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 the

background of political tumult.

In this episode, Eleanor Evans is joined by Professor Charles King,

the author of Every Valley, 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? 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 intensely and for longer in other 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. And so to pick up on the man himself Handel, who is so entwined

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