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Every Valley
- The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel's Messiah
- Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson
- Length: 10 hrs and 46 mins
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Publisher's Summary
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE • From New York Times bestselling historian and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Charles King, the moving untold story of the eighteenth-century men and women behind the making of Handel’s Messiah
"A delicious history of music, power, love, genius, royalty and adventure."—Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of The World
"A book of power and glory, brimming with emotion and dazzling in its reach."—Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Cleopatra and The Revolutionary
George Frideric Handel’s Messiah is arguably the greatest piece of participatory art ever created. Adored by millions, it is performed each year by renowned choirs and orchestras, as well as by audiences singing along with the words on their cell phones.
But this work of triumphant joy was born in a worried age. Britain in the early Enlightenment was a place of astonishing creativity but also the seat of an empire mired in war, enslavement, and conflicts over everything from the legitimacy of government to the meaning of truth. Against this turbulent background, prize-winning author Charles King has crafted a cinematic drama of the troubled lives that shaped a masterpiece of hope.
Every Valley presents a depressive dissenter stirred to action by an ancient prophecy; an actress plagued by an abusive husband and public scorn; an Atlantic sea captain and penniless philanthropist; and an African Muslim man held captive in the American colonies and hatching a dangerous plan for getting back home. At center stage is Handel himself, composer to kings but, at midlife, in ill health and straining to keep an audience’s attention. Set amid royal intrigue, theater scandals, and political conspiracy, Every Valley is entertaining, inspiring, unforgettable.
What the critics say
“A work of vivid social and cultural commentary, it functions also as an in-depth study of artistic creation, how ‘Messiah’ came to be, but also of the unstoppable spigot that was Handel’s musical imagination.”—John Adams, The New York Times Book Review
“[C]ompelling. King transforms Handel's world into a place we can all recognize and understand as the foundation for our own.”—The Washington Post
“Smartly written . . . In explaining the social and biographical background of the story of Messiah, King brings the masterpiece to life—and keeps it alive."—The Washington Examiner