Who Pays for “Messiah”?

Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner. We are in the middle of publishing a three-part series on George Frederick Handel's Messiah, and I'm slipping into the feed today with a Messiah bonus episode. Let me tell you how this one came about. Over the past several years, as I have become addicted to this piece of music, I attended several performances by the New York Philharmonic. The playbill

for these performances reads, Handel's Messiah presented by Gary W. Parr. I got to wondering what it means for a performance to be presented by a particular person, and I especially got to wondering who is Gary W. Parr, so I tracked him down. It turns out that he used to be the chairman

of the Philharmonics Board of Directors, and he's still a member of the board, which officially makes him a patron of the arts. Not quite the same kind of patron that King George II was to handle, but you get the idea. The conversation you're about to hear between Gary Parr and myself goes in some interesting directions. I'd ask our archivists, how many years have we performed the Messiah? It's decades upon decades.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (42 minutes, 6,989 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

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