656. How Handel Got His Mojo Back

23:38When he chose people to be really close to in a personal way, they were men. There was a kind of community that he felt with other men, and I don't have any sense of him having any relationships with women. How religious, how pious was Handel? Handel went to church weekly. He was a member of the St. George Hanover Square Church. He had his own pew. He was a Lutheran, of course. There was an attempt to convert him to Catholicism in Italy, which he refused. Lots of people didn't, but Handel refused and apparently said that he would rather live and die in the religion to which he was born, whether right or wrong.

24:26The sense of maintaining his Lutheran ties, I think, is interesting, given there was a Lutheran chapel at St. James's Palace, because the royal family worshipped as Lutherans. There was synergy between the royal family and Handel in their Lutheran background, which is why some of his religious works have corrals in them. You have to always remember with Handel that he had this extraordinary benefit, which was a pension from the royal coffers. I think a lot of people, when they hear pension, they think of something to take care of you in retirement. But this is basically a monthly stipend, yes?

25:06Stipend is a good word for it. And he got his first royal stipend in 1712 from Queen Anne. When George came over in 1714, continued it immediately. And then in 1723, added 200 additional pounds for work with the Chapel Royal, and then another 200 pounds for teaching the royal children, the grandchildren. And that 600 pounds was continued throughout his life, even long after the royal grandchildren were grown. And that just was sent to him directly rather than the bank? He would go and pick it up, actually. So that was his living expense? Yes, that is correct. He had the opportunity because of the pension, I think, to experiment and to say no to people that other composers did not have.

26:05He was trying to figure out how do I put my own art on a firmer foundation. And there were lots of things that he tried. That, again, is Charles King. His day job was receiving a salary from the British court. He works for a while for what is one of the first joint stock companies to be involved in opera production. production. He was also the first composer in Britain to assert copyright to his compositions. We know from his bank receipts that he wasn't particularly good at always collecting on those rights or the rights to publication, for example, and piracy of intellectual property was sort of the norm in this period.

26:47But he did have income from the published manuscripts that he managed to put out into the world. So in all of these ways, he's figuring out how is art not only a thing that inspires or that entertains, but that also provides an income not only for himself, but for the people he cared about, friends and family. Do we know anything about any financial or economic mentors? Oh, that's such a good question. Because as you describe him, he's fairly sophisticated and certainly more sophisticated than most people who make music for a living. Yeah, yeah. Well, I think this is a place where patronage and Handel's innovation really come together.

27:27He's not the one who's organizing the joint stock company or worrying about the legal instruments that will be required to set this up. But he is closely connected with all of the people who very much are in this world, who have the wherewithal, the means and the legal contacts to create the structures that allow Handel to succeed. Theaters had to worry about how you sell tickets. Theaters had to worry about paying the musicians, the artists, the folks who are designing the sets, the copyists who are creating the parts for the musicians in the pit or the equivalent. And so Handel from very early on is acutely aware of the economic and business side of entertainment in a way that perhaps some of his contemporaries who relied on noble patronage were not.

28:16Ellen Harris again. King George had given the Opera Company a warrant for the production of operas for 21 years. It's 1720 to 1741. And it's clear that Handel felt he needed to fulfill this obligation. Handel's operas were popular with the London audience, but there were challenges, including a rival company, the Opera of the Nobility. That one was started by King George's son, Frederick the Prince of Wales. So they had deep pockets and Handel had to compete with them over talent. Italian singers with whom he had difficulty. They were extraordinarily expensive. They frequently didn't want to sing what he wrote for them.

28:59They're very funny anecdotes. He had the soprano Francesca Cuzzoni rehearsing one of the first operas that she sang with him. He rehearsed in his house. He would play the harpsichord and they would sing. And she did not want to sing. This aria, which is very beautiful, isn't an exact quote, but it's a story, that he said, well, you may be the greatest she-double, but I am Beezlebob, and threatened to throw her out the window. He also had a tenor once who refused to sing an aria and said that if he was made to sing the aria, that he would jump into the harpsichord. Handel apparently responded because he had a really good sense of the entrepreneur.

29:45He said, please let me know ahead of time because I will advertise it. More people will come to see you jump than will come to hear you sing. But, of course, the opera of the nobility got Farinelli. the greatest castrato of the era. And Handel had tried repeatedly to hire him and had been unable to get him. But it wasn't just the singers. There were sets to build, costumes to create. And because Handel was fond of spectacle, there were occasionally fireworks. Running an opera company anywhere is a very difficult proposition. It's a very expensive art form. It's very difficult to run one, much less two, major opera companies.

30:26the opera companies he had been engaged with, the Royal Academy of Music from 1720, and then his own company from 1728, and then the opera nobility comes in and begins competing with him in 1732. Repeatedly, the opera company was running out of money. And that's primarily because opera is just so expensive to produce? Well, opera is very expensive to produce, and as a result, I think he stopped receiving salary. He was not able to build up any kind of cash fund for himself. During the early years of the Royal Academy, he was receiving into his annuities account at the Bank of England approximately 700 pounds a year.

31:09Today, that would be the equivalent of around$165 ,000. I think we can take that to be his salary from the Royal Academy of Music. In 1728, it went bankrupt and then a new company was formed. And Handel continued getting 700 pounds a year for a while. But in 1732, it all ended. And suddenly, he sold all of the annuity account. He opened a cash account with what he had left. That was in the vicinity of 2 ,000 pounds. Over the next years, he kept withdrawing money year after year until in 1738, he had 50 pounds left. He withdrew that, and he had nothing. Between 1739 and 1743, he had no accounts at all in the Bank of England.

31:57He had run out of salary, basically. Ultimately, his accounts were reduced to nothing, and then he had nothing in the bank. So he was in bad shape financially, but that wasn't all. He began having serious health problems in 1737. He had a major, what is called a paralytic attack. So his health, I think, was increasingly problematic. And as soon as he wrote that opera in 1741, which is Deodemia, he left town. He said that he was going to Dublin and looking forward to it and not having anything to do anymore with the people who were, you know, meddling with opera.

32:44he had received an invitation to come to dublin to do a series of concerts he'd never been to ireland before but if things were going well he might stick around to the spring but all of this was sort of up in the air that again is charles king and the only new thing that he had with him was this composition called messiah which he had composed the music for on the basis of this text written by his friend Charles Jennings, Bible verses not in the right order set to the conventions of Italian opera. This was not a recipe for success. Handel composed this thing really because he was looking for something new to offer on what amounted to a greatest hits tour.

33:25When any artist starts doing a greatest hits tour, that's probably not a great sign about what the arc of their artistic career is like. Coming up after the break, how Dublin and Messiah changed everything for our friend George Fridrick Handel. I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio. We'll be right back.

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36:16Handel's Messiah is full of melodies so rich that some people just can't help themselves. He trusted in God that he would deliver him. Let him deliver him if he delight in him. That, again, is the musicologist Ellen Harris. I just think it's one of the most spectacular choruses, but it's not one that people remember. They remember the Hallelujah Chorus, but I love this chorus. I understand you gave some fairly serious consideration to becoming a professional singer when you were younger, yes? Yes. Tell me about that and about making the choice to become an academic as opposed to a professional singer.

36:58It's very simple, really. If you want to become a professional singer, you have to believe that you're the best. I didn't. I did have this wonderful professor at Brown University who said to me, well, Ellen, your voice is very good when you practice. You didn't love to practice, I'm guessing? No, no, no. I sang when I felt like it. And the effort that has to go into maintaining a voice or any instrument, I mean, you're at it all the time. I just didn't think that that was really where I was headed, and I loved the research. The whole idea of working in an archive, a lot of the work I do frequently makes me feel like a detective.

37:40Because you can uncover things, you discover things in the archives.

37:51I, too, like discovering things in the archives, which now brings us to London. We've made George Frederick Handel's Messiah trip in reverse. We started in Dublin, then to Chester, and here we are now back in London, Handel's adopted hometown. He is well represented in a variety of archives here, including the British Library. so i'm chris scoby british libraries curator for music manuscripts and archives i've been working here since 2008 and in this role since 2017 you'll see in a moment there's elements of it that are quite fragile and we need to be careful with so every time it comes out of the storage where it's temperature controlled low humidity there's things we need to be careful with that we don't want to move it all the time there's always risks involved in things like that.

38:40So this is the first manuscript that was created. Meaning by Handel's hand. In Handel's hand, yeah. So it's known as the composing manuscript. So I'll open it up. And can you just describe this beautiful book it's bound in? Yeah, this is a kind of red leather binding that's actually from the 1950s. It's quite a modern binding. And we've got the name of the piece, Messiah, an oratorio by Handel, original score. And before it was bound in this, was it bound elsewhere? Was it in loose pages? It would have been bound in something probably more like a marble boards kind of binding, which was typical of George III's library bindings.

39:19Got it. So it's interesting, there's three or four different languages through here. Obviously, English, the text that he's writing down. There's Italian for the typical tempo markings and sometimes movement headings and things like that. There's German, there's little bits of Latin. What's this say here? So we've got a note being added afterwards. Here, part of the overture and the beginning of the rest, it's comfort ye my people are wanting.

39:49I'm impressed you don't use the fancy gloves. Yes, so that's something we've been told specifically by conservation not to use gloves for the simple reason you lose the ability to be tactile, to be careful, basically. Meaning you might tear it more likely with gloves. Yeah, clean hands are better than gloves. There's just less of a risk. If I just jump forwards a little bit. I quite like this page from He Shall Purify to see how the work is going on. So we've got a phrase here with lots of semiquavers and one of these running passages.

40:31he's had to continue the stave lines off the end to capture the idea so rather than going over the page wiggly bar lines not straight so he's extending the staff yeah you kind of get the impression of working in the moment having to create a bit more space because this is what you've got to get down on page there's work going on here there's the dirt from work there's the ink sort of smudging across things here as well it's moving quickly the notes are moving quickly we've got lots of semiquavers so the end sound is going to sound fast but you can almost feel the speed of the ink on the page the way the notes are tipping over more and more they're kind of increasingly coming off center and tipping over to the right through the speed and perhaps enthusiasm of writing.

41:19And when you get the personal connection straight away, it's not just conveying the notes here. This personality jumps off the page.

41:29I have to say, it's just awe-inspiring to think that I'm here with the composer's manuscript in the British Library, and I have a pen in my hand just casually, because I've been taking notes. I could... I mean, I probably shouldn't do that. Keep the pen away.

41:55Scobie now turns to the most famous page of the original Messiah manuscript, a page that is stained by a massive ink spill. Ooh. Yeah. But it looks like they really wiped quickly and preserved what was underneath. Yeah. So what's interesting about this is actually if you go to the page before, this is what's covered by the ink. It's the same music, but it's not in Handel's hand. And I'm reliably informed. I think you can tell from these little stainings in each corner that this copied page would have been attached over the ink spill. You're saying that the spill happened, someone wiped, the music beneath it was visible, but someone recopied the page.

42:40Exactly, yeah. And not him. Not him, no. It's been fairly well established by various generations of Handel scholars that this isn't Handel's handwriting, this bit, which leads us to think that maybe the ink spill actually happened during the copying for the conducting score. Things like these details aren't really known for sure. It's kind of piecing together what evidence there is to make some kind of detective-like assumptions.

43:08Spills happened, of course. And then you bought them, and then you get all sorts of mess. Yes. That, again, is the musicologist Ellen Harris. I mean, Messiah was written in three weeks. He would write at something of a white heat. Can you describe for me how Handel composed? What instrument was he composing on, if any? If any instrument, he would have used a keyboard instrument and probably a small harpsichord. He did have in the house a small harpsichord. He had a large harpsichord. The large harpsichord is probably used for the rehearsals in the front music room, the small harpsichord, potentially in the back room, where he could compose.

43:49A lot of composers simply write music. Their music is in their head, and they write it down. They don't play it first, necessarily. On the other hand, Handel was an improviser, and so would probably have improvised some things and maybe then written them down. As he writes, he knows well enough what he wants to do, that he can lay out a score. But then after he finishes, he goes back and fills it up. He writes all the inner parts. Depending on what the score is for any particular aria, he is adding the inner violin parts or the viola part, or he's adding some of the inner wind parts. Maybe even a trumpet.

44:31Could be. He gives his scores two dates. the first time through, and then the second time through when he actually puts in all the parts and the recitative. That's the order of things. And of course, in the process of this makes changes. So sometimes pages get ripped out, new pages get put in. Did he bring in vocalists to hear how all the vocal parts would sound like as he's writing Messiah and preparing to bring it up to Dublin for its debut? Do you know if he rehearsed with any vocalists either here or there? No, I do not think so. When he put the two choirs together, he had, I think, 16 men and 16 boys.

45:09And the men, the soloists, the men parts were taken from the choristers, I believe. He had a voglio, an Italian singer who sang with him, who came with him to Dublin. That's the only person who could have rehearsed with him on the way. But he caught up with Susanna Sibber in Dublin. She did not come with him. That was happenstance. It was happenstance, indeed. Susanna Sibber was a prominent young actress who had worked with Handel in London on a variety of productions. She was horribly abused by her husband, who set her up with another man and then accused her of adultery publicly. Ruined her career in London, at least for a short while.

45:53She was in Dublin doing some theatrical things, and Handel was able to pick her up for some of his performances. And then had her sing, he was despised, rejected. And it's a song that works so beautifully for a theater voice. It's not a virtuosic piece. The phrases are very short so that you don't need a lot of breath. It speaks. A lot of Messiah has this quality where I can't imagine the words being said any other way. He was despised, despised and rejected, rejected of man. I mean, I'm tempted to sort of go into it. He was despised, despised and rejected, rejected of men, a man loves. And, you know, it's just like little phrases with breasts, and then you come back and you get the rejected.

46:55Whereas, you know, Rejoice Greatly, which is sung by the soprano, is as virtuosic as it can possibly be. Ian, oh, I'm not going to try to sing that for you right now. You know, with long runs and enormous demand placed on the breath. So this sense of drama in He Was Despised is something that was very close to Susanna Sibber's best skills.

47:34In Dublin, there was great excitement over a new composition, a new kind of composition, by George Friderick Handel. There was so much demand for tickets and so little space inside the music hall that ladies were asked to arrive without the hoops in their skirts and men without their swords. So how was the debut received? Here's how Charles King puts it in his book Every Valley. The public reaction to Messiah was astonishment and wonder. Someone who was present at the first performance said it was a species of music like no other. People were just kind of flabbergasted by it. And on the way back to London from Dublin, Handel even took the time to stop into Charles Jennings' estate.

48:18Charles Jennings, you'll remember, was the wealthy and pious man who assembled the lyrics for Messiah from his personal collection of biblical manuscripts. Jennings, unfortunately, wasn't home at the time, but he wanted to tell him, as Handel put it, how well your Messiah, he was giving Jennings the credit, how well your Messiah was received there. Although maybe slightly disingenuous since Handel hadn't even told him to finish the piece, much less that he was going to perform it, correct? Yeah, by the time Handel was coming back from Dublin, Jennings knew that Handel had set his text to music.

48:53Chenin might have said, you know, you could have invited me to Dublin to be there too. You know, I might have liked to have been in the audience.

49:11It would be hard to overstate just how valuable that trip to Dublin turned out to be for Handel. We gave him back his, what's he called, the mojo? Is that what he called today? That's Prancius Odin, the Irish conductor we spoke with last week. Because the Irish temperament, I think, and the reception he got, he thoroughly enjoyed his stay and said he wanted to come back, but his health didn't let him. He did stay nine months. Nine months. When he was leaving, nine months later, he was so pleased at Dublin and the treatment he got here that he actually bought an organ and donated it to the hall as a gift, as a thank you.

49:44Is it either naive or maybe heretical of me to suggest that just as Messiah was a story about resurrection, that the Dublin trip for Handel was a resurrection of sorts for him? Well, resurrection is very strong, but we gave him back his energy. He went back to London full of energy to compose again. And here is Ellen Harris, once again following the money. When he came back to London, he opened an annuities account at the Bank of England with 1 ,600 pounds. Wow. Where'd that come from? Dublin. Where else could it? He made 1 ,600 pounds in Dublin. I can't say that, but I can tell you that he had no bank account when he left for Dublin.

50:25And when he came back, he opened a new annuity account with 1 ,600 pounds. My best guess is that he earned a great deal of money in Dublin. For the first time in his life, he had both a cash account and an annuity account. What he did from 1743 is he apparently put all of the proceeds from his season into the cash account, waited until he paid all his bills, and then just moved the rest into annuity accounts. And you can watch it happen. And you can see on a day that he suddenly takes all the money out of his cash account and moves it into an annuity account. Because he's feeling flush, he doesn't need that much cash on hand anymore, and he's secure enough to invest?

51:12He has apparently paid his bills that he needed to pay. When he came back to London, he was importuned to write operas. And he said no. He made it very clear that he was done. He knew that doing works in English drew a large audience. and since the works in English were largely based on biblical texts, they were performed during Lent only. He didn't have to worry about staging because they were not staged. He could use English singers who came much less expensively and he had a shorter season. But I would think that's a problem because you have less time for earning. True, he had less time for earning, but in fact the costs were so much less that he could actually make more money.

52:02So it's really about cutting production costs. That seems to be the key driver. I think it is the key driver. By 1745, Ani's given up the subscriptions altogether and is simply taking box office. I mean, that's also very new. The idea that you could run a company and simply take box office and not have any subscribers. He found dealing with the subscribers an irritation. From 1745, he never withdraws anything from an annuity. All the annuity counts just get bigger and bigger and bigger because there are no withdrawals. You know, this is so opposite from what was happening in the 1730s when there are only withdrawals.

52:45Okay, so he's becoming quite wealthy relatively late in life, and I'm happy for him. But as I understand it, when he brought Messiah back to London, it wasn't nearly as well received there as it was in Dublin. Well, it wasn't terribly successful. It's clearly a piece that he liked. He kept trying to adjust it to London taste so that we get all these different messiahs, you know, the 1743 messiah and the 1745 messiah. The first performance in London, I think it had three performances in that season. So that's not a big hit. He didn't hit his groove in London with Messiah until it became a charity piece at the Foundling Hospital.

53:29The first Foundling Hospital performance is 1750. And what is the Foundling Hospital? Here again is Charles King. The impulse behind it originally was the idea that we didn't have to live in a world in which people were just abandoned to their fate, that the wealthy, the well-connected had both the responsibility to and the means to create an institution that could help solve the problem. The founding hospital was created by a man called Thomas Coram. Thomas Coram was kind of the quintessential man of projects of the early 18th century. He was never wealthy himself. He was always a commercial agent, first in the New World and the American colonies.

54:13He spent time in Boston. He married a woman from Boston and went back and forth across the Atlantic several times in his life. But he was never particularly successful with much of anything. On one trip back to London, Coram was shocked by what he saw. Young children living on the streets in dire poverty. Coram developed a particular interest in one category of child, which at the time was called a foundling. Foundlings were different from orphans. Orphans were kids who, through chance, fate, had been left without parents. And they were often already looked out for by churches and by charitable organizations of that type.

54:53But foundlings were a real social problem because foundlings were kids who had one or both parents still living, but for some reason the parents couldn't care for them or they decided to just abandon them on the street. This deeply affected Coram, and he began this long project of getting wealthy aristocratic Britons on the side of creating an institution that would be focused on foundlings. He had all of these really terrific contacts from his time working on and in the colonies. The wealthiest people in Britain knew Thomas Coram, and also then he could marry that with this new charitable commitment that he discovered.

55:35So how successful overall was this charitable commitment? The Foundling Hospital, after struggling and struggling and struggling, finally got off the ground with a royal charter and with the most important, wealthiest people in Britain on its board of governors, and finally broke ground to create a formal institution where they could begin to bring kids in. But like any charity, they were always looking for money. They were always looking to be able to take in more children because the number of children who actually went to the foundling hospital and were cared for, there were tiny fraction of the families who existed in London.

56:11But by the 1750s, when Handel is asked to begin doing annual concerts to support the Foundling Hospital, it had become arguably the most well-known family-oriented charity in Britain. Describe the performances of Messiah at the Foundling Hospital early on, including Handel's not just authorship, obviously, but his role there. Throughout most of the 1750s, until his health really begins to decline, Handel is in person, conducting from the organ the performances of Messiah. You want to go to this institution, your money is going to a good cause. You would see the children sitting in the balcony in their uniforms, so you're seeing the beneficiaries of your good offices.

56:58And then you would have the chance to see this grand artistic figure who, with his gigantic 17th century wig, really looks like he's transported from a different era. And you would do all of that in the company of the great and the good of London. So these were the hottest tickets of the year, practically. When I think about the themes in the piece, redemption after heartbreak, joy after sorrow, and so on, I think not just on a population level or a historical level, but on a personal level. And Handel, his reputation had been diminishing. And then at a relatively late stage in his life, he wrote this piece, and it really set the tone for the rest of his life.

57:44When I was talking about this with a friend of mine, she runs a museum. She was talking about all the artists who in their 70s, 80s, even 90s really hit their stride. I'm just curious if you could give me a little bit about how this, I don't want to say rescued Handel or rehabilitated him. I don't know, maybe those words are appropriate, but how do you see this fitting into the arc of his life? How surprising was it? How fortunate was it, etc.? Handel had no idea that the thing that he composed in 24 days in August and September of 1741 was going to be the reason we're now in 2025 talking about him.

58:23In fact, this is one of the hardest things, I think, to talk with great Messiah fans about. Because this piece of music means so much to so many people and people experience it very deeply. They want it to be the product of Handel's deep religious devotion. They want an angel on his shoulder. I think the deeper, more profound truth to all of this is we never know what we do right now, how it's going to affect what happens tomorrow, what happens next week, or how the things we do in this moment affect the rest of our life. And that, in a way, is also written into Messiah. it. It starts with this idea that it will seem very strange to say this in this moment, in this world, but a redeemer is coming.

59:14A revolution is at hand. An upturning of everything is going to come. You know, what a ridiculous thing to say. But I love the idea that Handel, in a way, in his own life, in the composition of this piece of music, is enacting the very logic that you find inside Messiah itself.

59:40Coming up next time on Freakonomics Radio, we find another Handel archive. I like the bit at the beginning. In the name of God, amen, I, George Frederick Handel, considering the uncertainty of human life, do make this my will in manner following. We'll hear from the conductor who is leading this year's Messiah at Lincoln Center with the New York Philharmonic. I closed the score and handed it to my assistant behind me. The concertmaster said, what are you doing? And I said, I don't need that now. And we ask, whose Messiah is it anyway? There's a sense of pride, of ownership. This is ours. We'll also be slipping in a bonus episode, a conversation with the man who presents the Lincoln Center Messiah.

1:00:22Orchestras are really expensive bands. every orchestra in America struggles to break even. That's next time. Until then, take care of yourself. And if you can, someone else too. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. You can find our entire archive on any podcast app. Also at Freakonomics.com, where we publish complete transcripts and show notes. This episode was produced by Zach Lipinski and edited by Ellen Frankman. It was mixed by Jasmine Klinger with help from Jeremy Johnston. Thanks also to Rob Double of London Broadcast for field recording in Chester in London, to Regan Hutchins for recording in Dublin, to Katrine Nyland-Sorensen for her help with production and for her podcast Handles Messiah, the Advent Calendar.

1:01:11And special thanks to London Symphony Orchestra Live for allowing us to use their recording of Messiah performed in 2006 and conducted by Sir Colin Davis. The Freakonomics Radio Network staff also includes Alina Cullman, Augusta Chapman, Dalvin Abouaji, Eleanor Osborne, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippon, Elaria Montenacourt, Morgan Levy, Sarah Lilly, and Tao Jacobs. Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by The Hitchhikers, and our composer is Luis Guerra. As always, thanks for listening.

1:01:44People are split, as you know, about whether Messiah should end with the hallelujah. Oh, bitch. No, you don't. You don't end Messiah with the hallelujah chorus. That's the end of part two. You're not going to go on to part three. You're going to give up the trumpet will sound. You're going to give up? I know that my Redeemer liveth. You're going to give up blessing and honor, glory, and power be unto him? No.

1:02:17The Freakonomics Radio Network. The hidden side of everything.