657. Whose “Messiah” Is It Anyway? | Freakonomics Radio

All sorts of people have put their mark on “Messiah,” and it has been a hit for nearly 300 years. How can a single piece of music thrive in so many settings? You could say it’s because Handel really knew how to write a banger. (Part three of “Making ‘Messiah.’”) You can find the transcript and show notes for this episode on our website here: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/whose-messiah-is-it-anyway/ FOLLOW FREAKONOMICS RADIO: YouTube: https://freak.ws/3yIl6dl Apple Podcasts: https://freak.ws/3yAvQh0 Spotify: https://freak.ws/3TsdCmV ABOUT FREAKONOMICS RADIO: Discover the hidden side of everything with host Stephen J. Dubner, co-author of the Freakonomics books. Each week, Dubner speaks with Nobel laureates and provocateurs, intellectuals and entrepreneurs, and various other underachievers to uncover things you always thought you knew (but didn’t) and things you never thought you wanted to know (but do) — from the economics of sleep to the future of education, from markets for marriage to the surprising utility of wolves. ABOUT THE FREAKONOMICS RADIO NETWORK: Freakonomics began as a book, which led to a blog, a documentary film, more books, a pair of pants, and in 2010, a podcast called Freakonomics Radio. Hosted by Stephen J. Dubner, it’s one of the most popular podcasts in the world, with a reputation for storytelling that is both rigorous and entertaining. Its archive of more than 500 episodes is available, for free, on any podcast app, and the show airs weekly on NPR stations. Freakonomics Radio is now the flagship show of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which includes the podcasts No Stupid Questions, People I (Mostly) Admire, and The Economics of Everyday Things. FREAKONOMICS RADIO NETWORK PODCASTS: Freakonomics Radio: https://freakonomics.com/series/freakonomics-radio/ No Stupid Questions: https://freakonomics.com/series/nsq/ People I (Mostly) Admire: https://freakonomics.com/series/people-i-mostly-admire/ The Economics of Everyday Things: https://freakonomics.com/series/everyday-things/ Special series: https://freakonomics.com/topics/ CONNECT WITH US: [email protected] https://twitter.com/freakonomics https://www.instagram.com/freakonomics/ https://www.facebook.com/freakonomics/ https://www.tiktok.com/@freakonomicsradio https://www.linkedin.com/company/freakonomics-media Subscribe to our newsletter: http://eepurl.com/bKm0cf

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  Jane Glover is an early music scholar and a prolific conductor.

• 0:11Speaker 01

  I've conducted over 120 performances of Messiah, which I have loved since I was nine years old.

• 0:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  That first Messiah she heard was at Lincoln Cathedral in the East Midlands of England.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  My grandparents lived there and we had a family Christmas. We were all taken to Messiah and I was blown away by this piece. I can, to this day, remember everything about it. What had really blown me away was not the huge stuff. It wasn't actually Alleluia and Amen, though of course they did. It was actually the much more contemplative stuff. The thing I wanted to come and bash out on the piano when we got home was, "I know that my Redeemer liveeth."

• 0:59Speaker 01

  Something rang a chord within me and I couldn't really articulate it at the age of nine, but I somehow knew instinctively that music was going to be important and that Handel was going to be important to me. Because whenever I encountered Handel, and certainly Messiah, it always felt natural and familiar and this is what I should be doing.

• 1:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  Does the story still move you?

• 1:25Speaker 01

  Of Messiah? Absolutely.

• 1:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  Every time?

• 1:28Speaker 01

  Every time.

• 1:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  Does Messiah move you the way it moves Jane Glover? Maybe, maybe not. It's not for everyone. Maybe you prefer some other music this time of year. The 20th Century Christmas Songbook includes some of the most famous American music ever written. This song is considered the best-selling single of all time.

• 2:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  You probably know this one, too.

• 2:02Speaker 02

  Chestnuts roasting on an open fire.

• 2:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  And don't forget this one.

• 2:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  All of these Christmas songs, by the way, were written not by Christians, but by Jews. I know, plot twist. Today on Freakonomics Radio, we keep twisting the plot of Messiah.

• 2:31Speaker 03

  If we were to avoid reading or listening to any of the anti-Jewish material of the last 2,000 years, we wouldn't have much left.

• 2:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  We'll hear how musicians across time, from Mozart to Bernstein, have put their mark on Messiah.

• 2:47Speaker 01

  It's a little bit like having your house redecorated.

• 2:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  The trumpet shall sound, and if all goes according to plan, we shall be changed.

• 2:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  Whose Messiah is it anyways? The final episode of our Making Messiah series begins now.

• 3:21Speaker 04

  This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 3:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  When we first set out to make this series about Handel's Messiah, one of the most helpful books I read was called Handel in London: The Making of a Genius by Jane Glover. So Glover was already someone we wanted to speak with. And then we heard that she would also be conducting this year's Messiah at the New York Philharmonic, which is my hometown orchestra. So this past spring, we met up with her in London, in the house where George Frieder Handel used to live. It's on Brook Street in Mayfair.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  And this was a new build then. It was a well-to-do neighbourhood. So much of London in the 18th century was centred around squares, big squares. Each of them had a church in the middle, probably a marketplace, and then shops around. And this is where we are, in the Hanover Square environment.

• 4:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  Handel moved into this house in 1723, and he lived there for more than 35 years. Today, it is a museum called the Handel Hendrix House, as in Jimi Hendrix. For a brief time in the 1960s, he lived next door, so there is a Hendrix museum too. Over on the Handel side, the rooms have been restored to mid 18th century. Upstairs are the rooms where Handel worked and slept. Downstairs, there is a parlor with an organ where Handel would have performed for small audiences and sold tickets to his larger concerts. As we heard in last week's episode, Handel had found success not only as a composer and performer, but as an entrepreneurial producer.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  He was so good with money, as somebody who has also written about Mozart, who was hopeless with money, completely rubbish with money. He was just desperate with money.

• 5:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, what do you mean by that? He wasted it and overspent, or he wasn't good at making it?

• 5:30Speaker 01

  Well, he wasn't good at sort of keeping it. And if he had it, he gave it away. And if he didn't have it, you know, it was desperate. It was only when his wife, Konstanze, realised that they were in deep trouble. She had a great business sense. She took things over and turned things around. Handel, on the other hand, he had such a good nose for money. He was in the city of London the whole time, buying and selling in the markets. He, for instance, bought shares in the South Sea Company at just the right time.

• 6:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  And got out at the right time.

• 6:02Speaker 01

  And sold way before the crash. Other colleagues and friends of his were ruined by the South Sea Bubble.

• 6:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  Including patrons of his?

• 6:10Speaker 01

  Including patrons of his. But when he was running his concert series in the theatres here, he just knew what to charge, he knew how to pay people. Of course, he had a very good team around him, but you just know that he's at the heart of this operation.

• 6:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  When we left off last week, Handel's new Oratorio Messiah had been a smash hit in Dublin. But when he brought it back to London, it landed rather quietly. Several years later, in 1749, he performed the Hallelujah Chorus at a benefit for the Foundling Hospital, a home for abandoned children near Russell Square. Today, it too is a museum. London has a lot of museums, if you haven't heard. So we decided to visit.

• 6:58Speaker 05

  The very first concert here, he wrote a different piece called The Foundling Hospital Anthem, in which he lifted the whole of the Hallelujah Chorus and put it into the Foundling Hospital.

• 7:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  But that was only the one time?

• 7:08Speaker 05

  That was just the one time.

• 7:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  Catherine Hogg is a musicologist and head librarian at the Foundling Museum. After that first performance at the Foundling, Handel would return regularly for big charity fundraisers. And what did he perform then?

• 7:23Speaker 05

  It was the full Messiah every time. It's a slightly different version, the Foundling Hospital Messiah, as it's known, just because he changed over the years to defend on his soloists and so on. But as far as we know, it was the full works, yeah.

• 7:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  If we really think about the birthplace of Messiah as a continuously performed piece, obviously, it was in Dublin. When it debuted in London, it wasn't much of a hit. But then this is the place that really made it, yes?

• 7:49Speaker 05

  Yes. It took off here. Otherwise, it might just have languished and not been known.

• 7:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  How do you feel about that?

• 7:54Speaker 05

  Oh, pretty impressed with us. If I can identify with the 18th century hospital, yes, it's a very privileged place to be.

• 8:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hogg now leads us up a staircase.

• 8:04Speaker 05

  So now we're on the top floor of the museum, and this holds the Gerald Cook Handel collection. And it's the biggest private collection of Handel in the world. So we have paintings, scores, manuscripts, books, libretti, memorabilia, so-called handeliana, which is everything that doesn't fit into any other category.

• 8:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  In a glass case, there is a weathered parchment.

• 8:25Speaker 05

  This is Handel's will, which is one of our key objects. This is the real thing. This was in his bureau, which was opened after he died.

• 8:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  Would you read us a few lines?

• 8:33Speaker 05

  I like the bit at the beginning. "In the name of God, Amen, I, George Frederick Handel, considering the uncertainty of human life, do make this my will in manner following", which is a very characteristic phrase. And then, very interestingly, the first thing he mentions, "I give and bequeath unto my servant Peter LeBlanc my clothes and linen and £300". To put a servant first was very unusual. Servants usually came at the end with a month's or a year's wages, but he puts the servant at the top. He did give a lot of money to the fund for decayed musicians. The last codicil is more of a stream of consciousness and it's the apothecary and it's the neighbour. Quite a few widows, and then we can also see that he's going blind because in the codicils, which were all written in the last four years of his life, I think the signatures are getting more and more wobbly.

• 9:18Speaker 01

  He'd been quite quiet over the last few years of his life.

• 9:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  Jane Glover again.

• 9:22Speaker 01

  He hadn't written for seven or eight years. He was completely blind and not at all well, but was seen in the church around the corner all the time.

• 9:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  Talk about what his state of mind was as he was declining, heading toward death.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  I think he knew where he was going and was confident that there was a greater life on the other side. I do think that. And he said goodbye to people quite methodically and then went on his own journey.

• 10:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  Handel died at home at age seventy-four on April fourteenth, seventeen fifty-nine. It had been seventeen years and one day since Messiah was first performed in Dublin.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  London went into mourning. He was a huge figure, just huge. All of society knew him and of course, every musician knew him. He was deeply revered. I mean, it was very much the end of an era when he went.

• 10:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  In Handel's will, there was one more significant bequest. In fact, the most significant bequest of all. Here again is Catherine Hogg at the Foundling Museum, reading from the will.

• 10:38Speaker 05

  I leave a fair copy of the score and parts of my oratorio called Messiah to the Foundling Hospital. So, three weeks after he died, it was delivered. One thousand and fifty-four pages were delivered to the hospital, which is the score and parts.

• 10:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  When I think today of what it means to leave a score, I would think it's a gift that is memorabilia and, you know, a piece of him, but it was really an economic gift, yeah?

• 11:01Speaker 05

  Very much. They couldn't carry on the concerts which had raised seven thousand pounds, which is several million today, you know. They couldn't have carried on with concerts if they didn't have the music.

• 11:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, what do you think the bequest of the will was worth to the Foundling Hospital?

• 11:12Speaker 05

  Oh, probably in today's terms, millions.

• 11:18Speaker 06

  The version of the work which he bequeathed to the Foundling Hospital, a complete score and a set of parts, really represents our best shot at understanding an authoritative or final version of the piece.

• 11:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  That is Mark Reisinger, who we've been hearing from throughout this series. He is a musicologist and Handel specialist in New York City.

• 11:40Speaker 06

  We can point to Messiah as the first work in music history that never faded from public view. It has remained a hit, really from the 1750s right on through to the present day.

• 11:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  Reisinger separates Messiah performances into two historical strands.

• 12:00Speaker 06

  Strand A is the one that originated with Handel himself from the time that he conducted the premiere of the work in Dublin, then returned to London, began to do performances there, and carried on right through to the end of his life, being involved as much as he could be even after he lost his sight.

• 12:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  But things changed once Handel died.

• 12:21Speaker 06

  What came after his death, especially starting in the 1780s, is what I refer to as Strand B.

• 12:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  Strand B included Messiah adaptations. Among the first wave of composers to take it on was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. He reorchestrated Messiah in 1789, 30 years after Handel's death. Here again is Jane Glover in London.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  Mozart may have heard Handel here. I think he almost certainly did when he was here as a child, but he was very young. One of his great patrons, Baron von Svetin, was a huge Handel and indeed Bach fanatic. Back in Vienna, was trying to get their pieces performed and showed some Handel scores, including Messiah. To Mozart. Mozart was absolutely a fan, particularly the great contrapuntal choruses he loved. But the same with the narrative, the lyricism, the passion of the word setting. All of that would have appealed to Mozart. But if music is already a few years out of date, it's old fashioned.

• 13:27Speaker 01

  And so there was no way that Baron Ransvijten could put Messiah on the way it was in Vienna in the 1780s. So he said to Mozart, do something. And so Mozart added this and that and the other instrumentation. He didn't change the structure or the text or anything like that. He changed some of the vocal scoring because, why not? But Ben Handel did that himself the whole time. What I love about the Mozart version, which I've done a few times, is that you see one genius through the eyes of another. It's a little bit like having your house redecorated. You know, the structure remains the same, but the color scheme is different. It's just glorious. I smile a lot when the horns and the clarinets come in.

• 14:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  What were the instruments that were added?

• 14:11Speaker 01

  Clarinets and horns.

• 14:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  No flute?

• 14:14Speaker 01

  I think there are flutes, yes, I think so. But certainly the trumpet shall sound is on a horn, which is interesting. I'm not sure what the reason for that is, whether there wasn't a good enough trumpet player for Mozart at the time. We also know that Mozart actually had had a childhood phobia about the trumpet. He hated it, it frightened him. And although he wrote concertos, instrumental concertos for pretty much every other instrument in the orchestra, he never wrote a trumpet concerto.

• 14:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  Around the 25th anniversary of Handel's death, Messiah began receiving even more aggressive makeovers. Here's Mark Reisinger again.

• 15:00Speaker 06

  I think that first commemoration in 1784 originated as a plan just to bring together the largest possible number of the remarkable musical forces, you know, really capable players and singers that were in England at the time. There were over 400 people in the choir.

• 15:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  Wow.

• 15:20Speaker 06

  And a couple of hundred in the orchestra. By the 1830s, they were doing these festival performances in the abbey that had over 600 musicians in the middle of the 19th century, around the centennial of Handel's death. They began doing performances in the Crystal Palace in London that had something like, you know, 2,700 singers. They were celebrating Handel, to be sure, but they were also celebrating the greatness of the empire.

• 15:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  These mega messiahs stuck around well into the 20th century.

• 15:55Speaker 06

  So the one that I grew up with, that my dad first sat me down on the living room sofa and played for me was, for many years, the standard, which is Eugene Ormandy, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

• 16:17Speaker 06

  That is a landmark recording that I still regard with great affection.

• 16:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  But those big messiahs began to give some ground to a style now called HIP, or Historically Informed Performance. One of the leaders of this movement was the conductor Christopher Hogwood.

• 16:41Speaker 06

  Hogwood was the music director of the Academy of Ancient Music, and that's the group with which he recorded the piece. Hogwood's first recording in, I think, around 1981. He was pretty early in trying to record the 1750 Fowling Hospital version that no one had ever really heard before, done with a very strict approach in terms of the number of instruments, the choice of keys for certain arias, so forth.

• 17:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  When it is a historically informed performance, what is that exactly? What's the instrumentation, the number and type of vocalists, et cetera?

• 17:19Speaker 06

  The first difference that strikes most people, and I do this for my students, when you play a modern instrument performance like the Philadelphia Orchestra, right alongside of Hogwood, is the difference in pitch. The pitch standard in the 18th century was an A that was 415 hertz.

• 17:41Speaker 06

  Our modern tuning system, when the oboe comes out on stage to play the A for the rest of the orchestra to tune up, the oboe is playing an A that's 440 Hz. So it's a half step higher. It's the difference in going from here to here.

• 18:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  Anyone who's not a musician, though, does that matter?

• 18:03Speaker 06

  It does, because, for instance, as a bass, I long ago stopped accepting engagements to sing Messiah at modern pitch because that half step makes a big difference in the bass aria in Part III, "The Trumpet Shall Sound." In Handel's day, he would have heard and so forth. Today, modern audience is here. And the hallelujah chorus, same thing. So Handel's hallelujah chorus would have sounded like as opposed to. And there is a real difference in the color and the feel and the mood.

• 18:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  How do you hear that difference? What are some feelings or senses that are activated differently?

• 18:53Speaker 06

  The higher pitch, our modern pitch standard, the only word that comes to mind is bright. It just feels very-

• 19:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  I was gonna say schmaltzy, but that's not fair, right? Bright is better.

• 19:04Speaker 06

  And there's something slightly warmer for me about the lower pitch, the baroque pitch, but also the fact that the string instruments are strung not with metal strings, but with gut strings. Sheep gut, cow gut was the norm in the 18th century. There is a transparency of sound, a lightness to the sound of those strings that comes through. Modern instruments need to be able to project with more force because our concert halls have gotten bigger. So it's a natural and understandable evolution.

• 19:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  Coming up after the break, there is another evolution to consider.

• 19:48Speaker 06

  He knew full well that the wording that he's using here was controversial.

• 19:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio. We'll be right back.

• 20:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  The lyrics of Messiah, which were assembled by Charles Jennings, are a collage of passages from the Hebrew Bible, or the Old Testament, as Christians call it, and the New Testament. In this regard, it is very much like the New Testament itself, which collects and reframes earlier scriptures to present Jesus as the Messiah. Roughly two-thirds of the text in Handel's Messiah comes from the Hebrew Bible, but Jews and Judaism are rarely mentioned, and when they are, the implications can be troubling. This shouldn't surprise anyone. In 18th century England, standard Christian doctrine typically cast Jews and Judaism in a negative theological light. These are the topics explored in a book,

• 21:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  a controversial book in Messiah circles, called Tainted Glory in Handel's Messiah: The Unsettling History of the World's Most Beloved Choral Work. Its author is Michael Marison.

• 21:14Speaker 07

  I've retired from teaching music history at Swarthmore College, and now I'm just sort of scandalous, I suppose, writing books and giving tons of pre-concert lectures and university lectures and so on, and just having a grand old time.

• 21:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  How did you come to be known as the scholar who argues that Messiah is anti-Semitic, or at least in part?

• 21:34Speaker 07

  Well, partly because I was one of the very few people who thought such a thing.

• 21:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  There wasn't a lot of scholarship previously on that question?

• 21:42Speaker 07

  No, not really. It was a little bit from a much admired colleague, David Hunter, had written in passing about some aspects of this. But it started, I guess, because I've spoken frequently against this idea that people say historians are just supposed to be 100% objective, and they're not supposed to have any agenda whatsoever, and so on. And I said, well, that's arguably a nice ideal, but I don't know any historian who fits that description. I can't think of a single one.

• 22:08Speaker 07

  They were accusing me of being agenda driven. I said, you know, guilty as charged.

• 22:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so what was Morrison's agenda? His answer really has to do with Charles Jennings's agenda.

• 22:19Speaker 07

  He's very carefully chosen which verses from the Hebrew Bible to have set to music and which verses from the New Testament to have set to music. It turns out that almost every single text that's set to music in Messiah, whatever testament it's from, that particular text is found in the other testament as well. I think the reason he did that was not just to show off his biblical knowledge. It was to show that the New Testament really is what he thought of as, and classical Christianity thought of as, a fulfillment of the Hebrew Bible. The other really big factor is that Jews, of course, translated the Bible into Greek a few hundred years before the New Testament was written. That's a complicated matter too, but where it's relevant for our purposes here

• 23:02Speaker 07

  is that some of the readings there are different from what's in the Hebrew Bible, and some of those different readings are extremely favorable towards particular views of what God's Messiah either was or is going to be like. He knew full well that the wording that he's using here was controversial. It's not entirely clear that what it actually says in the New Testament is, "God was manifested in the flesh." The first significant movement in the piece for this interpretation that I've been suggesting is when it comes to the chorus singing, "And they shall purify the sons of Levi." That already sounds a little dodgy, you know?

• 23:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  Because why?

• 23:38Speaker 07

  Well, who are the sons of Levi and what does it mean to purify them?

• 23:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  And why are they in need of purification?

• 23:43Speaker 07

  Exactly. I would say that the writers of the Hebrew Bible here thought that there were some abuses in the system and that God would see to it that they were cleaned up. In other words, you would move from a slightly less ideal Jewish situation to a better Jewish situation. But the way that that text was quite frequently understood in Handel's and Jennings's day, including in many of the books in Jennings's massive library, some of which I was able to demonstrate he was drawing on directly for Messiah, it says, you know, God is going to purify the Levitic system of worship and so on. We're going to get God's Messiah, Jesus. To put it in the crudest terms, what it means to purify the sons of Levi is to

• 24:27Speaker 07

  move from the synagogue to the church.

• 24:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  Right. Although, in the original context, from the Hebrew prophet Malachi, that was plainly not the intention.

• 24:36Speaker 07

  Speaking as a historian, that seems extremely unlikely. But if you are speaking as a classical Christian theologian, then they perfectly did think that that was the idea all along.

• 24:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, considering all this, how do you explain why this piece of music has not just survived, but thrived, especially compared to, you know, not many people are still singing the standard church hymns from that period?

• 25:00Speaker 07

  Well, I mean, they were very smart to put on those regular performances of Messiah at the Foundling Hospital as a fundraising thing. That's sort of on the business side what I think contributes to it. But I do think it's really great music. And I do think that it focuses on a subject that was of great concern to many people at that point. That comes back to what Jennings thought he was up to in getting Handel to set this in the first place. And he's fighting against enlightenment rationalism and deism, the idea that God created the cosmos like a watch and wound it up and then just let it go. The whole point of the New Testament and classical Christianity was that God does intervene

• 25:42Speaker 07

  in history, and that the most spectacular way that he ever did that was by assuming the physical body of Jesus. And so I see the whole Messiah setting as a sort of musically and emotionally fantastic defense of that idea.

• 25:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  How much do you think Handel cared about or agreed with that agenda?

• 26:01Speaker 07

  I don't know that he knew as much about it as Jennings. But I know it sounds really cliche. If this kind of stuff is in the air, it's pretty hard not to be concerned about it.

• 26:22Speaker 03

  After reading Morrison, it's very hard to listen to Messiah.

• 26:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  That is Susanna Heschel. She is chair of the Jewish Studies Program at Dartmouth. She is also the daughter of the late Abraham Joshua Heschel. He was a theologian, author, and civil rights leader, perhaps the most influential rabbi in 20th century America.

• 26:43Speaker 03

  On the one hand, there's nothing especially horrific about Handel's Messiah as libretto. It's not especially denigrating or negative. There are far worse expressions of denigrating Judaism in 2,000 years and art and theological writings. But of course, when you put something to music, it has a different impact. When a politician gets up and makes declarations against the Jews during the Third Reich and says Jews are terrible, that's one thing. But if you go to church and your pastor gets up and talks about the perfidious Jews and how Germans have to be protected from Jewish degeneracy, that has a different impact.

• 27:28Speaker 03

  And I would say with music. Music is seductive, and we may not even pay attention in the moment to the words we're hearing, but they wash over us.

• 27:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  When it comes to the title character in Handel's Messiah, Heschel points to one especially large paradox.

• 27:46Speaker 03

  Jesus never said he was a Christian. He was called rabbi. So if you want the faith of Jesus, go to a synagogue.

• 27:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do you have any idea what share of, let's say, American Christians think about Jesus as a rabbi or even know that Jesus was Jewish?

• 28:09Speaker 03

  They don't. And it's remarkable. Many students of mine at Dartmouth are taken aback when you say Jesus was Jewish. Jesus was Jewish? Jesus was a rabbi? They're surprised. Yeah.

• 28:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  So is it okay in the year 2025 for a Jew like me to love Handel's Messiah?

• 28:29Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 28:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  Tell me why. I mean, I'm grateful for the yes, but tell me why.

• 28:33Speaker 03

  Look, these questions have arisen over and over about, for example, Wagner. Richard Wagner didn't like Jews at all, even though his favorite conductor was a Jew and so on. And Jews loved his music in Germany. But what he wrote in his pamphlet, Judaism and Music, first published in 1850, is horrible, horrible antisemitism. Is that the reason for the Holocaust? Well, no, of course not. Was he the only one? Absolutely not. I would say that if we were to avoid reading or listening to any of the anti-Jewish material of the last 2,000 years, we wouldn't have much left. I mean, what are we going to do with The Great Gatsby? What should we do with Merchant of Venice? There are great, important works that we

• 29:18Speaker 03

  have to read, but we read them critically, and that's fine. I don't believe we have to overthrow the canon, whether it's a literary canon or musical.

• 29:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  Does that mean that therefore that Handel's Messiah can be a jolly, good wish for universal peace?

• 29:34Speaker 03

  I would suggest something a little different. There was a time, I remember from my childhood, but I also read in the literature produced by Jews in Germany in the 19th century, which is also a golden era, which is a sense of pride. We gave the world the Messiah. Look what we've done. We gave the world the Bible, God, monotheism. Without us, there would be no Christianity. So in fact, there's a sense of pride, of ownership. This is ours.

• 30:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  Leonard Bernstein, one of the best-known Jewish conductors in history, led the New York Philharmonic in A Messiah at Carnegie Hall in 1956. That was a year before Bernstein's West Side Story opened on Broadway. The Messiah he put together for the Philharmonic was significantly trimmed and restructured.

• 30:33Speaker 06

  To my knowledge, it is unique.

• 30:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  That, again, is the musicologist Mark Reisinger.

• 30:39Speaker 06

  He created a two-part performance out of what had originally been a three-part work by taking part two, cutting it in half, and reversing the two halves. That's the simplest way to explain it.

• 30:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  If you go to the New York Philharmonic's archives, you can see Bernstein's marked-up Messiah score. He calls part one "Christmas section" and part two "Easter section."

• 31:03Speaker 06

  It's one thing to decide that you're just going to perform part one during the Christmas season, which is a common thing, or that you're going to perform several of the big choruses as part of a larger choral festival. But to give what purports to be a performance of the entire work and to completely rearrange major sections of it, I'm not aware of another major performance that's ever done that.

• 31:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  And Bernstein made some other statements with his Messiah.

• 31:36Speaker 06

  In 1956, Carnegie Hall still had segregated dressing rooms. We're seven years before the Civil Rights Act was passed. For him to make the choice to have two African-American soloists onstage, Adele Addison was the soprano, William Warfield was the bass, the choice of those soloists is also significant. In addition to that, Russell Oberlin was his alto soloist, a countertenor. To my knowledge, there had been no countertenor performances of this music, certainly on a major stage like Carnegie Hall. So this must have been a revelatory experience for most of the audience

• 32:20Speaker 06

  to hear a man singing in the female range with this very beautiful alto voice, these arias that they'd probably only ever heard sung previously by women.

• 32:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  Leonard Bernstein's Messiah was controversial. New York Times critic Harold Schoenberg complained about Bernstein's, quote, "several major cuts, wholesale musical transpositions, and his high-handed rearrangement that scrambled the order of movements." Other critics praised Bernstein for getting in touch with the historical Messiah. He had traded in a piano, which did not exist in Handel's time, for a harpsichord, and Bernstein, in casting Russell Oberlin, not only helped launch his career but set a path for a countertenor renaissance in America. When I looked up the soloists for this year's Messiah performances at the New York Philharmonic, which Jane Glover would be conducting, I saw that she would be using a countertenor.

• 33:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  In fact, all four soloists in this year's Messiah would be the exact same four that I saw back in 2021, the performance that got me addicted to Messiah in the first place. So that felt like a nice closing of the circle. Coming up after the break, we ask Jane Glover if we can sit in on rehearsals.

• 33:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio. We'll be right back.

• 34:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  Jane Glover, after showing us Handel's Old House in London, walks us around the corner to the church that Handel attended, St. George's. Inside, it's just us.

• 34:21Speaker 01

  It's got lovely windows, not stained glass, except at the east end, but there's a lot of light in the building and a magnificent organ.

• 34:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  We come across a pamphlet with some history of the church, and I ask Glover to read a bit. This is perhaps beneath her. After all, she has written her own book on Messiah, but honestly, I just love her voice. She is officially Dame Jane Glover, and she sounds like it.

• 34:48Speaker 01

  Among the many famous men and women associated one way or the other with St. George's, the best known is almost certainly George Frederick Handel. He moved to a house in Brook Street, around the corner, in 1723. While the church was being built, and almost immediately became involved in the affairs of the new parish. He loved England and in seventeen twenty-six became a naturalised British citizen. In seventeen fifty-one, his sight began to fail, and by seventeen fifty-three, he was totally blind. In spite of crippling arthritis, he continued to make his way to St George's, Sunday by Sunday. He died in seventeen fifty-nine after thirty-five years as a parishioner and worshipper at St George.

• 35:34Speaker 01

  Handel composed some of his greatest music at his house in Brook Street, including Messiah. Although not heard in St George's during the composer's lifetime, Messiah is now performed here annually by the church's professional choir.

• 35:49Speaker 01

  I have to tell you, one of the very first Messiah I conducted was in here, but I wasn't a professional musician then. I brought a group from Oxford, where I was, and we performed Messiah in here, and it was a great thrill.

• 36:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  You were a student still?

• 36:04Speaker 01

  I was a postgraduate student, yes. I think I was twenty-two or something.

• 36:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  So that counts among your one hundred and twenty?

• 36:10Speaker 01

  No, it doesn't. I count my professional ones, not my ones that I didn't get paid for.

• 36:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  Your life today as a conductor, you're as successful and acclaimed as they get, and you write books and you do other things. Beneath you, there is a pyramid of musicians and others who do work as hard as you do, I'm sure, but success and financial stability as a musician remains very, very, very difficult. There is patronage today, it's different than it was back then. How would you compare the state of being a working musician in your realm today versus early eighteenth century?

• 36:56Speaker 01

  That's such an interesting question.

• 37:01Speaker 01

  I think every era has its own challenges and its own strengths. It probably has always felt precarious unless, you know, you do get a smashing royal patron as Handel did. He was unusual in that. If you had a great patron like Haydn did and Handel did, then you were lucky. Or if you had a permanent job with the court, which many people did in the 18th century, you were fine. But if you were outside that, like Mozart, it was incredibly precarious. And I think most of us nowadays think we're in that camp. You, in a way, go from job to job or contract to contract.

• 37:45Speaker 01

  Your contract may be long if you're appointed to be principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra for five or 10 years, then you all don't need to worry about anything. Or if you have a job as the head of an opera company, or you have a job in an orchestra. But even those are becoming more precarious.

• 38:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  I know at this year's upcoming New York Philharmonic performance, which you are conducting, lucky for us, in New York, you've got a countertenor and one female soloist. Tell us what you can about the New York Philharmonic version that we'll hear.

• 38:15Speaker 01

  I've done all these 120 performances, and every one of them is different depending on where you are and who you've got. I've done enormous ones. The biggest chorus I had was about 450 in Australia. They didn't sing it all. There was a smaller choir to sing the more challenging and contrapuntal choruses, but they sang the big stuff and it was amazing. And I've certainly done it with symphony orchestras in places like the Royal Albert Hall. At the other end of the spectrum, I've done it with, you know, 16 singers, all of whom will step out to sing the solos, like the ones in Trinity Wall Street, which I did last year. My performances this year will be very different from the ones I did in Wall Street last year.

• 39:01Speaker 01

  And yet I think the spirit of it should remain the same. I'm bringing my own chorus from Chicago, actually, from Music of the Baroque. That's a professional chorus and they're fabulous.

• 39:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  How do you describe your role as a conductor in the moment? What are you actually doing and what are you trying to accomplish?

• 39:20Speaker 01

  The bottom line is that the conductor is responsible to the composer. And I have to, I think, convey what the composer put on the page to the audience who've paid to come and hear this with the colleagues I have in front of me. It's partly technique, but it's mainly communication. Anybody could stand up and beat four, but it's whether you involve people in the beating of that four and conveying the larger picture of where those four beats are actually going.

• 39:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  I understand you conduct a Messiah without a score, is that true?

• 39:55Speaker 01

  I do, yeah.

• 39:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  So how does that work? And I'm curious if anyone in the orchestra, the singers, are ever made a bit nervous by the fact that you don't have a score. They do, after all.

• 40:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. When I first did, for instance, Figaro, I don't know if you've heard of it, but it remained nameless. I rehearsed with the score and then we got to the dress rehearsal and I did a few notes before we started the run. And then I closed the score and handed it to my assistant behind me. And the concert master said, "What are you doing?" And I said, "I don't need that now." He said, "Well, of course you need it. What happens if something goes wrong?" And I said, "Well, I'll put it right."

• 40:34Speaker 01

  He really didn't want me to do this at all. But mostly, particularly on the concert platform, the desk goes away. You're absolutely close to your musicians and just you have them in your hands, in a sense, and everybody's doing it together. I think people like it.

• 41:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  When December came, Jane Glover arrived in New York City to conduct this year's run of four Messiah performances at Lincoln Center. As she mentioned when we spoke in London, she brought her own choral group, Music of the Baroque, from Chicago. Then there was a Baroque-sized selection of 30-some musicians from the New York Philharmonic, and the four vocal soloists: the soprano Amanda Forsyth, countertenor John Holliday, tenor Nicholas Pahn, and bass baritone Kevin Daze. They wouldn't have much time to all rehearse together, but everyone was plainly prepared: Jane Glover, perhaps most of all. We said a quick hello. Lovely to see you again. And then we let her get on with her work.

• 41:47Speaker 01

  So let's do the last resurrection, from the prick up to 140.

• 41:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  As with St. George's Church in London, we were the only civilians around. Jane Glover led them through the full piece, from the opening symphonia to a rousing amen chorus. When Glover told me earlier that she wants to have the musicians and the singers in her hands, well, here's what it sounds like when she does that.

• 42:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  As needed, Glover would stop her players and give instruction.

• 42:40Speaker 01

  Have the courage, just even to be quieter, because I want this to be real human frailty. And then we let it be very un-frail.

• 42:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  "Have the courage to be even quieter," she told them. Glover wanted to sense the real "human frailty," as she put it, so that when it's time for the piece to be un-frail, we would really feel it.

• 43:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  This reminded me of something the author Charles King told us earlier about the first vocal movement of Messiah.

• 43:16Speaker 08

  It begins with the idea of comfort, ye, comfort ye, my people. What is remarkable about that text is that it's not saying be of comfort. It is saying you do the comforting. You go and act in the world in a comforting way. It felt like it was a piece of art that could do something in the world, not comfort you, actually, but buck you up.

• 43:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  I went back to Lincoln Center later that week, twice, in fact, to see and hear Jane Glover conduct Messiah. I understand now why she is so revered. Her conducting is joyful and energetic, athletic is maybe the best way to describe it. She doesn't use a score, of course, so she's always totally engaged with the players. And you can watch the music seize her, the way it has seized so many people for so many years. In addition to the two philharmonic performances I attended that week and the rehearsal, I managed to slip in one more Messiah down at St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue. They're famous for their boys choir school.

• 44:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  I had arrived late, and the only seat I could find was way toward the back, behind a massive stone column. It blocked my entire view, couldn't see a single performer. So I just listened. I listened to the violin choruses that had somehow sprung from Handel's mind nearly 300 years ago. I listened to what Jane Glover had taught me to listen for, the frailties and the un-frailties. Every once in a while, I felt the rumble of a subway train passing by underneath the church. I loved the contradiction, the new and the old, the crooked straight, the rough places plain.

• 45:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'm not quite sure how to describe my relationship with this piece of music. Yes, I find it beautiful and moving, but it's more than that. It feels like a doorway to a world of possibility, even in the face of chaos and despair, especially in the face of chaos and despair. I appreciate your accompanying me on this journey into the heart of Handel's Messiah, and I hope you have a nice holiday season, whatever holiday you may celebrate, including none at all. We will be back soon with another episode. Until then, take care of yourself, and if you can, someone else, too.

• 46:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. You can find our entire archive on any podcast app. It's also at Freakonomics.com, where we publish transcripts and show notes. This series was produced with great care and skill and ambition by Zach Lipinski, and it was edited also with care, skill, and ambition by Ellen Frankman. It was mixed by Jasmine Klinger with help from Jeremy Johnson. We had recording help in New York from Evan Manners, in London and Chester from Rob Double, and in Dublin from Regan Hutchins. Thanks also to Katrine Nyland-Sorensen for her help with production and for her podcast Handel's Messiah: The Advent Calendar.

• 46:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  Special thanks to the London Symphony Orchestra and LSO Live for letting us use their recording of Messiah, conducted by Sir Colin Davis in 2006. I have listened to this recording hundreds of times over the past few years, and it never gets old. Also, big thanks to the New York Philharmonic for letting us sit in on their Messiah, which was properly awesome. Thanks also to all the musicologists, conductors, musicians, historians, and others who shared their insights, including Tim Page. And thanks to both the Handel Hendrix House and the Foundling Museum in London for their kind cooperation. The Freakonomics Radio Network staff also includes Alina Coleman, Augusta Chapman, Dalvin

• 47:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  Abouajie, Eleanor Osborne, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippon, Ilaria Montenacort, Morgan Levy, Sarah Lilly, and Teo Jacobs.

• 47:38Speaker 01

  He moved to a house in Brook Street while the church was being built. Sounds as if the church is still being built.

• 47:50Speaker 04

  The Freakonomics Radio Network. The Hidden Side of Everything.

• 47:58Speaker 05

  Stitcher.