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Handel's Messiah: the scandalous birth of a classical masterpiece
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Handel's Messiah is one of the most beloved masterpieces in classical music – Charles King explains how its birth was shaped by revolution, redemption, and unexpected alliances
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- [00:01]
Charles King
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Eleanor Evans
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Charles King
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- [01:36]
Eleanor Evans
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- [01:39]
Charles King
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- [02:05]
Eleanor Evans
Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine. Handel's Messiah is one of the most enduringly popular pieces of classical music, but its origins are far more complex than we might assume. Rather than springing from the mind of a lone genius, the story of this 18th century masterpiece is woven from deeply personal tales of scandal and redemption set against a background of political tumult. In this episode, Eleanor Evans is joined by Professor Charles King, the author of Every the Story of Handel's Messiah, to reveal the history behind the soaring Choruses. Charles, could you introduce for our listeners a sense of the scale and the scope of Handel's Messiah in Western music and its position today?
- [02:59]
Charles King
Well, there's really nothing else like it because it's in some ways the only piece in the classical canon that has never been revived. You know, since the. Since the first performance in 1742, it's been a near constant performance in the United States at Carnegie hall. They're doing the 150th consecutive annual performance of this. And of course, it's been in performance much more intense and for longer in other parts of the. Parts of the world, obviously. But given how powerful it is and how central it is, particularly to the holiday season, it's a very strange piece of music. You know, it's composed entirely of Bible verses. None of them are in the biblical order, however, so they're all rearranged. Yet it's set to the conventions of Italian opera through the form that we know as oratorio, which is essentially a scaled down version of an opera without the sets and the costumes. So it's a bit of a mystery, actually, how this supremely bizarre piece of classical music came to be so central to our civilization, in a way, but also so central to a very particular holiday season.
- [04:05]
Eleanor Evans
And so to pick up on the man himself, Handel, who is so entwined with this work, I think it's fair to say right off the bat that you really blast this idea of him as a lone genius out of the water with this book. Can we pick up on this idea and hear from you on that?
- [04:19]
Charles King
Yeah, you know, I think because of how powerful Messiah is. And, you know, you go to. To virtually any performance and you'll. You look around the room and somebody will have tears in their eyes or there'll be somebody weeping a few rows away. And of course, everyone stands by convention at the Hallelujah Chorus. So it's a thing that we feel this great sense of connection to. It's participatory. I mean, we might even call it the. The kind of greatest piece of participatory art ever created. And so it's always seemed to me a bit of a betrayal to believe that that form of art came solely from the mind of this, you know, lone genius locked in a room somewhere. And in 24 days, composing in a sort of fit of inspiration this, this music. Handel did compose it in 24 days, as it turns out, but that was not particularly unusual for him as a composer. And what I wanted to do in every valley was really tell a Story about the creation of this monumental work of art that was true to its history, meaning a thing that it took an entire era to create an entire community of individuals, to create many of them at the lowest point of their lives and to kind of break down the idea that this sprang from a single man's brain or heart. We want it to be a kind of heroic story. But to me, the real heroism lies in the way in which a whole set of very broken and troubled individuals ended up creating, you know, arguably our greatest monument to the possibility of hope.
- [05:53]
Eleanor Evans
So these are some of the stories we're going to get into today. And that's a great primer for what's to come. Before we get into the meat of this messy birth for this, this piece of art, I wanted to ask about what brought you to this project, particularly.
- [06:07]
Charles King
My wife and I live in Washington, D.C. we actually live on Capitol Hill. And like many people in the middle of COVID and the Black Lives Matter protests here in United states. And then January 6th, which was just the insurrection that was six blocks from our home. We were trying to sort of feel better about the state of the world in a way. And some years ago, I had purchased for my wife Maggie, who's a singer and a writer herself, Victrola, one of these old wind up record players. And like all of us, we were trying to figure out, well, what kind of magic is going to work in this moment of disease and turmoil to kind of right the world? And I had this idea that if I could find the oldest recording of Handel's Messiah, which is music that we have loved over the years, and kind of played it on this ancient acoustic device, that that would somehow be, you know, kind of big magic and help to sort of clear the air somehow. And I did what any of us would do, of course. I went on ebay to see if I could find such a thing. And it turns out there was a seller in London who shipped it to our home in Washington. And it was really like someone had cleared out their maiden aunt's est. It was just this old collection of records in a box, many of them broken by the time they arrived. But Messiah was intact in its original kind of buckram cover. And it was Sir Thomas Beecham conducting the BBC Chorus in Westminster Hall. And we put it on the record player. And as soon as those first strains came out, we both burst into tears. And I thought, first of all, that's exactly what we kind of needed in this moment, especially with those first words. You know, every performance begins with the words comfort ye which itself, its own kind of little miracle to us from the 1740s all the way to today. And so I wanted to follow that emotion, that line of thought back to why someone would begin this piece of music in that way. And what were the times that gave rise to a work of art, the essence of which is the attempt to provide some comfort to its listeners.
- [08:19]
Eleanor Evans
That's such a lovely anecdote to illustrate the power and the longevity of this art. I wonder if we can go to Handel time in Italy and this quest for musical development that set him on this path to be creating this sort of art.
- [08:32]
Charles King
Well, you know, Handel was not deposited into a family of musicians. I mean, very much unlike his exact contemporary Bach, who very much was. But Handel became a musician in some ways against the better designs of his father, who was a barber surgeon, as he was called in the late 17th century. He was the kind of person who would not only serve the local notables, but would work as a public health official, sealing off neighborhoods during typhus or plague epidemics. But Handel, who really should have gone into one of the professions, you know, studied law or something like that and still sort of stair stepped the family, he was just captivated by music. I mean, he was one of these kids who you just, you know, couldn't keep away from a sound making device in some way. And his father eventually arranged for him to have organ lessons with the, with a local organist in Halle, what would later become Germany, where he was born. But then he really, after spending time there and in Hamburg as a pit musician in the local, local theater, took off to Italy, which at the time, in the very late 17th, early 18th century, you know, if you were at all interested in music, that was the place you went because the Italians were inventing all of the modern forms that we now know, sonatas, cantatas and concertos and so forth. I mean, it tells us something about that history that we all break into pigeon Italian when we're talking about music. It's because, you know, they, they invented the sonic structure that we now think of as obvious. Even what a song sounds like, you know, a, that might have a verse and a chorus and then repeat, kind of go back to the top. All of this was this really exciting musical world that Handel was living in. We now call it the Baroque. But of course no one knew they were living in the Baroque era at the time. And that label even was, you know, a later term that musicians applied to this earlier kind of experimental and unruly and raw era of music. And so we should think of Handel's musical education there as being, you know, much edgier, much more punk in a way, than we might think of baroque music today with, you know, powdered wigs and frilly cuffs. It was exciting and magnetic and it was a place where he really passed his musical apprenticeship before finally moving to London.
- [10:49]
Eleanor Evans
So he's in this edgy world of music. I wanted to pick up on the patronage aspect as well, because. Is it fair to say this is also why he's cutting his teeth in the business aspect of being a musician?
- [10:58]
Charles King
Absolutely right. Because, you know, he does not come from wealth. And so he has to understand how you make a living as a working musician. He has to understand how audiences react to the music that he's creating. He has to sort of balance popular acclaim and noble patronage. So. And he has to understand the sort of very basic things. How do you pay musicians, how do you pay singers, or where do you find choristers? If you have a kind of larger work, how do you manage the kind of interpersonal relationships in any musical ensemble? That's what he's picking up. And that will go on to serve him extremely well later on, because the musician Handel becomes is very public facing. He becomes Britain's most important public composer, not only because of the work that he's composing for the Royal Court, but also because he's really a theater musician. And we have to understand that as we, you know, in understanding what Messiah would become even, and the particular technique that he's using to influence an audience, he's much more like a contemporary West End or Broadway composer. And once you begin to see Handel in that way, I think you come to a deeper understanding of why he has lasted as a composer.
- [12:17]
Eleanor Evans
So he's cutting his teeth. We followed him to London, to England. Your book gives us a sense of London as this sprawling world. The development of early theatre, the development of all of this different patronage, of political machinations. One bit of context I think we should get in early on is. Is Handel's place in the Hanoverian succession. I wonder if we can sort of zoom out a bit and you can give our listeners a sense of that.
- [12:41]
Charles King
Yeah, well, this is, of course, one of the. Not only the great accidents of history, but the great accidents of musical history in that Handel, after spending time in Italy and cutting his musical teeth there, he moves back for a time to what will become Germany, in part for family reasons. I mean, his mother is still there, she's a widow by this stage. Handel's earliest biographer said that she was very, very ancient by this time. She was 50 years old, as it turns out. But he wanted to really be closer to his family. And he had the opportunity to serve as essentially the court composer to a local noble family, the Dukes of Braunschweig Luneburg. And they were prominent within the Holy Roman Empire. The duke was one of the electors of the Holy Roman Emperor. So he was at the absolute top of the political system that Handel came from because of a whole series of unexpected dynastic machinations. Of course, the Dukes of Braunschweig Lindeburg become the Hanoverians, become the successors to the British throne. And so in 1714, when George I takes power as king, he brings along his court composer. Now, Handel had already been in London a little bit before that, but he's now established as not only composer to the court, but a person who is at the center of the developing, what will later call the West End, this burgeoning theater world that is really booming in this moment in part because of the popularity of Italian opera. And that is something that Handel has become a great expert on already in Italy. He's made a name for himself. He's already well known to wealthy patrons in London who've been making the circuit of the Italian opera houses. And so from 1714 on, Handel is extremely well placed to be very successful.
- [14:32]
Eleanor Evans
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- [15:10]
Charles King
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- [16:09]
Eleanor Evans
Okay, well, let's leave Handel's story there for just a moment, and we obviously will be returning to it, but we've said already that this isn't just Handel's story. So can we turn to Charles Jennings?
- [16:20]
Charles King
So Charles Jennings is a member of one of the wealthiest families in Britain at the time. They had made their fortune in the iron trade at the beginning of what will later become the Industrial Revolution. They owned properties across the the English Midlands, including an estate at Gopsel in Leicestershire. And Jennings becomes. As Handel's career is beginning to rise in London, Jennings becomes what we might think of as a Handel super fan. He absolutely loves this man's music. He goes to every new opera performance he can find. He becomes one of the great collectors of Handel's music as well, of the actual, you know, manuscript music, as he does for music from really from the continent as well. Much later on, one of the oldest copies of Vivaldi's Four Seasons turn up in Charles Jennings library. But he also suffered throughout his life from what in the 18th century was called the hip, you know, hyp, it was short for hypochondria. But it didn't mean the thing that we think that means today. Not some kind of imaginary illness or oversensitivity, but what at the time we might now call chronic depression or even bipolar disorder. And it was very real, it was very deep, this encasing sense of doom that he suffered from. And in a way, music and also collecting art and sculpture, paintings and so forth. That was in a way, a kind of way out of his darkest moments. And you can read in his letters where, you know, he calls himself a wretch. He says that he, in these, in these episodes, he can come up with no particular thing to do in his life. He can plan no particular action of his life, as he says, and. And Handel's music was this balm in a way that would, I think, help him through these moments. And he may have met Handel in person already in the early 1730s. He knew him by reputation, of course, even before that. And he begins to develop a real closeness and friendship. There's a patronage relationship there, of course, because he's attending Handel's performances, becomes quite a good friend of his and Jennings ends up being at the very center of the Messiah story as well.
- [18:33]
Eleanor Evans
So we have this patron, we have this artist. One final piece of the puzzle we should probably bring in before we go into this creation proper is the figure of Susannah Cibber. Can you introduce us to her and breadcrumb a bit why she's important in this story.
- [18:48]
Charles King
So Susanna Cibber, born Susannah Arne, would go on to sort of skip to the end of the story in a way. She would go on to become the most important actress of her time, I think, and by the time she died later in the 18th century, the most highly, highly paid actress of the time. The kind of theme female equivalent of David Garrett, if you like, especially when it came to tragedies. But she did not start out that way. She was the daughter of an upholsterer and a midwife in Covent Garden. And her father was a kind of skilled tradesman who was kind of dazzled by the footlights of the West End. He would look at people on stage and kind of think, now that's the life I would like to have. And so he. He creates this kind of family opera troupe, provides music lessons for Susanna's brother Thomas. And of course people will know the name Thomas Arne because he will go on much, much later on to write, among other things, Rule Britannia. But Susanna is not particularly talented as a singer. She's picking up whatever musical knowledge she can from the lessons provided to her brother. But she does seem to have this power on stage to make an audience feel something. And her father realizes she has this kind of innate talent. But he thinks the way to really secure her position in the theater is for her to marry into it. And so he is involved in kind of contracting a marriage to a man named Theophilus Cibber, who is the son of Colley Cibber, whose name is absolutely synonymous with theater in this period. The poet laureate and playwright and theater manager. And Susanna and Theophilus then than marry. But Theophilus turns out to be an absolute nightmare. I mean, he sleeps his way around the cast, he is frequently drunk. He already in this stage, he's considered to be a kind of washed up actor himself. Someone who shouts their lines from the stage in this kind of old school way. And even worse, he begins to kind of contract out his wife for meetings with wealthy young men who might show up at the stage door. There are these weird sort of triadic relationships that then develop in what is effectively prostituting his wife for his own profit. And to pay his bar tab, Susanna falls in love with one of these men, perhaps seeing him as a kind of rescuer named William Sloper, the son of a wealthy parliamentarian. And Theophilus, though, rather than divorce his wife for what is now a kind of relationship as opposed to a sort of business venture, decides that this is, in fact, going to be the vehicle of his own continued sort of enrichment, because he can now sue Sloper for the alienation of the affection of his wife. Why would he possibly divorce Susanna when he can continue suing Sloper every time he and his wife meet? And he does in 1738 and 39. And these two trials are absolute sensations in London because it's the private life of an acting couple, you know, these sort of very public figures. The wealthy son of a parliamentarian. There's a threesome involved. Oh, my gosh, you know, this is big news. But in the court proceedings, which are taken down and then printed and sold and accompanied with pornographic images and cartoons, of course, Susanna's private life is then aired, you know, sort of publicly. And the transcript is very intimate and very explicit for the time. And she is really ruined. And she disappears from the stage. Disappears for about two years after that period. And it turns out then that she pitches up in Dublin at exactly the time that Handel has come to that city to stage a new piece of work that he has just completed not too long before.
- [22:42]
Eleanor Evans
Okay, brilliant. So let's begin to weave these threads together. Then we have Handel himself, who has been in the mix centrally at these Hanoverian courts. And then we have Charles Jennings, who has been through immense personal tragedy and is looking for a way forwards with that. And obviously, you just introduced to Susanna Cibber. So where do all these come together?
- [23:01]
Charles King
So Handel is still in the 1730s, really very popular. I mean, he's sort of the best known public musician in Britain at the time. But there is a little bit of a sense that this is the stage of his career when he should start doing his greatest hits tour. There's a statue erected to him in Vauxhall Gardens, which is very unusual for a statue to be, you know, erected to a living artist. But it. It can't have escaped his notice, I suppose, that, you know, you usually erect statues to people who are dead. And so he receives an invitation from the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, or at least via the Lord Lieutenant's office, to stage a series of concerts in Dublin. And this kind of surprises many of Handel's friends. It's sort of like, why would you now go and do an entire season as it were on the road. But he decides to do that and goes to Dublin in the autumn of 1741 to start what he hopes will be a series of concerts, perhaps extending into the spring, maybe into the early bit of the next summer. And he takes along with him a new manuscript that he had just completed that August and September at some point, in fact, we know exactly the point, August 22nd of 1741, because Handel would note on his manuscripts. When he began composing, he had taken a series of texts that Charles Jennens had kind of out of the blue sent to Handel. Handel and Jenin had worked together before, with Jennens providing the text or libretto of an oratorio, and Handel, of course, providing the music. But this so called Scripture collection, as Jenin's called it, was very special because at some point before that, Jennings had sat down, probably in Gopsel, to create his own reimagined version of the essence of Christianity, of course, the birth, the suffering, offering, the resurrection of Jesus Christ. But he didn't want to do it in the biblical order. He wanted to do it in a kind of theological or even philosophical way that made sense to him. So you can imagine him sort of scribbling on sort of pieces of paper, texts from the Hebrew Scriptures, the prophets, the Psalms, the epistles of the New Testament, the book of Revelation, and then almost sort of rearranging them like index cards on a big table until they were in an order that made the most sense to him from comfort ye at the very, very beginning to Amen at the end. And he ships his thought off to Handel. Handel finally sits down to compose some music for it and does it very, very quickly. But Handel did everything very quickly. He wrote for the stage. There was, you know, there was a deadline, a new performance coming up. He had his work cut out for him. He completes all of that. Much of the manuscript, which of course still exists amazingly, and is in the British Library. The manuscript is full of amendments, changes, CR crossouts, and the kind of musical equivalent of et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, knowing that his copyists will then create a clean copy that fulfills his wishes as they understand them. And that's what he takes with him to Dublin, where he arrives later in 1741 for this new series of concerts.
- [26:16]
Eleanor Evans
I want to go into the creation of it just a little bit more. You've mentioned the resonance between the tumult of 2020, when you began work on this project, or began to think about this project, and the political tumult of Handel's own. And I think it's just very interesting to think of where Jennens and Handel are coming from politically as well as they are merging their artistic work on this project.
- [26:39]
Charles King
Handel and Jennings were very, very unlike. So Jennings is quite religious, he's a high church Anglican. He is opposed to any rationalizing of Christianity. In fact, his brother Robert had committed suicide in the 1720s. And and Jen's believed that the reason for that, and there is some evidence to suggest this is true, was that Robert, having gone up to Oxford, had been so influenced by the prevailing atheism among some of the other students that he had kind of both lost his faith and lost his rudder in life. And Jennings himself believed that it was the awe and mystery and wonder of Christianity that helped not only sustain the faith but sustain you in moments of turmoil, turmoil and trial. And there was no way you were going to think your way to a more hopeful world. In fact, you had to be convinced of it through the awe and majesty of the faith itself. Handel on the other hand was not particularly religious, at least at this stage of his life. So we have to dispense with the idea of Handel kind of in a fit of religious devotion, you know, composing the thing we now know as Handel's Messiah. He would become rather religious later on in his life, perhaps in the 1750s. But at this stage there's no sense that he thought even of this piece of music as anything particularly special other than the sheer oddity of it, you know, composing this entirely biblical text based oratorio that had come to from Jenin's. But politically too, these men were on opposite sides of the greatest political divide of their time. Handel obviously a servant of the crown, receiving effectively a salary from the royal court and composing for public occasions in. In 1727 he composes that magnificent Zadok, the priest for George II's coronation which has been used in every royal coronation up to Charles iii. And Jenin's was what at the time was known as a non juror. He is a person who believed that the end of the old Stuart line and the Hanoverian succession had been this massive wrong turn. A kind of not only a political wrong turn but a cosmic wrong turn. He was himself obviously a Protestant, but he believed that the steward either suspiciously or completely Catholic depending on which monarch one is talking about, he believed that they were sort of the correct and ordained royals of his country. And you couldn't just exchange one for another. The times were out of joint if you did so. So in effect in refusing to Take the oath. He took himself out of any position that would have required one serving in Parliament or taking a university degree, working in the law, just anything he might have wanted to do with his life. And for this political minority of non jurors, this was a very serious thing. There's only really one kind of moment outside of politics where we take a public oath to sort of pledge to tell the truth on a witness stand. But oath taking in that moment was seen as a very, very deep commitment. And so Jenin sees himself as a person committed to a rightly ordered world, and that his has taken this terrible wrong turn. It's in the initial stages of its inevitable decline because it is not in accord with the way that the cosmos requires. And so what I find just so astonishing about the person who compiled the text for Messiah, the person who created the music, is that they were, in every way that mattered, deep political enemies. But somehow, through this combination of art and friendship, they managed to craft thing, the core messages of which are about hope and unity and redemption. And I think that's an astonishing monument to the way in which one can actually build bridges across otherwise, you know, really seemingly unbridgeable divides.
- [30:52]
Eleanor Evans
Astonishing indeed. And such a really important facet to bring out. Speaking of redemption, I think we can bring Susannah Sybarit back again. Now, can you take us into this moment, the first performance in Dublin? Can you take us into what this moment is like and how it's received?
- [31:08]
Charles King
Handle has had a series of successful concerts already in Dublin during his stay there. And as the Easter season is approaching, he has planned to offer this new thing that he has just called on the first page of the manuscript, Messiah and oratorio. And it fits the Easter season. It's of course intended to be an Easter story. And he already has musicians and choristers and so forth that he has sort of drafted in for other performances. And he knows that Susanna Cibber is in town. She had actually performed for him many years ago in a minor role in the West End. And he drafts her in as one of the soloists for the first performance. And so the doors open to Neil's Music hall on April 13, 1742, a relatively new performance venue that's on Fishamble street, just down from Christchurch Cathedral in Dublin. So the first performance of this thing, it doesn't take place in a grand cathedral, doesn't even take place in a sacred space. It's in a secular, smallish concert hall. And Cibber in this role is really a bit of a, if not a scandal. It's certainly something that audiences would have noted because she was notorious by this stage for everything that had come out in the trial that her husband had concocted. So everyone knew intimately these quite embarrassing details of her sexual life. And among other things, when she steps forward from the. The chorus to sing, he was despised. He was rejected. A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. Anyone in the audience could have done the gender switch for themselves. You know, she was a person of sorrows. She was acquainted with grief. So for anyone sitting in the audience, they would have understood that this person, who herself had experienced incredible suffering at the hands of her husband and and of the public, was now singing the sort of darkest bit of Messiah, the sort of the essence of the Passion, the suffering of Jesus Christ. And we know from a later account of what that experience was like that the audience behaved very, very unusually during this performance, because we have a letter that says throughout the performance people were quiet, which in a theater of this time would have been very, very unusual. You know, you would go there to speak with people, to be seen taking some food along or having a basket, you know, and then you might be quiet for one solo if they were a famous soloist. But it was very, very rowdy venue. But people were quiet throughout this. And you can imagine in that particular moment, people, in a way sensing the connection between the redemption of this individual and the redemptive message of the text.
- [34:07]
Eleanor Evans
Needless to say, this is only the beginning for this, you know, substantial piece of work. There are many more names we haven't even mentioned yet. You know, satirist Jonathan Swift makes an appearance. We haven't mentioned Thomas Coram yet, and perhaps we can leave those for readers of your book. But I did want to ask, you mentioned earlier on about the convention of people standing during the Hallelujah Chorus. Is it fair to say that this is a bit apocryphal in nature in terms of how this began?
- [34:35]
Charles King
The one thing we can say is that the common myth of George II standing at the Hallelujah Chorus and then everyone else following suit is almost certainly not true. This is a practice that developed over time. It wasn't that unusual. In fact, perhaps in other instances where you have a religious text and a choral portion of the work for people to stand at that moment. But if you think about the structure of Messiah, that bit comes at a very, very strange time, because the Hallelujah Chorus is, if you're sitting through, a full performance is about 2/3 of the way through. And when I go to a performance, it's always. I always kind of smile because for people unfamiliar with the work, you think, oh, it's the Hallelujah Chorus. You stand at the Hallelujah Chorus and then you start looking for your car keys and your parking validation and get ready to leave. And it's like, no, wait, wait, sit back down. There's still, still a third of this thing left to go. But regardless of the origins of it, it makes Messiah the only piece of classical music that always brings audiences to their feet. And this is a remarkable feature of the sort of the communal nature of this piece of music. You know, you can go to a sing along and sing it from your seats with, with an orchestra and, and chorus. You can participate in a choir and, you know, sing it in your, in your local place of worship or your community hall. And then you can do something with your body together with other people. You can rise at this really, really triumphant moment. And, you know, Charles Jennings had no idea this would become this thing. Even Handel had no idea it would become this thing. It is a great testament to, in a way, the eternal power of unexpected art to continue to move and inspire people, regardless of their religious tradition.
- [36:28]
Eleanor Evans
Or what a wonderful thought for anyone lucky enough to go to a live performance or any performance of this and hold in their heads, that's wonderful. You've given us a great sense today of the many complexities behind Handel's work here. For anyone going to listen to it or watch it, indeed this season and beyond, is there any final thought you'd like to leave our listeners with today? Charles?
- [36:51]
Charles King
Well, I really hope that Every Valley helps people to think of this music as new, you know, new and raw and fresh. Messiah is so much a part of the holiday season that it's always there kind of in the background. But, you know, its earliest audiences thought of this, as one of the first listeners remarked, as a species of music like no other. It has a deep philosophical message at its core, which is essentially, you know, what if you looked at the world not to find evidence of how terrible things are, but you looked at the world through the prism of those first words, through the prism of comfort. Ye, the kind of the staggering possibility that things might turn out all right. And then you lived your day, you lived your week, you lived your life with that kind of in mind, you know, Charles Jennings, this deeply depressed individual, kind of shared with us his ladder out of the abyss. Begin with the possibility of a more hopeful world, and then step forward.
- [38:01]
Eleanor Evans
That was Charles King, his book, Every Valley, the story of Handel's Messiah is out now. Thanks for listening to the History Extra Podcast. This podcast was produced by Sam Leel Greene.
- [38:22]
Charles King
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