Charles King, "Every Valley"

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Charles King, "Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and

Troubled Times That Made Handel's Messiah" (2024).

 

 

그래서 부제를 그렇게 붙였겠지만, 몇 사람의 이야기를 통해서 그 시대를 역사적으로 기술하는 것이 책 구성의 이이디어였던 것 같다. 페이지를 그렇게 채운 것 같다. 어쨌든, Charles Jennens의 메시아의 리브레토(대본)도 첨부되어 있고 역사적 사실이나 소소한 일화에 대해서도 읽을 수 있었지만, 책이 무척 재밌었다는 생각은 안 드는 것은 그 몇 사람의 이야기가 좀 지루하게 느껴져서 일 거다. 

 

The Guardian 서평

 

"King, a professor of international affairs in Washington DC, does a fine job of implicating Handel in the conflicts and contradictions of an unsettled society. He first travelled from Hanover to London in 1710, arriving in what seemed to be “a failed state, mired in revolution, political conspiracy and murder”. Installed at the English court, he unofficially spied for his royal patrons at home in Germany while composing music to glorify the local Hanoverians, who captured the crown from the Stuart dynasty in 1714: King argues that the chorus in the Messiah that salutes Christ as “Wonderful, Counsellor, the Prince of Peace” was a coded tribute to George II. Handel’s colleague Thomas Arne, who happened to be Susannah Cibber’s brother, supplied the monarchy with its imperial anthem in “Rule, Britannia!”. Although Britons here boast that they “never never never shall be slaves”, they happily profited from the enslavement of others. Both Jennens and Handel were clients of the South Sea Company, whose “signature money-making venture”, as King notes, was “the involuntary transport of human beings” from Africa to the American colonies. Music, the airiest and most spiritual of arts, is murkily embedded in the realities of politics, commerce and inhuman exploitation."

--- 위 서평에서

 

The New York Times 서평

 

 

책 본문에서

 

Later historians sifted through the thousands of texts published in European cities in this period and selected a canon of writings that seemed to confirm Paine's view of a watershed in human thought: a collecteive rethinking of the basis of government, the power of science, and the proper understanding of society, produced by writers and talkers from John Locke to Mary Wollstonecraft, Jean-Jacques Rousseau to David Hume. (p. 15)

 

"If it is now asked whether we at present live in an enlightened age," the German philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote, by coincidence in the same year [1784] as the Handel commemoration in Westminster Abbey, "the answer is: No, but we do live in an age of enlightenment." In one sentence Kant had helped name a historical era while also acknowledging its limitations. (p. 15)

 

At the time Handel first came to Britain, an aging Londoner could measure her life by her country's self-inflictd tragedies: a child during the civil wars that swept across England, Scotland, and Ireland; a young girl when a king was executed and a Puritan oligarcy installed; perhaps a new bride when a king was restored and a matron when another king was violently dethroned; and in her decline witness to a shaky rpyal succession and armed Jacobites sailing for the coast. In the 1660s, John Milton had invented a word that captured the experience of living through such a string of horrors. At the center of hell, he wrote in Paradise Lost, lay a "pandaemonium," an encirclement of demons. (p. 55)

 

Slavery was so woven into British politics and society that its sheer ordinariness could render it invisible. Issac Newton owned shares in the South Sea Company. John Locke owned stock in the Royal African Company.... Defoe's castaway [Robinson Crusoe] ends up shipwrecked on a desert island because of a business venture to buy Africans on the coast of Guinea, sell them in Brazil, and pocket the proceeds. (p. 133)

 

[Thomas] Coram told a friend that it was something of an achievement to have managed one's finances so well, with generosity of purpose and no self-indulgence, that one could move toward death in satisfied poverty. He was now in his eighties. On many days, he could be seen sitting outside the Foundling Hospital in his rust-colored coat, smiling among children. He died not long afterward, in March 1751. Only then did the governors make his connection to the Foundling Hospital permanent. After a solemn, well attended service, he was buried under the altar of the chapel, steps from Handel's organ, which was at last fully installed and tuned. (p. 234)