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.

In Every Valley, Charles King, a professor at Georgetown University, describes this monumental performance in great detail. But his story begins many years earlier, charting Handel’s rise to celebrity status in one of the most polarized ages of British history. Many, including Charles Jennens, the English landowner and patron of the arts who compiled the libretto for Handel’s Messiah, quietly opposed the new Hanoverian regime granted the throne by the 1701 Act of Settlement. Handel, a German from Halle, however, had been Kapellmeister at the Hanoverian court before he (and the Hanoverians) permanently moved to London. Jennens’s admiration of Handel’s musical talent outweighed their political differences, and his determination to keep Handel writing despite setbacks in the composer’s career made the eventual composition of Messiah possible.

King’s book brilliantly weaves together the stories of several of Handel’s and Jennens’s contemporaries: Ayuba Diallo, an African Muslim man enslaved in the Americas who eventually makes his way to London, Thomas Coram, a philanthropic sea captain who works tirelessly into his old age to establish the first foundling hospital, and Jonathan Swift, the author of Gulliver’s Travels and dean of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral just down the road from where Handel’s Messiah would first be performed. One of the characters most prominently featured in King’s narrative is Susannah Cibber, a young alto soloist Handel hired last minute for Messiah’s debut. Four years before, her career had been shattered by a scandalous trial that had brought the sordid details of her personal life into public scrutiny. Nevertheless, as she sang one of the most famous arias of the oratorio, the audience sat gripped. “He was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.” The words could have described her, the soloist, but instead they described Christ, the Messiah, who “hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows.” When she finished her solo, Patrick Delany, chancellor of Christ Church Cathedral, declared from the audience, “Woman, for this, be all thy sins forgiven.”

The stories that King recounts are all rooted in a particular time and place, but they consistently point to the reasons why Handel’s Messiah still captures crowds today. Its biblical text remains as timely as ever: “Why do the nations so furiously rage together?” Like the psalmist, Jennens’s compilation does not attempt to provide a simple answer. Instead, it reminds us that “the kingdom of this world is become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ; and he shall reign forever and ever.”