Freakonomics Radio - “The Greatest Piece of Participatory Art Ever Created”

Episode Date: December 5, 2025

Why does an 18th-century Christian oratorio lend such comfort to our own turbulent times? Stephen Dubner sets out for Dublin to tell the story of George Frideric Handel’s Messiah. (Part one of “Making Messiah.”) SOURCES:Charles King, political scientist at Georgetown University.Katrine Nyland Sørensen, Danish broadcaster, host of Handel's Messiah - The Advent Calendar.Mark Risinger, teacher at St. Bernard's School.Michael and Aileen Casey, Dublin conservationists.Proinnsías Ó Duinn, conductor and music director of Our Lady's Choral Society.Stuart Kinsella, tenor soloist and consort singer. RESOURCES:Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel's Messiah, by Charles King (2024)."Two Men Wrote ‘Messiah.’ You Know One of Them." by Charles King (New York Times, 2024)."On Fishamble Street, family lives among four centuries of relatives’ keepsakes," by Zuzia Whelan (Dublin Inquirer, 2018).Hallelujah: The Story of a Musical Genius & the City That Brought His Masterpiece, by Jonathan Bardon (2016).George Frideric Handel: A Life with Friends, by Ellen Harris (2014).Handel: The Man & His Music, by Jonathan Keates (2010)."Handel's Messiah," performed by The London Symphony Orchestra (2007).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.

Love is hard to explain. When you fall in love with a person or a place or a thing, who can say why? A few years ago, I fell madly in love with a piece of music. This was during the COVID pandemic when there was still a lot of mask wearing, a lot of social isolation, a lot of death, but also glimmers of hope. I am a sucker for hope. I went to a concert around Christmas time with my wife and some friends, and the music I heard that night jacked up my hope meter to 11. It was a great feeling, especially when there was so much uncertainty and darkness,

so much fear of the future. The older I get, the more I realize that fear of the future is essentially a default condition of humankind. One thing I've learned from interviewing historians over the years is that the historical outcomes that seem obvious today were not always obvious in the moment. The rise or fall of a given empire or institution was rarely a foregone conclusion. If one or two decisions had gone another way were one battle or marriage or pregnancy,

the outcome might have been different. But when you're standing in the present, it's hard to see where the future lies. If you sense there is an ill wind blowing, you assume it will keep blowing in the same direction and that things will only get worse. So we make all sorts of predictions based on uncertainty and fear. Maybe that's what allows us to so easily abandon our kindness to people who aren't like us

and to justify acts of exclusion, which brings me back to the people and the places and the things that we fall in love with. Why can only some of us love certain things? That piece of music that I fell in love with, it is an 18th century Christian oratorio called Messiah. by George Friedrich Handel. In some circles, it is very famous, so you may know every note, or maybe you've never heard of it.

It doesn't matter. I had never really heard Messiah until that COVID concert. And, by the way, I'm Jewish, so not my Messiah, although Jesus, of course, was Jewish. We can talk about that later. As it turns out, a lot of Jews love handles Messiah, as do a lot of Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists and atheists, too. Charles King, a political scientist at Georgetown, recently published a book about Messiah called Every Valley.

He argues that Messiah has a good claim to being the greatest piece of participatory art ever created. Why is it so popular? I think it's because what Messiah is really about is hope. What do I mean by that? Well, this will take some explaining. three episodes worth of explaining. Let's start in the place where Messiah was first performed in 1742.

It wasn't in Germany where Handel grew up and showed great promise. It wasn't in Italy where he learned the ways of opera and of patronage, nor was it in London, where the German-born king was his patron, and where Handel became a superstar. But by 1742, Handel was in his late 50s and his star had dimmed, significantly. And that's why I recently traveled with some colleagues to Dublin, Ireland. This is Fisambl Street, and it's the site of the musical where Maasai was first performed. Our guide is Stuart Kinsula. He is a handle enthusiast and a tenor in the Irish Baroque Orchestra and other

Irish choirs. There's actually very, very little of it left. There's a little bit of a wall to the side, and there's this large arch. There's also a plaque. It reads, George Frederick Handel conducted the first performance of the Messiah on this site

on 13th of April 1742. These days, Messiah is usually performed around Christmas time, but originally it was linked to Easter. This little corner of Old Dublin continues to celebrate the premiere.

There's Handel's Hotel with its lobby bar called Messiah. There's the chorus cafe. And in front of a modern apartment building, there is a modern statue of a very fit and for some reason very naked George Friedrich Handel in a conductor's pose. Baton raised as if leading an orchestra, although the modern orchestra with a conductor out front didn't exist until long after Handel died. Most of the area around Fishamble Street has been completely redeveloped since Handel's time. There's only one house that survives Mr. Casey's house down there, which has been in continuous occupation for, I think, two or three hundred years.

Who is Mr. Casey? He's the owner, but it's been handed down through the family since the early 1700s are thereabouts. Stuart Kinsula has sung Messiah many times in many places, including right here on Fishamble Street, where there is a large outdoor performance every Easter time. There is a huge platform put up here, covered, of course, because it will inevitably be raining. And then everyone gathers in front, usually wearing anorax. And then it's performed here, literally outside.

But it's a lovely experience because everyone just comes along, brings their scores, probably from last year where the rain has already seeped into them. And they go through some of the best choruses. I did the tenor stuff for Prontius O'Din, who organizes a performance every year. with our ladies' choral society. And it's glorious. It's great fun. We left Fishamble Street

and headed for a nearby radio studio where we had an appointment to speak with the very concert organizer that Kinsula just mentioned. Fransheus Odin is the name. It looks more difficult than it sounds. Fransius Odin is perhaps the most renowned Irish conductor

of his generation. He's in his early 80s. Can you explain for someone who doesn't know orchestral music, What is the function of a conductor in the moment? You're responsible for the well-being, mentally, because all of these musicians in an orchestra, they're all trained to be soloists,

and they've probably played the Beethoven Fifth 900 times. Some young guy comes in and starts trying to lecture them, and that sends them off to a pub. So you're very responsible what happens to an orchestral musician when he goes home. To learn what makes them tick and to know that the concert is not necessarily today, you're rehearsing today for tomorrow.

so you build and when you know that they're with you and they've got it you can send them off you don't have to go to 5 o'clock if they need to practice

they should practice otherwise go play golf do something and when you hit the concert they should still be at the edge of the seat not comfortable and now you have electricity

how many times have you conducted Messiah in whole or in part in whole on average about six times a year for the last 60 years Okay, that's 360 right there. Yeah, similar that.

Do you have a single favorite? No, my job is to make the audience have a favorite. I'm a salesperson for wherever I'm conducting, and I work on behalf of the creator to recreate it. I always use the word to recreate something rather than to perform something. I recreate it on a page as I think the composer had in his head. And so every night's different. And do you still conduct the outdoors Messiah every year down in Fishamble Street?

Yes, I know, yeah. What's the experience? like for you? The street was always different. Everything's different. Do you look forward to it every year? Or is it more of a chore by now to go outdoors? If music becomes a chore, I stop.

So are you the one who began doing this on Fish Amble? Yes. Well, actually, it was a priest who was a member of the choir. And when it came to 1992, which is about 250th anniversary, the performance, up to that point, the only thing that happened in Dublin, somebody lived in an apartment on Fish Ample Street upstairs. stairs. And he used to open the window and on his old drama phone, play choruses of some say, out through the window. That's the only thing that ever happened. Until

1992, and at this stage, the guy in the choir, he knew his Messiah backwards. You could sing all four parts. He said, if we're not going down to do this in the street, I'm going to go down myself and sing all four parts in this video. You're not doing that. So off we went down to the keyboard, an organ, and the choir, that's what it was, excerpts. And we saw, okay, next year you went down, and it was the same setup with the soloist. and then we got people to come behind it and then became an orchestra. We played in horizontal snow and sleet.

There's a photograph in the Irish Times of a member of the choir with a hailstone on his tongue. It is a remarkable feeling to be in a place where so many people love the thing that you love. Having chatted with Pransheus Odin, who keeps the Messiah tradition alive in Dublin,

and having stood on the site at Fishamble Street where Messiah was first performed, we decided to take a walk across the River Liffey to the neighborhood around Henrietta Street. In the 18th century, it was one of the fanciest streets in Dublin, with big Georgian townhouses occupied by aristocrats, church officials, and other wealthy folks. These were the very people who would have attended the first performances of Messiah, which were presented as charity fundraisers. We hadn't been able to set up an interview with anyone over on Henrietta Street, but we thought it might be worth walking around just to commune with the ghosts.

That was the suggestion of a new friend of ours, Katrina Sorensen. She is a Danish broadcaster and a fellow Messiah maniac. Hello, and my name is Katrina, and I'm sort of Stephen's sidekick. So we head over to Henrietta Street. Katrina, me, my producer, Zach, and Regan, our local sound recordist. The three of them are huddled on the sidewalk, setting up their audio gear, so I start to wander around. I'm hoping someone might come out of one of these old townhouses so we can speak with them. Down on the basement level of one house, I see a tall green plant. And since I live in New York City,

I'm always looking for plants that do well with minimal light. So I get out my phone to take a picture of this plant. And then I see a woman's face in the basement window. She looks alarmed. And she's got her phone up to her ear. I can appreciate that she may not like a stranger taking a picture of her house, so I wave an apology and head back across the street over to my crew. I tried to stalk some people to see if we could get access to some of the houses. Oh, did you try the lady

over there? Because I was standing there on the phone, and she looked up at me like she was calling the police. I was about to take a photograph of her... There's a plant growing underground. It's the greenest plant I've ever seen. I thought it'd be good to find out what is. Can I make a small suggestion?

Can I suggest, or we will carry our bags? Yeah. Hello. I live across the road. Nice. Hi. Yes. Did you know that you have to apply for permission to do any filming whatsoever?

No, but we're not filming. We're just recording an interview. It's for radio. All right, then. Not filming, but radio. But I was admiring that plant that you have that is the healthiest looking below-ground plant I've ever seen. I think it's trying to get to the night. Well, that's, aren't we all?

But do you know what it is? Yes, it's a laurel. It's a laurel. Yeah, but the reason why we're here, it's because that we're recording a podcast about Handel's time in Dublin. So we're talking a little about the houses and the architecture in the early 18th century.

I can tell you they're being very polite, but I know that they would give their right arm to have a little look inside one of these houses. Well, if you want to have a quick look inside one of these houses, but no, nothing. Come on there. Oh, lovely. Wow, what century?

Are we in today? Yes. This was designed in 1735 and completed in 1743. I'm Stephen, by the way. I'm Aileen. Nice to meet you. And we're making a radio series about Messiah, George Friedrich Kandall's Messiah. We wanted to come over here just to get a sense

of what life was like here then. So if this was finished in 1743, you said? Yes. So Messiah debuted in 1742, correct? Yes. Yeah, so this is perfect. So what kind of person would have been living here then, do you know? My knowledge is second-hand and flawed.

Mine is fourth-hand, so it's okay. If my husband were here, he could tell you exactly. And as it happens, you have seen the house in Fish Angle Street on the corner. That was there then. That's Michael's family home. Do you go down to Fishamble and hear the... Yes, sometimes we went, not this year but last. Well, you see, the thing is,

that it all started because Michael would open the windows and play the Messiah. Wait, that's your husband? The one that opened the window and played Messiah out the window? Yes. We've heard about him from everyone. We just sat with Pontius Odean. Yeah, we just came from a conversation with him. And he said that?

Yes. Oh my. I didn't know anybody knew that. I thought that was just in the family. That is one of those Irish coincidences. What is it? Seven degrees. There's always somebody that you know that knows somebody else. And no matter of where you go in the world, you will meet someone you know from Ireland. Yeah. Where is he? In Fischamble Street. Right now? Right now. Aline Casey asks us to hang on for a minute while she steps into another room and calls one of her sons, who may be with her husband, Michael. Apparently Michael does not carry a phone.

with a small crew who are doing an audio documentary on Campbell. Michael Casey agrees to meet with us, so Aileen sends us back to Fishamble Street to find him. Ah, you wouldn't be Michael Casey, would you? How do you do? Stephen Dubner. Pleasure to meet you. Delight you could all come along.

Let me take you up to the first floor. Come in. The Casey home is indeed the one that Stuart Kinsula told us about, earlier, one of the oldest surviving homes on Fishamble Street. Inside, the walls are absolutely plastered with paintings, World War I memorabilia, with Michael Casey's collection of death masks, and of course, there is the man of the hour. Here's a bust of Handel, mid-19th century, I would say, and it's always been in this place, presumably because, well, Handel was in the area for quite some time. Is Handel a little bit of a patron saint of your?

your family? Do you think he's watched over your family in a way? Oh. Well, we certainly watched over his memory with busts and small poses and that on the appropriate occasions. So, you know, we would do that. We just interviewed Pransheus Odin. Oh, yes, yes, yes. And we asked him, how did this live performance on Fishamble Street on the anniversary, how did this happen? He said, well, there was this fellow who used to open his window

and play a recording. Was that you? Yes, yes. I want to see the window. Well, I actually opened the center one here. I could kneel on the ground with a very handy, portable record player. The three discs, I still have them.

It was excellent, because they had the Loretta on the sleeve. Oh, so you could sing along? Oh, if you could sing along. I knew the whole lot. It was my primary introduction to Isaiah. I knew my entire scripture from the script. You were how old when you started doing that? Oh, I would have been, I think it was in 1963.

I was 13. What is it about the piece of music that had such a hold over you as even a 13-year-old? The period is number one, and the period of the music. I've always lived in an 18th century house, and you do actually feel there's a musical sense about interiors. Why do you think this? This piece of music has endured as it has, more than anything else from that time, really. Well, it was a very, very significant piece of music.

It was a new sort of, I wouldn't call it entertainment, but it certainly caused the imagination of people. And so, thanks in part to Michael Casey and the conductor, Pransius O'Din, and singers like Stuart Kinsula, if you ever find yourself on Fishamble Street in Dublin, On the 13th of April, you will hear this. Today on Freakonomics Radio, the first of a three-part series in which we explore the meanings of Messiah, the musical, religious, and political meanings.

Handel thought that even in the middle of war and disease, and death, it was worth making a piece of art. We discovered that Handel was a pioneer in what today we would call the creator economy. I did have a colleague early on say to me, why are you spending so much time at the Bank of England? Why aren't you looking at the music? And I said, well, have you ever heard Follow the Money? And we try to figure out just how this one piece of music from nearly 300 years ago still exerts such a pull on so many people. We gave them back as what they call it, the Mojo, is how he calls Jay?

The mojo of Messiah. Irish coincidences, the crooked straight, and the rough places plain. All that and much more, starting now. This is Freakonomics Radio. The podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host, Stephen Dubner. The hallelujah chorus that we just heard from the choir on Fishamble Street in Dublin, it is the most recognizable movement from Messiah. You may remember it from Dumb and Dumber, or even better, from Mel Brooks's History of the World, part one.

And so, music was born. Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! It was also featured in Charles Schultz's Peanuts. What are we going to hear today, Marcy? Handel's Messiah.

The most exciting part is when they get to the Hallelujah Chorus and everyone stands. Standing is exciting? You may have also heard the Hallelujah Chorus in TV ads, for cars, airlines, for Oscar Meyer luncheon meat, as it used to be called, and there are countless recorded versions, a huge range of styles and configurations from the very polished Mormon tabernacle choir version, to the throwback versions with period instruments. There are gospel versions.

There are metal versions. There are bluegrass, messiahs, and steel drum messias. In this series, we will primarily be hearing the wonderful London Symphony Orchestra version recorded in 2006 at Barbicane Hall, under the direction of Sir Colin Davis. With, however, the occasional interlude from a guest. I'm probably not in the right key, so... Oh, oh, you just happen to have a piano with you, I see. I happen to have a piano here, and I'm going to use it.

Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah. It sounds nothing like I sound in the shower. Oh, but everybody sounds great in the shower. That is Mark Reisinger. He is a music teacher at St. Bernard's, a boys' school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He has a Ph.D. in Musicology and is a handle specialist with a particular affinity for Messiah. I have known this piece since my very earliest memories. It's just always been a part of my life.

I had a father who was a minister and a mother who was a very fine soprano and one of my parents' favorite stories is that I was born in March, and in December, they were standing in the living room, singing along with Eugene Normandy and the Mormon Tavernacle Choir, because their church choir was doing a performance around Christmas time. They looked down, and I had pulled myself up on the end of the coffee table, and was trying to take my first steps on my own. So the running joke has always been that, you know, handles sort of spoke to me, and I stood up and tried to walk for the first time. Let's pretend for a minute that I've never heard Messiah, maybe never even heard of it, and I come across you, and I know that you know an awful lot about this music

and music history. So just tell me, what is Messiah? Handel's Messiah is technically an oratorio. That means that it was written in a style in the middle of the 18th century in the baroque era that is very closely aligned to the style of opera at that time. The main thing to appreciate is that these were words taken from the Bible. They were not intended to portray a dramatic story. They were performed in a theater as a concert piece with the soloists, the orchestra, the chorus, all remaining stationary. No sets, no costumes, no stage action. He was composing for an audience that certainly knew the theater, new opera, new stage plays, but was offering them something different. The text is a series of meditations

on the prophecies from the Old Testament about a Messiah, then words from the New Testament passages dealing with the birth of Jesus, and reflections on what that meant for Christianity. the hallelujah chorus is easily the most famous piece from messiah including in television commercials etc over the years exactly i'm just curious how you as someone who knows and loves messiah in toto what's your feeling about that piece when you either sing it yourself or hear it in a performance do you get a thrill out of it still or is it more like oh yeah we're going to do the hallelujah now i absolutely get a thrill especially when I get to hear it or sing it in context. The melody itself is fine, but when you reach that point in the story, it is really incredibly exciting. It's a wonderful rousing chorus.

It really is. It's the one that everybody knows. I'll go for a hallelujah anytime. This again is Stuart Kinsula, the tenor who showed us around Fishamble Street in Dublin. I have sung it so often now. There are groans from the choir, from the professionals, when you say, oh, it's the hallelujah chorus.

And quite often, if you have the directors of music, you'll go on to rehearsal and say, so hallelujah chorus, and you just say, rep, and then move on. For serious musicians, is the hallelujah chorus a bit like a quarter-pounder from McDonald's might be for a chef? It's got a little hackneyed, I'm afraid, by multiple performances. It's still an amazing piece. It really is great. But it's just if you have to sing it 200 times in a year or something like that, because, I don't know, tourists come along and go,

oh, so, Dublin, handle. Could you sing us the hallelujah chorus? It's like, funny you should ask that. Many audiences, especially if an audience sing it for the first time, when they hear that piece, they recognize it. They may sing along, they may not, they may stand up, they may not. But many of them think the piece is now over, plainly, because they start gathering up their coats and so on.

What does that feel like as the performer, I wonder? There is that, or my favorite one is when, at the end of the hallelujah chorus, there's this grand thing, we've gone, hallelujah, hallelujah, and then people start going. And then you go, hallelujah. So you're just praying that they do not do that. There is a whole other section to come. And, yeah, I mean, to last for a full performance of Messiah, modern audiences are not quite used to it.

It's been used quite a bit in television ads over the years and other things like that. I always wondered if it was a bit, quote, spoiled because of that, because when you hear it in context, to me at least, it's not hacking. I think it's all about context. It's like a 24-course meal or something like that. If you do it in this sort of liturgical pattern, you build up to it slowly and you've had the right wine pairings or whatever, and you get there, it's just amazing. It really is. If you just bang out the greatest hits, it's like sticking on your record of the top 20 or whatever.

Yeah, they're good tunes and stuff like that. But experiencing them in the context, which is usually two or three hours long. I mean, it really makes a big difference to your reception of the music. Of all the pieces of music that could have endured and thrived for 280, whatever years, what is it, whether musically, thematically, the participation angle, what is it about the piece that you think has led it to endure and thrive? I think it's really the fact that the tunes are so good. I mean, there are all these little bits of restative and so forth, and some of the arias are really beautiful, but it's also nicely paced so that you,

You have choruses here and there, which also are very, I mean, they're a challenge to, say, if you're in an amateur choir. They are a bit challenging to put on, but they're so satisfying to sing when you're doing these sort of culverture runs and that sort of thing. So, yeah, I think that the enduring popularity of Messiah is just because it's such exquisitely crafted music. Coming up after the break, how Messiah came. to be and handles forgotten collaborator. He from a very early age had convinced himself that the world was deeply out of joint. I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Free Economics Radio. We'll be right back. The political scientist Charles King has written major books on Eastern Europe and global history. In 2024, he published a book called Every Valley, The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times that Made Handles Messiah.

Every Valley is the name of one of my favorite movements in Messiah. So I asked King why he chose that as his title. Oh, it's one of my favorites as well. It's the first proper aria in the piece, the radical message of this. thing, that every valley shall be exalted, every mountain hill made low. The world to come will be the mirror image of the thing that we see in this unjust world as we experience it. The rough places plane. The rough places plain, exactly. Part of the book Every Valley is about the darkness that so many people associated with this

piece of music experience. And we're experiencing. at the time. They were in their own version of a kind of dark valley. Just tell me the story of how and why you came and when even you came to write this book. My wife and I were sitting at home during COVID. We happened to live on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. We had been through the Black Lives Matter protests and the local response, which involved helicopters flying over our house. We had a health crisis in the family, and then there was January 6th, which was six blocks away from our house, and we were desperately trying to feel better. My wife, who was a singer and performer, had always loved Messiah. I had purchased for her some years ago a Victrola, one of these wind-up 1925, completely acoustic record players.

And I had the idea that if I could find the oldest possible recording of Handel's Messiah and put it on this thing, that would somehow be. big magic and make us feel better. So I went to eBay as anyone would and found a 1927 recording and we put it on. We both just burst into tears. That is such a common experience with so many people. You know, you go to any performance and you look around and there's going to be somebody with tears in their eyes, might even be you. I wanted to follow that feeling and figure out how did this work of art come to have over the centuries this deep connection with people? Tell me about your own upbringing, especially religious upbringing and how that may have fed into your appreciation for or discovery or maybe rediscovery of Messiah. I grew up about as far from Handel's Messiah and the world that created it as you can imagine. I grew up on a cattle farm in the Ozarks of Northwest Arkansas. But I realized in working on every valley that I had some skills that I kind of didn't know I had. First of all,

Growing up in a Pentecostal tradition, I knew the King James Version of the Bible, and I have always loved the language of that text. It speaks very deeply to me personally. As a kid, growing up in a rural part of the country, I had the great fortune of having a band teacher, Pat Ellison, who was incredible. She would put together all the brass players and say, we're going to play this thing called Baroque music, of course. None of us had ever heard of any of this, but once you start playing some of the brass literature from that period, it's addictive. You know, you get this great antiphonal passing back of a melody between the lower brass and the higher brass. And we worked all of this stuff up and took it to the National Cathedral in Washington and performed there. And, you know, there was nothing to suggest that a bunch of farm kids and small town kids from Arkansas should have any business playing this music. And what has been so. thrilling about learning more about handle and the period is in some ways Messiah is the ultimate democratic piece of music. It's a kind of thing that you not only go and listen to, but it's a thing you might sing along with. You might sing along while it's on your stereo at home. You might be with an amateur corral singing it. And that's in part why I think it's survived

for so long. We feel committed to it, engaged with it, because it wants to engage with us. Talk about the Baroque movement for a moment. I love how you write of it, like it's the punk of its day. What do you mean by that? What was it coming out of and what did it lead into? Well, we look back on this period, you know, and it's folks in wigs and frilly cuffs and gigantic skirts. And we might think, how can I possibly relate to that era? When I was writing every valley at some point in the middle of the project, I said to my wife, I can't get over the wigs. I just can't relate to these people. They don't seem like real people to me.

Once I sort of went back to my childhood and thought, well, why was this music so thrilling to me when as a not particularly good trumpet player, you know, I was trying to make my way through some of this? I think the reason is that the Baroque period was responding to the strictures of an earlier time. It was a time of great experimentation. new instruments were being created. The piano, for example, evolving out of the harpsichord, new construction techniques for violins were being experimented with. People were breaking the rules in a way that's sort of hard for us now, if we think of Baroque is really quite mannered. The rules were really being broken. And a key thing that I think we don't quite understand now is that any performance was in many ways an improvised performance. Baroque was most of the

much closer to jazz than it is to later symphonic orchestral music of, say, the 19th century. You might get a chord progression or a baseline progression, and then a fair amount of a Baroque orchestra is improvising around that. So the virtuosity of players was quite incredible. There was every expectation that a performance was going to be a unique event because you were watching the art be created before your very eyes. All that new creativity, whether it's new instruments, new ways of playing,

new types of groups, new ways in which a piece was put together with different components and so on. Talk about that a moment more, especially it's locusts. People are experimenting all over. I mean, French Baroque

is its own tradition, for example, but the epicenter was Italy. It's the reason that we kind of break into Pigeon Italian when we're talking about music these days. We are part of the inheritance now of the time that Handel is experiencing

as a young man in his early 20s in Italy. It is so exciting. It's absolutely thrilling. You feel like you're on the cutting edge of something. And for a young artist to be in that environment where you feel like you're doing something genuinely new

and you're breaking all of the old rules and you're experimenting with things and you're wondering, how long can I get away with holding this really dissonant note until I resolve it into the court. Of course, Handel didn't know he was living in a period called the Baroque

that was a term that later composers applied when they looked back on this deeply unruly and rule-breaking and perhaps too popular and not cerebral enough era. So we're looking at that time through the prism

of what later 18th and 19th century composers wanted us to see. I don't think there's been a day since that day when I discovered your book back in December.

of 2024 that I haven't listened to Messiah for at least half an hour. And often three or four hours, I've just fell down the hole and I became very, very attached to it. And my emotional response is often quite large and surprising to me. How is this piece of music that, you know, was left behind on sheet music, right? No recording then. How was it that it has continued into this era to have such a profound emotional effect? I think there are a number of things that get braided together inside Messiah. Handel was a composer for the stage. He's much more like an Andrew Lloyd Weber, let's say, than a Bach.

He's very conscious of the way in which melody, harmony, chordal progressions, how all of this has an impact on the audience. He married that quite surprisingly with sacred text, which was very unusual at the time, really quite controversial at the time. the place for sacred texts would be in a church, not in a theater or a concert hall, he then sort of twisted these things into a form that then had a shape. And that shape was the one that he acquired from Charles Jennings, who had created the libretto, the structure of the entire thing. And what we're then hearing is not just the sacred text, but we're hearing Jenin's interpretation of the sacred texts. Charles King devotes a good bit of his book to Charles Jennings, the Messiah collaborator,

who's been largely forgotten by history. Jennings was wealthy, well-educated, at least a bit eccentric, and deeply religious. He put together the libretto for Messiah from his private collection of religious manuscripts. Handel accepted it happily, but then set it to music without any further input from Jennings, and in fact, without telling Jennings anything about it. While Jennings considered Handel a genius, he also complained to friends that Handel was lazy and obstinate. Anyone who has ever managed a board will understand what it's like to have a wealthy patron like Charles Jenis. Why has he primarily been written out of history? Is that just the way it goes with collaborators sometimes?

I think this is the sad fate of lyricists. He was not a professional musician. He was a wealthy landowner, one of the wealthiest families in Britain. at the time, who had collaborated with Handel on a couple of earlier occasions. Handel was always looking for good ideas and for texts to set to music. And Jennings was already a Handel superfan. He would go to every performance when he came up to London for the season from his estate in Leicestershire, and he would be very disappointed if Handel weren't offering something new. And as is the case sometimes with very wealthy patrons, he felt the right to correct Tandal when he thought he had gone astray musically, you know, well, I would have changed that

melody a little bit. Was Jennings technically a patron? Did he pay Handel as well, or just provide him with librettos? We don't know that he paid Handel directly, but what's so astonishing about the collaboration between these two men is that they were on opposite sides of the greatest political divide of their time, and in some ways the big religious divide of their time. In the late 17th century, the reigning royal line, the stewards, had been ousted in the so-called glorious revolution of 1688. There would eventually be yet another steward reigning in the early 18th century, but after that time, the royal line switched to the so-called Hanoverians. Politically, Handel was a servant of the regime. He was employed by the Hanoverian kings. He composed music for the court.

And even at the time of Messiah, was he still on the payroll? He was still on the payroll. He was still a court composer at that time. Jennings believed that the current king was illegitimate. He looked back to the old Stewart dynasty. He was what was called a non-jurer, meaning that he had not sworn allegiance to the new king. That also meant that he could never sit in parliament. He couldn't take a university degree. He could have no government position at all. We couldn't go into the law. And he, from a very early age, had convinced himself that the world was deeply out of joint. The thing that helped him get out of, or at least weather these moments, was art and music. You write, it took a universe of pain to make a musical monument to hope. Describe for me what you mean by that universe of pain. What was going on at that moment?

Well, we think of the Enlightenment as being this period in which humans rediscover rationality and are reasonable and use the insights of science to make the world better. But it was also a time when people were confronted, I think, with a deep reality of human pain and suffering. In this period, Britain was at war with France in one of the earliest global wars. It was a time of incredible disease of childhood mortality. The mortality rate in London in the middle of the 18th century was 75%, an almost unbelievable figure. people would bury more kids than they ever saw to adulthood. And even though there was, I suppose, some optimism about the ability of the human mind to conquer some of these ills,

the other great theme of this period of the Enlightenment is how to manage catastrophe with good reason, because everyday suffering, everyday disaster was a thing that people confronted. When you say that people were being more broadly confronted by suffering, talk for a moment about how that's happening in terms of information traveling around. There are a number of things that are happening in this period, very late 17th century, early 18th century, that are changing the ability of individuals to really see the world, understand the world. It's a time of great travel, not only for exploration, but increasingly for pleasure. individuals are also able to read about things that are happening literally on the other side of the world because of the advent of newspapers. In Britain, censorship had been lifted only a short time before. So Britain was flooded with pamphlets and printed books and all sorts of other forms of printed, readable information in a way that had never really existed.

So in all of these ways, I think people are familiar not only with the possibility, that the world offers, and the way in which it can be managed or even fixed through the advent of science, but the way in which we understand the deep suffering and brokenness of the world in new ways. What parallels do you see between that era and ours, whether it's political and social divisions, economic pressures, et cetera? The 1740s were a time of incredible political division, you know, over the basic questions of what the legitimate government of Britain is.

People are beginning to sort themselves into professions or even very early factions that will eventually become political parties. And so people are exchanging information within what to us would look like a kind of bubble in a way that would be very familiar to us now. Coming up after the break, how Handel put together his band for Messiah's debut.

I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio. We'll be right back. When we visited Fishamble Street in Dublin to learn about the 1742 debut of Messiah, Stuart Kinsula walked us down the street to a many centuries-old stone cathedral. So, this is Christchurch Cathedral. It's where half of the gentlemen of the choir would have come from to sing in Messiah. They really were quite a talented bunch. They could occasionally be a little bit disreputable.

Disreputable in a drinking kind of way? Whatever makes you say that. There was literally a tavern at the end of Christchurch. I think it was called the Bull's Head. And in fact, some of the initial performances for a lot of these charitable performances actually took place in the tavern. As we heard earlier from Charles King, Messiah was an unusual piece for its time and potentially controversial. While its lyrics came from the Bible, it was going to have its debut not

in a church, but in a music hall. The dean of nearby St. Patrick's Cathedral was Jonathan Swift, the extremely well-regarded author of Gulliver's travels and a modest proposal. By this time, he had been dean of St. Patrick's for nearly three decades, and his voice carried a great deal of moral authority. He was beginning to be a little bit senile, and he did actually agree that the lay vicars from St. Patrick's could come along and sing for this charitable performance. Which was a big ask or no?

It was. The deans disapproved of the men singing in these secular scenes, But because the subject was so sacred, I think they were allowed to get away with it. And I might just read a little quote. So Swift having agreed to let the lay vicars sing, Messiah, his memory failing, went back on it, ordering, quote, his sub-dean in chapter to punish such vickers as shall ever appear there as songsters, fiddlers, pipers, trumpeters, drummers, drum majors, or in any sonal quality, according to the flagacious aggravations of the wrongs, respect of disobedience, rebellion, perfidy and ingratitude. So if he was going senile, there was

nothing wrong with the vocabulary. But he's basically saying, we're church people, not circus people. Exactly. So Swift said yes to allowing church choristers to perform in Messiah. And then he said no, but ultimately he said yes once again. His reasoning has been lost to time. It may have been because A, George Friedrich Handel was a big deal, a world-famous composer who had brought a brand-new oratorio all the way to Dublin from London, and B, this world premiere was sure to raise a lot of money for local charities. By the time we get into the 18th century, an enormous amount of the performances in Dublin were for charities. There was a thing called the Charitable Musical Society for the Relief of Distressed Families, which is pretty difficult to put into an acronym. or charitable musical society for the support of the hospital for incurable. Another bit of a long one.

And then there is the charitable musical society for the relief of imprisoned debtors. It's still done today. I mean, if you want bums on seats for a concert, you run it for a charity, and everyone feels a bit better about it and they go along and the standard of the music could be fabulous to awful, but people will go along because they want to support a particular charity. And here is Charles King, the author of Every Valley. I've always thought it was a wonderful fact about this piece of music that it was from the very beginning associated with doing something in the world, which connects to this idea of our own power to change things.

The premiere of Messiah raised more than 1,200 pounds, roughly $300,000 in today's money. It was used for various good works, Charles King, right? including the release of 142 debtors from local jails. Back then, you could be put in jail for stealing a loaf of bread. The early 18th century has sometimes been called the Great Era of Projects. Everyone had a scheme for something. How could you reform a thing? Sometimes just random people would write up a scheme and then send it off to a patron or send it off to Parliament.

So it was a time of great optimism about the power of individuals to wipe the slate clean, start over, redesign something from scratch. This is also a time when as incomes are rising in Britain, there are more people than ever who have the disposable wealth to think about philanthropy as a thing that's not only a good idea or royal or noble patronage, but the merchant class might think about what they can do to improve the condition of people around them. You make the very large and very interesting argument that Messiah played a role in making the Enlightenment real and making it stick. Can you walk me through that argument? Any audience who first heard Messiah would have come from a Christian, religious, typically Anglican

background. They would have expected to hear certain things in a work of music that was composed out of sacred texts. But what was so surprising at the time is to hear this work of music that had, at its core, a philosophical and theological journey. There's nothing in Messiah that's in the biblical order. It's all in the order that the librettist Charles Jennings wanted you to hear it in. So it begins with the idea of comfort, comfort ye my people, which is a text that's taken from the 40th chapter of the book of Isaiah. What is remarkable about that, text, if you go back to the original, 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. And so part of the

philosophical and theological argument in Messiah is really about agency that you have to be the one to transform the world. And that tracks so much with the political theory and the science of the time. We're not simply caught up in the maelstrom of fate, but we can really do something to reshape the world. I hear you, and I appreciate that point, but when I think about a parallel with today, a contemporary parallel, I wonder how the average, let's say, American feels today about personal agency, about the ability to not only engage with, but change the shape of large institutions. What's your feeling about that? Look at what Messiah is.

It's not a work of philosophy. It's not a work of economics. It's a work of art. Handel and Charles Jennings thought at some level that even in the middle of war and disease and death, it was worth making a piece of art. That's what I think people felt so deeply. the middle sections of Messiah that are so graphic in their descriptions of the suffering of Jesus, lean into the darkness, like really feel it, really feel the suffering that's in the world,

and then look for the ladders out. That's what I think Charles Jennings was doing in creating the original libretto for this. This deeply depressed man was building his own ladder out of the pit. You can read that theologically. Obviously, Charles Jenin's read it Theologically, but there's also something deeply human about that, it seems to me, that it's up

to all of us together. We're all singing from our seats together to build this stairway out of the valley as we find it. But this is a piece in praise of God. So what should one say about

a God and why should one praise a God who allows such suffering? I mean, that's the existential, eternal, $64,000 God question, but how do you answer it? This is the question that was at the core of so much of the thought of the 17th and 18th centuries. Theologians call it the problem with theodicy. How do you explain a just and good God who allows suffering in the world to continue? The easy answer to that is, well, it's all a mystery.

But I think Messiah begins with the idea of promise. It says, comfort you. that you have the power to be comforting in a deeply unjust world. And then we're going to move through some darkness and we're going to move through some really difficult times. And then at the end, we're going to have a vision. And it's really just a vision of what the world to come might look like, whether it's eternal or whether it's a different version of the world

that we're going to create. But it's asking us in a way to reason against experience, than from experience. Just for the couple of hours that you're sitting in your seat, listening to this piece of music, imagine that things are going to be okay. Imagine that the world is going to be just rather than unjust. And what would you do then to help make it that way? Quite apart from the theological context of this, I think that is an incredibly useful way of thinking about your day or you're weak. Like, if I just do the thought of experiment and imagine a world that is more just, where can I find little bits of evidence that

that world might be a warning? That's what I think people felt so deeply when they heard the first performance in Dublin. It felt like it was a piece of art that could do something in the world, not comfort you, actually, but buck you up. And I think in many ways, people have sense that over the centuries. It feels like this kind of message in a bottle from a time that has felt like every time. Coming up next time, in part two of our series, Handle the Man. He had to exercise a certain amount of entrepreneurial muscle in his work in London. We'll hear about the lean times. his accounts were reduced to nothing,

and then he had nothing in the bank. And his life after Messiah. I love the idea that Handel in his own life is enacting the very logic that you find inside Messiah itself. 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. Regan Hutchins handled our field recording in Dublin. Special thanks to Katrina Sorensen for her help with production and for her podcast Handles Messiah, the Advent calendar, which was a very helpful resource. Thanks also to the London Symphony Orchestra and LSO Live for allowing us to use their 2006 recording of Messiah

conducted by Sir Colin Davis. The Freakonomics Radio Network staff also includes Alina Cullman, Augusta Chapman, Dalvin Abouaji, Eleanor Osborne, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippin, Elaria Montenicourt, Morgan Levy, Sarah Lilly, and Teo Jacobs. Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by The Hitchhikers, and our composer is Luis Guerra. As always, thanks for listening. I don't worry about things that have no control over. There's no point in worrying. You'd be a good golfer with that attitude. Yes, you certainly need that attitude.

If you miss one for a couple of million dollars, you just miss a put that you could have got if you're plastered at home. When Macaro has done that a couple of times. The Freakonomics Radio Network, the hidden side of everything. Stitcher.