gray rock

On April 13, 1742, over seven hundred Dublin concertgoers squeezed into the Fishamble Street Music Hall, meant to only hold six hundred. They were about to hear a new work, an oratorio composed by Georg Frideric Handel. The oratorio put to music a collection of scripture passages that wove together the Christian story from the prophecies of the Hebrew Bible to the Gospels, all the way through to triumphal passages from the letters of Paul and the Book of Revelation. As its epigraph, Handel took a line from Virgil’s “­Messianic Eclogue”: Majora canamus – “Let us sing of greater things.” As its name, Handel chose Messiah.

Charles King’s book Every Valley details the desperate lives and troubled times that gave birth to Handel’s masterpiece.