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

Episode Date: December 19, 2025

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.”) SOURCES:Charles King, political scientist at Georgetown University.Jane Glover, classical music scholar, conductor.Katharine Hogg, musicologist, head librarian at the Foundling Museum.Susannah Heschel, religion professor, chair of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College.Mark Risinger, teacher at St. Bernard’s School.Michael Marissen, professor emeritus of music at Swarthmore College, author of Tainted Glory in Handel’s Messiah: The Unsettling History of the World’s Most Beloved Choral Work. RESOURCES:Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s Messiah, by Charles King (2024)."Why These Christmas Songs Could Only Be Written in America," by Eli Lake (The Free Press, 2024)."Reflections on Bernstein’s 1956 “Messiah,”" by Mark Risinger (Leonard Bernstein Office, 2022).Handel in London: The Making of a Genius, by Jane Glover (2018).Tainted Glory in Handel's Messiah: The Unsettling History of the World's Most Beloved Choral Work, by Michael Marissen (2014).“Handel’s Messiah,” performed by The London Symphony Orchestra (2007). EXTRAS:"Making Messiah," series by Freakonomics Radio (2025). Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jane Glover is an early music scholar and a prolific conductor. I've conducted over 120 performances of Messiah, which I have loved since I was nine years old. That first Messiah, she heard, was at Lincoln Cathedral in the East Midlands of England. My grandparents lived there, and we had a family Christmas, and we were all taken to Messiah, and I, 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 live. 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. Does the story still move you?

Of Messiah? Absolutely. Every time. Every time. 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. I'm dreaming of a white. Christmas. You probably know this one, too. Chast nuts roasting on an open fire. And don't forget this one. 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. 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 love.

We'll hear how musicians across time from Mozart to Bernstein have put their mark on Messiah. It's a little bit like having your house redecorated. The trumpet shall sound. And if all goes according to plan, we shall be changed. Whose Messiah is it anyways? The final episode of our Making Messiah series begins now. 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 Fritter-Candall used to live. It's on Brook Street in Mayfair. And this was a new build, then.

It was a well-to-do neighborhood. So much of London in the 18th century was centered 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. Handel moved into this house in 1723, and he lived there for more than 35 years. Today, it is a museum called the Handel Hendricks House,

as in Jimmy Hendricks. For a brief time in the 1960s, he lived next door, so there is a Hendricks 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. He was so good with money as somebody who's also written about Mozart, who was hopeless with money, completely rubbish with money. He was just desperate with money. money. Now, what do you mean by that? He wasted it and overspent, or he wasn't good at making it? 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, Constanza, realized 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. And got out at the right time. And sold way before the crash. Other colleagues and friends of his were ruined by the South Sea bubble.

Including patrons of his? Including patrons of his. But when he was running his concert series in the theatres here, he just knew what to charge. They knew how to pay people. Of course he had a very good team around him, but you just know that he's a very good team. at the heart of this operation. 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. The very first concert here, he wrote a different piece called the Founding Hospital anthem, in which he lifted the whole of the Halliday Cross and put it into the Founding Hospital. But that was only the one time.

That was just the one time. 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? It was the full Messiah every time. It's a slightly different version, the founding hospital Messiah, as it's known, just because he changed over the years defending on his soloists and so on. But as far as we know, it was the full works, yeah.

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

How do you feel about that? Oh, pretty impressed with us. If I can identify with the 18th century hospital, yes. It's a very privileged place to be. Hogg now leads us up a staircase. 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. In a glass case, there is a weathered parchment. 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. Would you read us a few lines? 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 him bequeath and to my servant, Peter Leblond, my clothes and linen, and £300. To put a servant first was very unusual. Servants usually came at the end with a month or years 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 a 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. He'd been quite quiet over the last few years of his life. Jane Glover again. 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. Talk about what his state of mind was as he was declining, heading toward death. 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 Oh, death, where is thy stake Oh, death, where is the state? Handel died at home at age 74

on April 14th, 1759. It had been 17 years and one day since Messiah was first performed in Dublin. London went into mourning. He was a huge friend. 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. 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. I leave a fair copy of the score and parts of my oratorio called Messiah to the founding hospital. So three weeks after he died, it was delivered. 1,054 pages were delivered to the hospital, which is the score on parts. 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. Very much. They couldn't carry on the concerts which had raised £7,000, which is several million today. They couldn't have carried on with concerts if they didn't have the music. So what do you think the bequest of the will was worth to the founding

Hospital. Oh, probably in today's terms, millions. 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. That is Mark Reisinger, who we've been hearing from throughout this series. He is a musicologist and handle specialist in New York City. 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. Reisinger separates Messiah performances into two historical strands.

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. But things changed once Handel died. What came after his death, especially starting in the 1780s, is what I refer to as Strand B. Strand B included Messiah adaptations. Among the first wave of composers to take it on was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. He re-orchestrated Messiah in 1789, 30 years after Handel's death.

Here again is Jane Glover in London. 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 Van Svieten, was a huge handle 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. And so there was no way that Baron Van Sveetan could put Messiah on the way it was in Vienna in the 1780s. So he said to Mozart, 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 then 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.

What were the instruments that were added? Clarinet's and horns. No flute? I think there are flute, 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 Yorkshire, he never wrote a trumpet concerto. Around the 25th anniversary of Handel's death, Messiah began receiving even more aggressive makeovers.

Here's Mark Reisinger again. 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. Wow. 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. These mega messiahs stuck around well into the 20th century. So the one that I grew up with, my dad first sat me to. 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. That is a landmark recording that I still regard with great affection. 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. 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 Falling 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. When it is a historically informed performance, what is that exactly?

What's the instrumentation, the number and type of vocalists, et cetera? 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 along. side of Hogwood is the difference in pitch. The pitch standard in the 18th century was an A that was 415 Hertz. 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 hertz. So it's a half step higher. It's the difference in going from here. to hear. Anyone who's not a musician, though, does that matter? 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 three, the trumpet shall sound. And Handel's

day, he would have heard and so forth. Today, Modern audience is here. And the Hallelujah Chorus, same thing. So handles Hallelujah Chorus would have sounded like as opposed to. And there is a real difference in the color, in the feel, and the mood. How do you hear that difference? What are some feelings or senses that are activated differently? The higher pitch, our modern pitch standard, the only word that comes to mind is bright.

It just feels very... I was going to say schmaltzy, but that's not fair, right? Right is better. And there's something slightly warmer for me about the lower pitch, the Baroque pitch, but also the fact that the string instruments are strong, not with metal strings, but with gut strings. Sheep gut, calgut 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 for us because our concert halls have gotten bigger. So it's a natural and understandable evolution. Coming up, after the break, there is another evolution to consider.

He knew full well that the wording that he's using here was controversial. I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio. We'll be right back. The lyrics of The lyrics of Messiah, which were assembled by Charles Jennings, are a collage of 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, 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 Marissen. 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, just having a grand old time.

How did you come to be known as the scholar who argues that Messiah is anti-Semitic, or at least in part? Well, partly because I was one of the very few people who thought such a thing. There wasn't a lot of scholarship previously on that question? 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 historian, are just supposed to be 100% objective and they're not supposed to have any agenda whatsoever

and so on. I said, well, it's arguably a nice ideal, but I don't know any historian who fits that description. I can't think of a single one. They were accusing me of being agenda-driven. I said, you know, guilty is charged. Okay, so what was Marissa's agenda? His answer really has to do with Charles Jennings' agenda. 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 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 it 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. 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. Because why? Well, who are the sons of Levi? And what does it mean to purify them? And why are they in need of purification? 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 Handels and Jennings' Day, including in many of the books in Jennings' 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 move from the synagogue to the church. Right, although in the original context from the Hebrew prophet Malachi, that was plainly not the intention. 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. 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. 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 Jenin's thought he was up to and getting handled 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 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. How much do you think Handel cared about or agreed with that agenda? I don't know that he knew as much about it as Jenin's, 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. After reading, Marissa, and it's very hard to listen to the Messiah. 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. On the one hand, there's nothing especially horrific about Handel's Messiah's libretto.

It's not especially denigrating or negative. There are far worse expressions of denigrating Judaism in 2000 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. 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.

When it comes to the title character in Handel's Messiah, Heschel points to one especially large paradox. Jesus never said he was a Christian. He was called rabbi. So if you want the faith of Jesus, go to a synagogue. 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? 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. So is it okay in the year 2025 for a Jew, like me, to love Handel's Messiah? Yes. Tell me why?

I mean, I'm grateful for the yes, but, tell me why? 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 two thousand 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 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. Does that mean, therefore, that handles Messiah can be a jolly good wish for universal peace? 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. 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. To my knowledge, it is unique. That, again, is the musicologist Mark Reisinger. 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. If you go to the New York Philharmonics archives, you can see Bernstein's marked-up Messiah score.

He calls part one, Christmas. section and part two easter section 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. And Bernstein made some other statements with his Messiah. In 1956, Carnegie Hall still had segregated dressing rooms, where seven years before the Civil Rights Act was passed, for him to make the choice to have two African American soloists on stage, 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 revolutionary experience for most of the audience to hear a man singing in the female range with this very beautiful alto voice. These are that they'd probably only ever heard song previously by women. 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.

In fact, all four soloists in this year, Messiah would be the exact same for 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. I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio. We'll be right back. 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.

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, 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. 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 17th, 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 1726 became a naturalised British citizen. In 1751, his sight began to fail, and by 1753, 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 1759, after 35. years as a parishioner and worshipper at St. George. 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. I have to tell you, one of the very first messires I conducted was in here, but I wasn't a professional musician then. I brought a group from Oxford, where I was, and we were. We performed Messiah in here, and it was a great thrill. You were a student still. I was a postgraduate student, yes. I think I was 22 or something. So that counts among your 120?

No, it doesn't. I count my professional ones, not my ones that I didn't get paid for. 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 18th century? That's such an interesting question. 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 handled it, then you were lucky. Or if you had a permanent job with a 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

your contract may be long if you're appointed to be principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra for five or ten 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.

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

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 can 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. I understand you conduct a saw you without a score? Is that true?

I do, yeah. 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. Yeah. When I first did, for instance, Figuero, at an opera company, it better remain 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 do you do? doing? And I said, I don't need that now. He said,

of course you need it. What happens if something goes wrong? And I said, well, I'll put it right. 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. 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, counter-tenor John Holliday, tenor Nicholas Pond, and bass baritone Kevin Days. 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.

Let's do the last resurrection. 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. As needed, Glover would stop her players and give instruction. I have the courage if you can, just even to be quieter,

because I want this to be real human frailty, and then we let it be very unafrail. 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 unfrail, we would really feel it. This reminded me of something the author Charles King told us earlier about the first vocal movement of Messiah.

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. 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. It's 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 is seized so many people for so many years. 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. 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, merely 300 years ago.

I listened to what Jane Glover had taught me to listen for, the frailties and the unfrailties. 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. 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. 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 Katrina Nyland Sorensen for her help with production and for her podcast Handels Messiah, the Advent Calendar. 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 Hendricks House and the Foundling Museum in London for their kind cooperation.

The Freakonomics Radio Network staff also includes Alina Cullman, Augusta Chapman, Dalvin, Abouaji, Eleanor Osborne, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippin, Ilaria Montenicourt, Morgan Levy, Sarah Lilly, and Theo Jacobs. He moved to a house in Brook Street while the church was being built. Sounds as if the church is still being built. The Freakonomics Radio Network, the hidden side of everything.