A work of vivid social and cultural commentary, it functions also as an in-depth study of artistic creation ... Its melodramatic subtitle aside, King’s is a book rich with quirky characters living under strange circumstances: eccentric royals, visionary benefactors, financial collapses, theatrical triumphs and career meltdowns, legal shenanigans worthy of Dickens’s.
A splendid writer ... A meticulous researcher ... Fine and vivid sentences ... Jennens’s story is indeed fascinating ... The form of King’s book is like an intricate collage, gathering very different characters with the goal of concentrating on the surround, the context.
While at times academic in tone, the new book is thoroughly researched and ultimately compelling. King transforms Handel’s world into a place we can all recognize and understand as the foundation for our own.
King’s innovation in Every Valley is to chronicle the pain, shame, vexation and disappointment experienced by several people connected to the oratorio’s creation ... Affecting ... King’s account of Messiah and its troubled origins is fluently written and instructive, but on two points I find it unpersuasive ... Similarly amiss are Mr. King’s frequent and patronizing attempts to make Messiah acceptable to areligious readers.
King expertly juggles these individuals’ stories and a lot more besides. He paints a vivid picture of the cut-throat competition and perennial insecurity of London’s theatreland in the 1720s and 1730s.
To grasp the background of the Messiah’s creation, King interweaves the lives of several people directly or tangentially connected with it ... King accompanies these with analyses of Georgian life and thought, and the result is a densely textured history of the era and particularly of London, then on its way to becoming the largest city in Europe ... Alongside his account of Handel and Jennens, King places three stories of suffering and persecution ... The dense social background and intertwining strands of Every Valley sometimes take one far from Messiah itself, but they vividly evoke its origins, creation, and impact on eighteenth-century society, while also suggesting the message it conveys to our own.
Fascinating ... His book humanises the work’s exalted creators and demonstrates that the Messiah is not a pompous manifesto of faith but a troubled, often desperate quest for consolation.
