Freakonomics Radio - 656. How Handel Got His Mojo Back

Episode Date: December 12, 2025

When he wrote Messiah (in 24 days), Handel was past his prime and nearly broke. One night in Dublin changed all that. (Part two of “Making Messiah.”) SOURCES:Charles King, political scientist at Georgetown University.Chris Scobie, curator of music, manuscripts, and archives at the British Library.Ellen Harris, musicologist and professor emeritus at MIT.Mark Risinger, teacher at St. Bernard's School.Philip Rushforth, organist and master of the choristers at the Chester Cathedral.Proinnsías Ó Duinn, conductor and music director of Our Lady's Choral Society. RESOURCES:Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel's Messiah, by Charles King (2024)."Arnaud du Sarrat and the international music trade in Halle and Leipzig c.1700," by Tomasz Górny (Early Music, 2023).George Frideric Handel: A Life with Friends, by Ellen Harris (2014).Handel (Composers Across Cultures), by Donald Burrows (2012)."Georg Händel (1622–97): The Barber-Surgeon Father of George Frideric Handel (1685–1759)," by Aileen Adams and B. Hofestädt (Journal Of Medical Biography, 2005).Handel's Messiah: A Celebration: A Richly Illustrated History of the Music and Its Eighteenth-Century Background, by Richard Luckett (1995).Handel's Messiah The Advent Calendar, podcast series. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In part one of this series, we visited Dublin, the unlikely site of George Friedrich Handel's first performance of Messiah. I say unlikely because Handel lived in London, the capital of the music world. Dublin was far away and relatively provincial. And Handel was a longtime superstar, hugely popular as both composer and performer, with a royal patronage on the side. So why did he decide to go all the way to Dublin to put on a series of concerts? Well, because they asked, and importantly, they offered to pay. The Irish would cover all his expenses, and Handel would get a cut of the ticket sales, except, interestingly, for Messiah. That was the one new composition he was bringing to Dublin, and it would be performed as a charity event. In any case, in November of 1741,

an aging and not very healthy handle left for Dublin. The first leg of the trip would take several days, traveling by horse-drawn coach up to Chester, an old city in the north of England. From there, he would take a shorter coach ride up to a ferry port on the English coast. The ferry would take another day or three, depending on the wind, to get across the Irish Sea to Dublin.

But his trip didn't go exactly as planned. When he arrived in Chester, he learned that the Irish Sea was so rough, that you couldn't get a ferry for at least a few days. So, Handel had to hunker down in Chester for a bit. We decided to go to Chester for ourselves to see what that might have been like. There was always this story about Messiah and Chester. That is Philip Rushforth.

I lived in a house in Abbey Street here that had a school in the back garden. It was a room that was rather like a chapel. And it was rumoured that Handel had been in this room. in order to rehearse some of the Messiah. That rumor left an impression on Philip Rushforth. He would go on to become the organist and master of the choristers at Chester Cathedral, which is where we have met him today. Rushforth has worked here for a few decades, but when you consider the cathedral itself,

that's not very long. It was founded in 1092 as a Benedictine monastery. The current building dates back to the 1300s, and George Friderick Handel arrived here in 1741. The weather was poor, so he was delayed in Chester. He wanted some proof of his music that he'd written down. He wanted someone to sing it, so he could hear it and see what he'd written was correct, I assume.

And he asked Edmund Baker, the organist of the cathedral at the time, if he had someone who could cite sing. Baker said, yes, I've got a man in the choir called Mr. Janssen. And Janssen got it wrong, quite significantly, I think. Handel shouted at Janssen and said, You told me you could sing at sight. Janssen said, I can indeed, sir, but not at first sight. I thought it was quite a good comeback, if that's indeed what happened.

In your mind, how much was Messiah developed here in Chester? The story is that he was still working on it and hadn't finished it when he passed through Chester on his way to Dublin. But he must have been very close to the end if he knew that the premiere was happening in Dublin. There is an organist practicing in the cathedral sanctuary for a concert that evening, so Rushforth walks us through the sanctuary. This is where the monks' dormitory used to be.

The monks would descend down those stairs to worship eight or nine times a day, you know. And this is our main rehearsal space in here. You can see where the medieval wall finishes and where new... begins. And now we are in a quiet, modern rehearsal room with a piano. Shall I just play a little bit? Yeah, tell us what we're going to hear. We're going to hear the interlude, I suppose you call it,

the pastoral symphony from Handel's Messiah. No, he didn't call it pastoral symphony. He called it Pfea, correct? Pfea, that's right, yes. And what is Pfea? What is that derived from? I knew you were going to ask me that. I looked it up later. Pifa comes from the Italian word Pfe Ferrari.

They were the shepherd musicians who used to play in the streets of Rome, especially around Christmas time. Shepherds are important all through handles Messiah, as witnesses, as messengers, as allegories. When did you first hear, Messiah? I would have been probably about 11, 12 years old. And what kind of impression did it make? I just thought that there was such vitality in all of the music.

And being relatively young then, I just thought that it was supremely beautiful. Today, on Freakonomics Radio, how that supremely beautiful piece of music became Handles Salvation. He had to exercise a search. amount of entrepreneurial muscle. We'll hear how Handel got so good in the first place. Scarlatti, one of his contemporaries, would always make the sign of the cross whenever Handel's name was mentioned. We'll hear what producing operas did to him. He had 50 pounds left. He withdrew that, and he had nothing.

And yes, we will hear about his comeback, because who doesn't love a good comeback story? Part two of our series Making Messiah starts now. This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything, with your host, Stephen Dubner. was born in 1685 in Halla, a city that today is in northeast Germany, back then was part of Brandenburg, Prussia. Johann Sebastian Bach was born nearby just a few weeks later. They were exact contemporaries from the same part of Germany who tragically never met in person, but they were certainly aware of one another. That is Mark Reisinger. We met him in the previous episode. He's the one that sounds like this. Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah.

Rysinger is a musicologist and a Handel specialist who teaches in New York City. It's a bit of an axiom among singers that Bach, in many cases, really does almost treat the voice like an instrument. It's hard to differentiate between the way he's writing for the violins versus the sopranos. Handel's music by and large, that's not so much the case. Bach was born into a pious family of important musicians. Handel's father was a barber surgeon. He cut hair, but also limbs, in need of amputation. His son, George Friedrich, began playing the organ when he was very young.

Some scholars have argued that his father opposed his musical interests, but he seems to have received an excellent education. He was lucky because he spent the first 18 years of his life in the Halle, which was a pretty important. city commercially. I heard a fascinating paper only a couple of years ago at the American Handel Society conference from a European scholar who has located some evidence about the amount of music publishing that went on and that was funneled through Hala. It tells us a lot about the range of music from all over Europe that was probably available. More importantly, though, I think his teacher,

Friedrich William Zachoff was well-connected. He was a church musician who had a pretty substantial library of music himself, and he was choosing the music to give Handel as models to imitate in his early compositions, as well as the kinds of things that he needed to learn to play on the organ. At age 18, Handel left Halle for Hamburg. And that is an important chapter because he spent time playing in the opera, orchestra as well as learning to compose and encountering older musicians who exercised a fair amount of influence on him. One of the operas that he would have known there is the one that

ultimately is the source for the aria. I know my Redeemer Liveth and Messiah. I know my Redeemer Liveth is part of a lineage of melodies that can be traced back all the way to a melody by Reinhard Kaiser that Handel would have encountered when he was in Hamburg as a late teenager playing in the opera orchestra there. He's trying to make you feel something.

And that is Charles King, a political scientist at Georgetown and author of the book Every Valley. We heard from him in part one of the series as well. He is not a singer, but he is a very good explainer. If you listen to enough Handel, you'll hear loads of recycling.

which was very common at the time, stealing other people's chord progressions and melodic lines, also very common. I mean, if you found something that worked, why wouldn't you use it? You write about the period or the moment, really, when Handel was discovered by a Medici, who's come to Germany. I gather to scout, right, to scout for musicians, performers, maybe composers. It reminded me of those stories you used to hear about Hollywood, like Lana Turner being discovered in a coffee, shop or whatever. But just talk about how it was that Handel came to be in Italy in the first place. Handel, in a way, had to get to Italy, I think, because the composer that he eventually becomes and the musician he eventually becomes really depended on his time there. We want to think of the courtly system in Italy at the time as one court trying to one up the other to acquire the best artists, the best musicians, perhaps not exclusively, but to have them for a period of time or a season. And they would be paid with lodging in food and maybe in cash payments. And they would

want someone who was not only entertaining, but who would increase the prestige of the court. Handel is acquired this way, likely by one of the Medici from Florence, who see him performing and then he's invited to spend a period of time there. He's composing for secular audiences by and large, whether it's the court of a prince or in an Italian opera house. And that, I think, gives a very different feel to all of Handel's music that comes after. He wants to have an effect on an audience.

Handel develops this incredible reputation, so much so that Scarlatti, one of his contemporaries, would always make the sign of the cross whenever Handel's name was mentioned as this person who would just tear up a keyboard. Handel had been in Italy for three years when he got a better offer, back to Germany to become master of the choir

for Prince George of Hanover. He took that job when he was 25, but he didn't stay long, an even brighter future beckoned in London. Here's Charles King. London was just going crazy. This was the moment when the West End was developing, both as new housing for a wealthier class,

but it was the thing that would eventually, of course, become the theater district. And Handel was at the absolute center of that. He had to exercise a certain amount of entrepreneurial muscle in his work in London. That's Mark Reisinger again. After he'd been in London for some time, he launched his Royal Academy in 1720

under the patronage of the King, under King George I, it was an opera company that was kind of a joint venture that people invested in and that the king also subsidized. As someone like you who knows this music well and knows the history of the music well, what cultures and countries and traditions do you hear? In other words, do you hear someone who was young in Germany and performed and heard the kind of music he heard in Germany with the training he had and then went to Italy and did. what he did there for several years and then went to London and got caught up in the culture there?

Or is it not so distinguishable as that? It's an interesting question. I think that if you were to take his first opera composed in his Hamburg years, we're talking around 1703, and compare it with the operas from the late 30s, written in London around the time that he was sort of winding down, you would notice a big difference in the. fluidity of his melodic style, the angularity of harmonic progressions in the early works, things just, they didn't have the same kind of flow of harmonic grammar and syntax until he made it to Italy and was becoming familiar with the Italian style. So he still remained himself, but his style is rather cosmopolitan. Handel is certainly traveling from one culture to the next and one place to the next,

and without really knowing what's going to be there for him. So he's a risk taker in his own life, just like he's a risk taker in his art. Handel's being an outsider is really essential to the story of his life as an artist. I think being a non-native English speaker turns out to be really critical. Of course, he's multilingual already by the time that he arrives in Britain and his English gets better and better, although he'll have this German accent throughout his life that his friends, you know, always made fun of. But the thing he can hear is the rhythms of the language. So if you take something like the hallelujah chorus, just that syncopated line forever and ever and ever,

it took a non-native speaker, I think, to hear, oh, here's a natural rhythm to this set of words that perhaps others can't hear. One of the really terrific things, I think, in Messiah, is that you have, occasionally melodic lines that Handel has self-plagiarized, where he's taken something else, perhaps originally composed in another language like Italian, and then he'll set it to an English text. The most famous example of this is, Four Unto Us a Child is Born. When you listen to it, it goes, For Unto Us a Child is Born, with the emphasis on the word four. If you think about it for a moment, it's like, well, that's not at all the way we would speak that line. We might emphasize the word us or a child, you know, for unto us,

a child is born. But because Handel had taken it from an Italian duet, the first word of which was no, and somebody emphasizing the word no at the beginning, we get for unto us a child is born. But what could be more memorable than a miss sung line in English that we now think of as the obvious way to write that line? Coming up, after the break. Have you ever heard Follow the Money? We look at the economics of being an 18th century pop star. I'm Stephen Dubner.

This is Freakonomics Radio. We'll be right back. Tell me why. You love Handel's music so much? Well, I love it because it expresses emotion, I think, in such beautiful and humane ways. I find it difficult when I listen to Handel not to feel the emotion that he is expressing. Where does Messiah rank for you personally? It's a musical work of enormous beauty and power that brings you through an emotional journey

that gives you peace and a feeling of redemption, it has a life spring to it. That is the musicologist Ellen Harris. I'm a Handel scholar and have written on Handel's finances, on Handel's cantatas in Italy, on his life in London. I do like to joke that Handel is my man. My husband does let me, so that's okay. Of all the Handel researchers and biographers,

through the years, you seem to have taken things to a whole different level, especially trying to understand handles finances as an entrepreneur, which he was, and a performer, which he was, and an investor, which he was. What made you pursue those avenues in addition to the music avenues? I did have a colleague early on say to me, why are you spending so much time at the Bank of England? And why aren't you looking at the music? And I said, well, have you ever heard follow the money. Essentially, if we really understood Handel's finances, you would understand much more about his life and work. And it was also enthralling, actually, to go to the Bank of England and to sit in their archive and call up these ledgers from the 18th century that are enormous

volumes. Some of them are four, even five inches thick. And there's Handel's account. Then there are transfer volumes where every transaction is registered, and you needed to sign. And there's Handel Signature. There's Handle Signature in these ledgers. Describe him as a person. If you and I happen to be around back then, what's his reputation? What does he look like? What does he enjoy? What does he not enjoy? How public is he, et cetera? He's a big man. He's tall, unusually tall for the age. Good looking, as one can see from his younger portraits. he of course gained a good deal of weight as he got older he's described as walking with kind of a lope he was very genial with friends

but a curmudgeon frequently in regard to his music he was known to have a short temper so you didn't want to get on the bad side of him was handle a good time guy did he like a party did he like a drink he seems to have yes there are stories about him

and his friend Joseph Guppy, who was a scene painter for him, and also an independent artist, going off and having drinking parties with one of their patrons, but also they went off to Europe together at one point, and one of Handel's admirers said that he had hoped that Handel would be going to a spa, but now there was no hope for improvement since he was traveling with Guppy. So that does give you some sense of their reputation. Is your sense that he was a bachelor devoted to his work? Is your sense that he was maybe gay in a time when that was not so easy, especially with his royal patronage, perhaps?

What is your sense generally of his romantic life? I cannot speak to handle sexuality. What he did in his bedroom, I have no idea. I doubt that he was actively homosexual in the sense of, the homosexual clubs and things that existed in the 18th century because he was too public a figure and that probably would be known. When he chose people to be really close to in a personal way, they were men. There was a kind of community that he felt with other men, and I don't have any sense of him having any relationships with women. How religious, how pious was Handel?

Handel went to church weekly. He was a member of the St. George Hanover Square Church. He had his own pew. He was a Lutheran, of course. There was an attempt to convert him to Catholicism in Italy, which he refused. Lots of people didn't, but Handel refused and apparently said that he would rather live and die in the religion to which he was born, whether right or wrong. The sense of maintaining his Lutheran, ties, I think is interesting, given there was a Lutheran chapel at St. James's palace, because the royal family worshipped as Lutherans. There was synergy between the royal family and Handel in their Lutheran background, which is why some of his religious works have corrals in them. You have to always remember with Handel that he had this extraordinary benefit, which was a pension from the royal coffers. I think a lot of people, when they hear pension, they think of something to take care of you in retirement, but this is basically a monthly stipend, yes?

Stipend is a good word for it, and he got his first royal stipend in 1712 from Queen Anne. When George came over in 1714, continued it immediately, and then in 1723 added 200 additional pounds for work with the chapel royal, and then another 200 pounds for teaching the royal children, the grandchildren. And that 600 pounds was continued throughout his life, even long after the royal grandchildren were grown. And that just was sent to him directly rather than the bank? He would go and pick it up, actually. So that was his living expense? Yes, that is correct. He had the opportunity because of the pension, I think, to experiment and to say no to people that other composers did not have.

He was trying to figure out how do I put my own art on a firmer foundation. And there were lots of things that he tried. That again is Charles King. His day job was receiving a salary from the British court. He works for a while for what is one of the first joint stock companies to be involved in opera production. He was also the first composer in Britain to assert copyright to his compositions. We know from his bank receipts that he wasn't particularly good at always collecting on those rights or the rights to publication, for example, and piracy of intellectual property was sort of the norm in this period. But he did have income from the published manuscripts that he managed to put out into the world. So in all of these ways, he's figuring out how is art not only a thing that inspires or that entertains,

but that also provides an income not only for himself, but for the people he cared about, friends and family. Do we know anything about any financial or economic mentors? Oh, that's such a good question. Because as you describe him, he's fairly sophisticated and certainly more sophisticated. than most people who make music for a living. Yeah, yeah. Well, I think this is a place where patronage and handles innovation really come together. He's not the one who's organizing the joint stock company or worrying about the legal instruments that will be required to set this up.

But he is closely connected with all of the people who very much are in this world, who have the wherewithal the means and the legal contacts to create the structures that allow handle, to succeed. Theaters had to worry about how you sell tickets. Theaters had to worry about paying the musicians, the artists, the folks who were designing the sets, the copyists who were creating the parts for the musicians in the pit or the equivalent. And so Handel from very early on is acutely aware of the economic and business side of entertainment in a way that perhaps some of his contemporaries who relied on noble patronage were not. Ellen Harris again.

King George had given the opera company a warrant for the production of operas for 21 years. It's 1720 to 1741. And it's clear that Handel felt he needed to fulfill this obligation. Handel's operas were popular with the London audience, but there were challenges, including a rival company, the opera of the nobility. That one was started by King George's son, Frederick. the Prince of Wales. So they had deep pockets and Handel had to compete with them over talent. Italian singers with whom he had difficulty, they were extraordinarily expensive. They frequently didn't want to sing what he wrote for them. They're very funny anecdotes. He had

the soprano Francesca Coutzoni rehearsing one of the first operas that she sang with him. He rehearsed in his house. He would play the harpsichord and they would sing. And he would sing. And she did not want to sing. This aria, it's just very beautiful. It isn't an exact quote, but it's a story that he said, well, you may be the greatest she-double, but I am Beaselbop, and threatened to throw her out the window. He also had a tenor once who refused to sing an aria and said that if he was made to sing the aria, that he would jump into the harpsichord. Handel apparently responded because he had a really good sense of the entrepreneur.

He said, please let me know ahead of time because I will advertise it. More people will come to see you jump than will come to hear you sing. But of course, the opera of the nobility got Farinelli, the greatest castrato of the era, and Handel had tried repeatedly to hire him and had been unable to get him.

But it wasn't just the singers. there were sets to build, costumes to create, and because Handel was fond of spectacle, there were occasionally fireworks. Running an opera company anywhere is a very difficult proposition. It's a very expensive art form. It's very difficult to run one, much less two, major opera companies.

The opera companies he had been engaged with, the Royal Academy of Music, from 1720, and then his own company from 1728, and then the opera and nobility comes in and begins competing with him in 1732. Repeatedly, the opera company was running out of money. And that's primarily because opera is just so expensive to produce? Well, opera is very expensive to produce, and as a result, I think he stopped receiving salary. He was not able to build up any kind of cash fund for himself.

During the early years of the Royal Academy, he was receiving into his annuities account at the Bank of England, approximately 700 pounds a year. Today, that would be the equivalent of around $165,000. I think we can take that to be his salary from the Royal Academy of Music. In 1728, it went bankrupt, and then a new company was formed. Handel continued getting 700 pounds a year for a while. But in 1732, it all ended. And suddenly, he sold all of the annuity account.

He opened a cash account with what he had left. That was in the vicinity of 2,000 pounds. Over the next years, he kept withdrawing money year after year, until in 1738 he had 50 pounds left. He withdrew that, and he had nothing. Between 1739 and 1743, he had no accounts at all in the Bank of England. He had run out of salary, basically. Ultimately, his accounts were reduced to nothing,

and then he had nothing in the bank. So he was in bad shape financially, but that wasn't all. He began having serious health problems in 1737. He had a major, what is called, a paralytic attack. So his health, I think, was increasingly problematic. And as soon as he wrote that opera in 1741, which is Deodemia, he left town. He said that he was going to Dublin and looking for, forward to it and not having anything to do anymore with the people who were, you know, meddling with opera.

He had received an invitation to come to Dublin to do a series of concerts. He'd never been to Ireland before. But if things were going well, he might stick around to the spring. But all of this was sort of up in the air. That, again, is Charles King. And the only new thing that he had with him was this composition called Messiah, which he had composed the music for on the basis of this text written by his friend Charles Jennings, Bible verses not in the right order, set to the conventions of Italian opera. This was not a recipe for success. Handel composed this thing really because he was looking for something new to offer on what amounted to a greatest hits tour. When any artist starts doing a greatest hits tour, that's probably not a great sign about what the arc of their artistic career is like. Coming up after the break, how Dublin and Messiah changed everything for our friend George Tridwick Handel.

I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio. We'll be right back. Handel's Messiah is full of melodies so rich that some people just can't help themselves. He trusted in God that he would deliver him. Let him deliver him if he delight in him. That, again, is the musicologist Ellen Harris. I just think it's one of the most spectacular choruses, but it's not one that people remember. They remember the Hallelujah chorus, but I love this chorus.

I understand you gave some fairly serious consideration to becoming a professional singer when you were younger, yes? Yes. Tell me about that and about making the choice to become an academic as opposed to a professional singer. It's very simple, really. If you want to become a professional singer, you have to believe that you're the best. I didn't. I did have this wonderful professor at Brown University who said to me, well, Ellen, your voice is very good when you practice. You didn't love to practice, I'm guessing? No, no, no. I sang when I felt like it. And the effort that has to go into maintaining a voice or any instrument, I mean, you're at it all the time. I just didn't think that that was really where I was headed,

and I loved the research. The whole idea of working in an archive, a lot of the work I do frequently makes me feel like a detective, because you can uncover things, you discover things in the archives. I, too, like discovering things in the archives, which now brings us to London. We've made George Friedrich Handel's Messiah trip in reverse. We started in Dublin, then to Chester, and here we are now, back in London, Handel's adopted hometown. He is well represented in a variety of archives here, including the British Library.

So I'm Chris Scobie, British Library's curator for music manuscripts and archives. I've been working here since 2008. and in this role since 2017. You'll see in a moment there's elements of it that are quite fragile and we need to be careful with. So every time it comes out of the storage where it's temperature controlled, low humidity, there's things we need to be careful with it.

We don't want to move it all the time. There's always risks involved in things like that. So this is the first manuscript that was created. Meaning by Handle's Hand. In Handles Hand, yeah. So it's known as the composing manuscript. So I'll open it out. And can you just describe,

this beautiful book it's bound in? Yeah, this is a kind of red leather binding. It's actually from the 1950s. It's quite a modern binding. And we've got the name of the piece, Messiah, an oratorio by Handel, original score. And before it was bound in this, was it bound elsewhere?

Was it in loose pages? It would have been bound in something probably more like a marble boards kind of binding, which was typical of Georgia's library bindings. Got it. So it's interesting. There's three or four different languages. through here. Obviously, English, the text that he's writing down. There's Italian for the typical

tempo markings and sometimes movement headings and things like that. There's German, there's little bits of Latin. What's this say here? So we've got a note being added afterwards. Here, part of the overture and the beginning of the rest, it's comfort ye my people are wanting. I'm impressed you don't use the fancy gloves. Yes, so that's something we've been told specifically by conservation not to use gloves. For the simple reason, you lose the ability to be tactileness to be careful, basically. Meaning you might tear it more likely with gloves? Clean hands are better than gloves.

There's just less of a risk. If I just jump forwards a little bit, I quite like this page from He Shall Purify to see how the work is going on. So we've got a phrase here with lots of semi-quavers and one of these running passages. He's had to continue the stave lines off the end to capture the idea. So rather than going over the page,

wiggly bar lines, not straight. I see. So he's extending the staff. Yeah. You kind of get the impression of working in the moment, having to create a bit more space because this is what you've got to get down on page. There's work going on here.

There's the dirt from work. There's the ink sort of smudging across things here as well. It's moving quickly. The notes are moving quickly. We've got lots of semi-quavers. So the end sound is going to sound fast. But you can almost feel the speed of the ink on the page. The way the notes are tipping over more and more.

They're kind of increasingly coming off centre and tipping over to the right through the speed and perhaps enthusiasm of writing. And when you get the personal connection, straightaway. It's not just conveying the notes here. This personality jumps off the page. I have to say, it's just awe-inspiring to think that I'm here with the composer's manuscript in the British Library, and I have a pen in my hand just casually because I've been taking notes. Like, I could. Yeah, you probably should do that. Yeah. I probably keep the pen away. Scobie now turns to the most famous page of the original Messiah manuscript,

a page that is stained by a massive ink spill. Ooh. But it looks like they really wiped quickly and preserved what was underneath. Yeah, so what's interesting about this is, actually, if you go to the page before, this is what's covered by the ink. It's the same music, but it's not. in Handel's hand. And I'm reliably informed. I think you can tell from these little stainings in each corner that this copied page would have been attached over the ink spill.

You're saying that the spill happened, someone wiped, the music beneath it was visible, but someone recopied the page. Exactly, yeah. And not him. Not him, no. It's been fairly well established by various generations of Handel scholars that this isn't Handel's handwriting this bit, which leads us to think that maybe The ink spill actually happened during the copying for their conducting score. Things like these details aren't really known for sure. It's kind of piecing together what evidence there is to make some kind of detective-like assumptions. Spills happened, of course.

And then you bought them, and then you get all sorts of mess. Yes. That, again, is the musicologist Ellen Harris. I mean, Messiah was written in three weeks. he would write at something of a white heat. Can you describe for me how Handel composed? What instrument was he composing on, if any? If any instrument, he would have used a keyboard instrument

and probably a small harpsichord. He did have in the house a small harpsichord. He had a large harpsichord. The large harpsichord is probably used for the rehearsals in the front music room, the small harpsichord, potentially in the back room where he could compose. lot of composers simply write music. Their music is in their head, and they write it down. They don't play it first necessarily. On the other hand, Handel was an improviser, and so would probably

have improvised some things, and maybe then written them down. As he writes, he knows well enough what he wants to do, that he can lay out a score. But then, after he finishes, he goes back and fills it up. He writes all the inner parts. Depending on what the score is for any particular aria, he is adding the inner violin parts or the viola part or he's adding some of the inner wind parts. Maybe even a trumpet. Could be. He gives his scores two dates. The first time through and then the second time through when he actually puts in all the parts and the recitative. That's the order of things. And of course, in the process of this makes changes. So sometimes pages get ripped out, new pages get put in.

Did he bring in vocalists to hear how all the vocal parts would sound, like as he's writing Messiah and preparing to bring it up to Dublin for its debut? Do you know if he rehearsed with any vocalists either here or there? No, I do not think so. When he put the two choirs together, he had, I think, 16 men and 16 boys. And the men, the soloists, the men parts were taken from the choristers, I believe. He had a volio, an Italian singer who sang with him, who came with him to Dublin. That's the only person who could have rehearsed with him on the way. But he caught up with Susanna Sibber in Dublin.

She did not come with him. That was happenstance. It was happenstance, indeed. Susanna Sibber was a prominent young actress who had worked with Handel in London on a variety of productions. She was horribly abused by her husband who set her up with another man. and then accused her of adultery publicly, ruined her career in London, at least for a short while. She was in Dublin doing some theatrical things,

and Handel was able to pick her up for some of his performances, and then had her sing, he was despised, rejected, and it's a song that works so beautifully for a theater voice. It's not a virtuosic piece. The phrases are very short, that you don't need a lot of breath. It speaks. A lot of Messiah has this quality where I can't imagine the words being said any other way. He was despised, despised and rejected, rejected of man. I mean, I'm tempted to sort of go into it. He was despised, despised and rejected.

of men, a man loves. And, you know, it's just like little phrases with breasts and then you come back and you get the rejected. Whereas, you know, rejoice greatly, which is sung by the soprano, is as virtuosic as it can possibly be. And I'm not going to try to sing that for you right now. You know, with long runs and enormous demand placed on the breath. So this sense of drama in people,

was despised, is something that was very close to Susanna Sibber's best skills. In Dublin, there was great excitement over a new composition, a new kind of composition by George Friedrich Handel. There was so much demand for tickets and so little space. face inside the music hall that ladies were asked to arrive without the hoops in their skirts and men without their swords. So how was the debut received? Here's how Charles King puts it in his book Every Valley. The public reaction to Messiah was astonishment and wonder. Someone who was present at the first performance said it was a species of music like no other. People were just kind of flabbergasted by it. And on the way back to London from Dublin, handle even

took the time to stop into Charles Jennings's estate. Charles Jennings, you will remember, was the wealthy and pious man who assembled the lyrics for Messiah from his personal collection of biblical manuscripts. Jennings, unfortunately, wasn't home at the time, but he wanted to tell him, as Handel put it, how well your Messiah,

he was giving Jennings the credit, how well your Messiah was received there. Although maybe slightly disingenuous since Handel hadn't even told me to finish the piece, much less that he was going to perform it, correct? Yeah, by the time Handel was coming back from Dublin, Jennings knew that Handel had set his text to music.

Chenens might have said, you know, you could have invited me to Dublin to be there too. You know, I might have liked to have been in the audience. It would be hard to overstate just how valuable that trip to Dublin turned out to be for Handel. We gave him back as what they call it, the mojo, is that what he called today? That's Pransheus Odin, the Irish conductor we spoke with last week. Because the Irish temperament, I think, and the reception he got, he thoroughly enjoyed his stay,

and said he wanted to come back, but his health didn't let him. He did stay nine months. Nine months. When he was leaving, nine months later, he was so pleased at Dublin and the treatment he got here, that he actually bought an organ and donated it to the hall as a gift as a thank you. Is it either naive or maybe heretical of me to suggest that just as Messiah was a story about resurrection, that the Dublin trip for Handel was a resurrection of sorts for him? Well, resurrection is very strong, but he gave him back his energy.

He went back to London, full of energy to compose again. And here is Ellen Harris, once again, following the money. When he came back to London, he opened an annuities account at the Bank of England with 1,600 pounds. Wow. Where'd that come from? Dublin. Where else could it? He made 1,600 pounds in Dublin. I can't say that, but I can tell you that he had no bank account when he left for Dublin. And when he came back, he opened a new annuity account with 1,600 pounds.

My best guess is that he earned a great deal of money in Dublin. For the first time in his life, he had both a cash account and an annuity account. What he did from 1743 is he apparently put all of the proceeds from his season into the cash account, waited until he paid all his bills, and then just moved the rest into annuity accounts. And you can watch it happen, and you can see on a day that he suddenly takes all the money out of his cash account and moves it into an annuity account. Because he's feeling flush, he doesn't need that much cash on hand anymore, and he's secure enough to invest. He has apparently paid his bills that he needed to pay. When he came back to London, he was importuned to write operas. And he said, no.

He made it very clear that he was done. He knew that doing works in English drew a large audience, and since the works in English were largely based on biblical text, They were performed during Lent only. He didn't have to worry about staging because they were not staged. He could use English singers who came much less expensively, and he had a shorter season. But I would think that's a problem because you have less time for earning. True, he had less time for earning, but in fact, the costs were so much less that he could actually make more money.

So it's really about cutting production costs. That seems to be the key drive. I think it is the key driver. By 1745 on, he's given up the subscriptions altogether and is simply taking box office. I mean, that's also very new. The idea that you could run a company and simply take box office and not have any subscribers. He found dealing with the subscribers an irritation. From 1745, he never withdraws anything from an annuity. All the annuity counts just get bigger and bigger and bigger. because there are no withdrawals. You know, this is so opposite from what was happening in the 1730s, when there are only withdrawals. Okay, so he's becoming quite wealthy, relatively late in life, and I'm happy for him. But as I understand it, when he brought Messiah back to London, it wasn't nearly as well received there as it was in Dublin. Well, it wasn't terribly successful.

It's clearly a piece that he liked. He kept trying to adjust it to London taste so that we got all these different. messias, the 1743 Messiah, then the 1745 Messiah. The first performance in London, I think it had three performances in that season. So that's not a big hit. He didn't hit his groove in London with Messiah until it became a charity piece at the Foundling Hospital. The first Foundling Hospital performance is 1750. And what is the Founding Hospital? Here again is Charles King. The impulse behind it originally was the idea that we didn't have to live in a world in which people were just abandoned to their fate, that the wealthy, the well-connected, had both the responsibility to and the means to create an institution that could help solve the problem. The founding hospital was created by a man called Thomas Corum.

Thomas Corum was kind of the quintessential man of projects of the early 18th century. He was never wealthy. himself, he was always a commercial agent. First in the new world, in the American colonies. He spent time in Boston. He married a woman from Boston and went back and forth across the Atlantic several times in his life. But he was never particularly successful with much of anything. On one trip back to London, Coram was shocked by what he saw. Young children living on the streets in dire poverty. Corum developed a particular interest in one category of child, which at the time was called a foundling. Foundlings were different from orphans. Orphans were kids who, through chance, fate, had been left without parents. And they were often already looked out for by churches

and by charitable organizations of that type. But foundlings were a real social problem because families were kids who had one or both parents still living, but for some reason the parents couldn't care for them or they decided to just abandon them on the street. This deeply affected Corum, and he began this long project of getting wealthy, aristocratic Britons on the side of creating an institution that would be focused on foundlings. He had all of these really terrific contacts from his time working on and in the colonies, the wealthiest people in Britain, knew Thomas Corum, and also then he could marry that with this new charitable commitment that he discovered. So how successful overall was this charitable commitment? The Fowling Hospital, after struggling and struggling and struggling, finally got off the ground with a royal charter and with the most important wealthiest people in Britain on its board of governors and finally broke ground to create a formal institution where they could begin to bring kids in. But like any charity, they were always looking for money.

They were always looking to be able to take in more children because the number of children who actually went to. to the Foundling Hospital and were cared for, there were tiny fraction of the families who existed in London. But by the 1750s, when Handel is asked to begin doing annual concerts to support the Foundling Hospital, it had become arguably the most well-known family-oriented charity in Britain. Describe the performances of Messiah at the Founding Hospital early on, including Handels, not just authorship, obviously, but his role there. Throughout most of the 1750s, until his health really begins to decline,

Handel is in-person conducting from the organ the performances of Messiah. You want to go to this institution. Your money is going to a good cause. You would see the children sitting in the balcony in their uniforms, so you're seeing the beneficiaries of your good offices. And then you would have the chance to see this grand artistic figure, who with his gigantic 17th century wig really looks like he's transported from a different era. And you would do all of that in the company of the Great and the Good of London.

So these were the hottest tickets of the year, practically. When I think about the themes in the peace, redemption after heartbreak, joy, after sorrow, and so on, I think not just on a population level or a historical level, but on a personal level, and Handel, his reputation had been diminishing, and then at a relatively late stage in his life, he wrote this piece, and it really set the tone for the rest of his life. When I was talking about this with a friend of mine, she runs a museum, she was talking about all the artists who, in their 70s, 80s, even 90s, really hit their stride. I'm just curious if you could give me a little bit about how this, I don't want to say, rescued Handel or rehabilitated him. I don't know, maybe those words are appropriate, but how do you see this fitting into the arc of his life? How surprising was it? How fortunate was it, et cetera?

Handel had no idea that the thing that he composed in 24 days in August and September of 1741 was going to be the reason we're now in 2025 talking about him. In fact, this is one of the hardest things, I think, to talk with great Messiah fans about, because this piece of music means so much to so many people, and people experience it very deeply. They want it to be the product of Handel's deep religious devotion. They want an angel on his shoulder. I think the deeper, more profound truth to all of this is we never know what we do right now, how it's going to affect what happens tomorrow, what happens next week, or how the things we do in this moment affect the rest of our life. And that in a way is also written into Messiah. It starts with this idea that it will seem

very strange to say this in this moment, in this world, but a redeemer is coming. A revolution is at hand. An upturning of everything is going to come. What a ridiculous thing to say. But I love the idea that handle in a way in his own life and the composition of this piece of music is enacting the very logic that you find inside Messiah itself. Coming up next time on Freakonomics Radio, we find another Handel archive. 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. We'll hear from the conductor who is leading this year's Messiah at Lincoln Center with the New York Philharmonic.

I closed the score and handed it to my assistant behind me. The concert master said, what are you doing? And I said, I don't need that now. And we ask, whose Messiah is it anyway? There's a sense of pride, of ownership. This is ours. We'll also be slipping in a bonus episode, a conversation with the man who presents the Lincoln Center Messiah.

Orchestras are really expensive bands. Every orchestra in America struggles. to break even. That's next time. Until then, take care of yourself. And if you can, someone else too. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. You can find our entire archive on any podcast app,

also at Freakonomics.com, where we publish complete transcripts and show notes. This episode was produced by Zach Lipinski and edited by Ellen Frankman. It was mixed by Jasmine Klinger with help from Jeremy Johnston. Thanks also to Rob Double of London Broadcast for field recording in Chester and London, to Regan Hutchins for recording in Dublin,

to Katrina Nyland Sorensen for her help with production and for her podcast Handles Messiah, the Advent calendar. And special thanks to London Symphony Orchestra Live for allowing us to use their recording of Messiah performed in 2006 and conducted by Sir Colin Davis. The Freakonomics Radio Network staff also includes Alina Coleman, Augusta Chapman, Dalvin Aboagi, Eleanor Osborne, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippin, Alaria Montenicourt, Morgan Levy, Sarah Lilly, and Teo Jacobs.

Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by The Hitchhikers, and our composer is Luis Gera. As always, thanks for listening. People are split, as you know, about whether Messiah should end with the hallelujah. Oh, bitch. No, you don't. You don't end Messiah with the holiday of chorus. That's the end of part two. You're not going to go on to part three. You're going to give up the trumpet will sound.

You're going to give up. I know that my Redeemer liveth. You're going to give up blessing and honor, glory, and power be unto him. No. The Freakonomics Radio Network, the hidden side of everything. Stitcher