When Charles Jennens sent his friend George Frideric Handel a new libretto for him to set to music in summer 1741, he was at first met with a long silence. Winter was approaching by the time Jennens learned that both his text and Handel were in Dublin, where Handel had travelled from London in early November, possibly by invitation of the lord lieutenant of Ireland. Far from ignoring the text from Jennens – with whom he had already collaborated on Saul, an oratorio (music drama on biblical themes) – Handel had composed a score for it with inspired speed. His manuscript notes show that he began the first of its three parts on August 22nd, 1741, completing the initial draft on September 6th.
Charles King’s lively, richly detailed narrative history traces the progress of Handel’s Messiah from ink-stained manuscript to beloved standard of classical repertoire, both during Handel’s nine months in Dublin and in the decades and centuries afterwards. Central to the story is the dynamic and sometimes tense partnership between the composer and librettist. Handel, a German immigrant whose talent and forceful personality had enabled him to pursue his career through several big European cultural centres before arriving in London in 1710, was enthusiastically loyal to the Hanoverian dynasty – having held lucrative court posts under the same prince-elector of Hanover, Georg Ludwig, who in 1714 succeeded as George I of England, and continued his patronage of Handel.
Jennens, by contrast, was an introverted, English literary scholar and music collector whose retired habits were due largely to his being a nonjuror, who regarded the Hanoverian claim to the throne as illegitimate and so could not take any oath of loyalty required to hold public offices (though he remained a committed Anglican). His project of compiling the Messiah text from adapted passages from the King James Bible expressing the fulfilment of Isaiah’s prophecies of a Redeemer who would triumph over, while submitting to, mortal suffering was haunted by grief for a brother driven to suicide by religious despair.
King’s sympathetic, balanced portrait of Jennens is characteristic of his treatment of Messiah not as the work of a “lone genius” composer, but as a collaborative achievement. Another contributor to the success of the oratorio’s first performance at Neal’s Music Hall on Fishamble Street on April 13th, 1742, was the English (and Catholic) contralto Susannah Cibber. She had sung for Handel before, but he had found her unexpectedly in Dublin when he recruited her for solos, including “He was despised”. Cibber’s compelling, emotionally intelligent performance proved crucial to rehabilitating her career following a scandalous lawsuit brought against her lover, the married Berkshire squire William Sloper, by her husband and fellow actor Theophilus Cibber (who had himself brought the couple together, when he accepted money from Sloper in exchange for sexual access to Susannah).
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King, author of cultural histories of cosmopolitan cities including Odessa and Istanbul, here adopts a similarly broad view on an expanding British empire. Among pioneers of its new American colony of Georgia was philanthropist Thomas Coram, who later established the Foundling Hospital for abandoned children in London, which Handel supported by giving popular fundraising performances of Messiah. King also makes careful, even-handed use of recent research showing how Handel’s own income derived from aristocratic patrons’ investments in the slave-trading Royal African Company. The story of the West African Muslim scholar Ayuba Suleiman Diallo further reveals how, in Handel’s world, “empire, enslavement, and art were mutually dependent”. Diallo would experience both enslavement in the United States and freedom in England, where he was elected to a learned society whose members also included Jennens, and befriended by the Anglo-Irish naturalist and royal physician Hans Sloane – a Royal African Company shareholder and Foundling Hospital governor who married the heiress of a slave-owning Jamaica sugar-planter.
Diallo’s journey highlights the complexity of an era in which, as King observes, optimistic Enlightenment discourses of reason and liberty were shadowed by the injustices of slavery and the subjection of women, and the suffering caused by poverty, disease, and imperial and sectarian wars. Although Jonathan Swift, as Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in 1742, initially prohibited its musicians from performing Messiah in the secular Fishamble Street venue, he spent his literary career confronting similar dilemmas to Handel and Jennens. No less than Handel’s transcendent Messiah, the satirical humour of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) spoke for a society searching, in King’s vivid account, for “practical grounds for remaining hopeful when the everyday evidence seems to point in the opposite direction”.
Jenny McAuley is a writer and researcher based in Oxford
