655. “The Greatest Piece of Participatory Art Ever Created”

24:39Charles King: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?

25:25Charles King: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.

25:43It's a wonderful, rousing chorus. It really is. It's the one that everybody knows. I'll go for a hallelujah any time. This, again, is Stuart Kinsla, 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 along to a 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 but 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 like funny you should ask that many audiences especially if an audience seeing 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.

27:02There is that. Or my favourite one is when at the end of the Hallelujah Chorus, there's this grand thing. We've gone, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, and then people start going. And then you go, hallelujah. And so it just, 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 happening.

27:45I 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, and 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?

28:39I think it's really the fact that the tunes are so good. I mean, there are all these little bits of recitative and so forth, and some of the arias are really beautiful. but it's also nicely paced so that 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 coloratura 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

29:18Coming up after the break, how Messiah came to be and Handel's 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 Freakonomics Radio. We'll be right back.

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32:32The 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 Handel's 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. 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.

33:10The rough place is plain. The rough place is plain, exactly.

33:20Part of the book, Every Valley, is about the darkness that so many people associated with this piece of music experienced and were 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.

34:04And 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.

34:49I 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.

35:36It 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.

36:17And, 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 Handel 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 chorale 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.

36:58Talk 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.

37:42I 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 broke as 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 much closer to jazz than it is to later symphonic orchestral music of, say, the 19th century.

38:30You might get a chord progression or a bass line 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 its locus. People are experimenting all over. I mean, French Baroque is its own tradition, for example, but the epicenter was Italy.

39:13It's the reason that we kind of break into pidgin 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, you're wondering, how long can I get away with holding this really dissonant note until I resolve it into the court?

39:53Of 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.

40:31And 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 Webber, 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.

41:21The place for sacred text 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 Jennings' interpretation of the sacred texts.

41:51Charles 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 Jennings.

42:34Why 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.

43:13And as is the case sometimes with very wealthy patrons, he felt the right to correct Handel 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 Stuarts, had been ousted in the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688.

43:58There would eventually be yet another Stuart 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 Stuart dynasty. He was what was called a non-juror, meaning that he had not sworn allegiance to the new king.

44:39That 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? 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.

45:22But 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.

46:07with 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.

46:50In 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, etc.

47:32The 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'd be very familiar to us now.

48:02Coming 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.

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50:09When we visited Fishamble Street in Dublin to learn about the 1742 debut of Messiah, Stuart Kinsella 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.

50:54As 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.

51:38Which 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 and chapter to punish such vicars 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 respect of disobedience, rebellion, perfidy and ingratitude.

52:21So if he was going sun isle, 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.

53:06There 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 Incurables, 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.

53:47And here's 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 writes, 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.

54:27Everyone 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 conditions.

55:08of 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.

55:50It'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.

56:39And 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 Masai 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.

57:32That'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 Jennings 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.

58:13We'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 of 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, Well, it's all a mystery.

58:56But I think Messiah begins with the idea of promise. It says, comfort ye, that you have the power to be comforting in a deeply unjust world.

59:11And 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 rather 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.

59:44And 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 your week. Like, if I just do the thought 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 sensed that over the centuries it feels like this kind of message in a bottle from a time that has felt like every time

1:00:42Coming up next time in part two of our series, Handel the Man.

1:00:47Charles King:He had to exercise a certain amount of entrepreneurial muscle in his work in London. We'll hear about the lean times. Ultimately, 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 do. 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.

1:01:30This 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 Katrine 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 Rippon, Elaria Montenacourt, Morgan Levy, Sarah Lilly, and Tao Jacobs.

1:02:13Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by the Hitchhikers, and our composer is Luis Guerra. As always, thanks for listening.

1:02:24I don't worry about things I 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 putt that you could have got if you were plastered at home. When McElroy's done that a couple of times. Oh boy.

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