Chapter 1: What inspired David Lang to compose 'Wealth of Nations'?
At the end of March, the composer David Lang debuted a modern piece of music set to a 250-year-old book, Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. It had four sold-out performances by the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel. Last week on the show, we heard from Lang about the origins of the piece, and we sat in on a few rehearsals. We also attended one of the performances.
Afterward, we spoke with some audience members in the lobby.
I'm here on a band trip, and this was one of the activities, so yeah. I really like all of the crescendos and how it was all building up to a really big moment at the end.
I think it actually speaks to what is most beautiful about humans, that we feel better when we help others. I think that's a beautiful emotional and pragmatic loop.
This is the kind of piece the Philharmonic should be doing. It was also interesting watching Gustavo Dudamel up close. He was really into it.
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Chapter 2: How does a composer feel after a world premiere?
I mean, he was really inside the piece.
The published reviews were also positive. Stacey Vanek-Smith, writing for Bloomberg, said that David Lang had shown that economics, often reduced to stock tickers and earnings reports, can in fact be profoundly human. And what about Lange himself? How did he feel about the first performances of his new composition? Well, he was pleased and proud, at least for a little while.
Last week, I was a superstar. This week, I'm nothing. Today on Freakonomics Radio, the global economy has changed a great deal since Adam Smith, but the underlying lessons may be more pertinent than ever.
There is a human dimension and a human cost involved. to everything we do, and we need to wake up to that.
The math and aftermath of Wealth of Nations, starting now. This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything, with your host, Stephen Dubner. I caught up with David Lang about a week after the last of the four performances of The Wealth of Nations.
And I asked what it felt like to work on a big new piece like this for years and then hear it come to life and then go away.
There's always this post-experience depression. And the bigger the piece and the bigger the triumph, the deeper the hole.
But I mean, you have to feel it was a great success, no?
I always go into these things thinking that the definition of success would be to come out and not have everyone think that I'm incompetent. That's the way to set the bar low. I want to set the bar low because there's so many things that can go wrong, you know. And my music repeats a lot. So if you make a mistake, it could be like, there's 10 minutes of this mistake.
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Chapter 3: What emotions do audience members express after the performance?
But you should tell me what you thought. I mean, I've been living with this piece for years. You just heard it the first time, so I'd be very curious to know what you thought.
I thought it was wonderful. I thought it was thought-provoking, but also totally engaging. It was deep, but accessible. There's a lot of different movements, obviously, and a lot of different emotions and a lot of different colors in the music. And you'll forgive me if I speak about music in a language that isn't quite the language of musicians or composers.
But I found the music spiky and kind of punky at times, but also very delicate. I found the piece celebratory, but also mournful. I found it... confident, but also seeking. And I found I walked out of there with a new appreciation for Adam Smith, which is not nothing because I had quite a bit of an appreciation for him and a pretty big appreciation for David Lang.
What's weird, you know, being a young composer, you try to learn things and figure things out and you're always aware of what you're trying that you've never done before. When you become an old composer, and I can say that as a senior citizen, you're you know things instinctively that you're not really paying attention to any longer.
So these issues of pacing and depth, there are all sorts of really important things that I don't think about as intensely as I used to think about them. I just trust that I will know how they work. And so for me, one of the really fun things was thinking that I was going to have
an experience that had a particular shape, like this giant enthusiastic Adam Smith stuff with a full orchestra at the beginning, and that gradually as the piece went on, it would taper down to these more personal American thoughts. And we would get someplace that would be, as you said, optimistic, but also kind of really trying to pay attention to what's going on around us.
and I wasn't really sure that that was going to work. But for me, that's the thing that I was really satisfied with, the shape of the intellectual argument I was really happy with.
I had a lot of fun being at rehearsals, and there were many things that really impressed me. First of all, I'm just blown away by how good the New York Philharmonic is and their singers. When I heard the first choral rehearsal and then the first orchestra rehearsal, it sounded so good. I thought, oh, well, everybody must have rehearsed a bunch before already together. But in fact, they haven't.
It does seem like an absolute miracle that a person like you could sit in your studio in Soho for a bunch of years and write dots on the paper. And then one afternoon in March of 2026, you know, 48 vocalists and then a whole bunch of musicians and a couple soloists get together and they turn this two-dimensional thing into not even three, like six.
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Chapter 4: What challenges does David Lang face as a composer?
The music, beautiful. The choral writing, beautiful. The narration, the text, the approach to the text was really clear. I kept discovering new things. And in retrospect, I realized... that the first half was a narration of Adam Smith's treatise through music, and then the second half was the effects. I want some bread. I need shelter. Oh my goodness.
I mean, it's so powerful, the second half in light of the first. I mean, like devastating.
What it made me wonder is, especially since so much of the Philharmonic's revenues come from philanthropy and philanthropists, and those are often the kind of people who have the concentrated wealth that is being decried in a piece like this. How do you think about how some of your most generous patrons are hearing that?
It was a searing indictment to our society today, that piece. But the people who give money to the New York Philharmonic in philanthropy, and for that matter in tickets as well, care deeply about this enormous public and civic good that is this beautiful orchestra. They cared deeply about their city.
But I mean, were you concerned at all? Did any patrons come up to you after any of the four nights and say, you know, wonderful piece, Matthias. I'm always thrilled to be here. But boy, oh boy, did he lay into us. Nobody.
Nobody. I was kind of ready for it.
Yeah.
Look, people have their eyes open to what's happening in the world.
If you look back at history and you look at particularly turbulent times in history and you look at the art from those times, you see that the artists were very often not just describing the turmoil of the moment, but seeing, you know, holding the mirror up to society in a way that just nobody else does.
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