Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel's Messiah

The untold story of the eighteenth-century men and women behind the making of Handel's Messiah, one of the world's most beloved works of classical music, from a New York Times bestselling historian and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. 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, a time of astonishing creativity but also of war, enslavement, social polarization, and conflicts over everything from the legitimacy of government to the meaning of truth. Contrary to popular belief, the Messiah was not the product of a lone genius scribbling furiously on a musical staff. It came about because of 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; an African Muslim man held captive in the American colonies; and Handel himself, composer to kings but, at midlife, in ill health and straining to keep an audience's attention.