham conducting' in the first weeks of the Covid pandemic, and bursting into tears -- is a poignant introduction to a book about misery and hope.
...an illuminated pathway back to a moment when empire, faith, terror, and hope were wound together in one extraordinary life. [loc. 4672]
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