New York Philharmonic Transforms ‘The Wealth of Nations’ Into an Oratorio Showcasing Free-Market Capitalism

The celebrated composer David Lang debuted last week at the New York Philharmonic an oratorio sprung from the theories of the Scottish economist Adam Smith, as laid out in his formative 1776 treatise, “The Wealth of Nations.” Two hundred and fifty years to the month after Smith’s seminal work was first published, “the wealth of nations,” performed at Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall, draws on Smith’s text, alongside a chorus of American voices to explore the relationship between self-interest and collective gain and, in Mr. Lang’s words, “how we demonstrate our connectedness through trade, through money.”The result, buoyed by the artistic direction of the incoming music director, Gustavo Dudamel, impressed upon the audience that economic principles belong not only on Wall Street or in university lecture halls. They are, Mr. Lang argued in music, as central to the human experience as desire, love, and loss — and as deserving of artistic expression. That said, it takes some adjusting to listen to an opera whose libretto is written in English and is lifted, more or less, from an Econ 101 textbook. The text —projected on a screen behind the orchestra and printed in the program — pulls lines from Smith’s thousand-page magnum opus, assembling them with excisions and repetitions for effect.The vocal expertise of the forty-person chorus and two soloists, mezzo-soprano Fleur Barron, in her New York Philharmonic debut, and bass-baritone Davóne Tines, lends the prose a poetic quality that may not be picked up from the page alone. Mr. Lang’s opening section speaks to that effect. Drawing from the early pages of “The Wealth of Nations,” he examines Smith’s understanding of human motivation. Under the title “self-love,” he sets the lines: “We have / almost constant occasion / for the help of others it is in vain for us to expect it / from their benevolence only we will / be more likely to prevail / if we can interest their self-love in our favor / and show them that it is for their own advantage / to do for us what we require of them.”The phrases are drawn from Smith’s account of voluntary exchange — his argument that humans, when free to act in their own self-interest, unintentionally generate a system of trade that is both efficient and prosperous. The theory gives rise to Smith’s free market philosophy. Mr. Lang subjects those ideas to scrutiny in the sections that follow. He weaves in Frederick Douglass’s warnings about the unlimited hoarding of wealth, Eugene Debs’s Statement to the Court, and words from President Roosevelt and Ralph Waldo Emerson, among others. Mr. Lang, as noted in his program note, intended their voices to “challenge, extend, explain or contradict” Smith’s ideas, though in practice they register less as rebuttal than as enrichment.Many of their concerns about poverty and inequality are addressed by Smith himself, including in the passage Mr. Lang saves for last: “The secret / the very simple / the very simple secret / no society can surely be flourishing and happy / of which the far greater part / of the members are poor and miserable / it is but equity / that they who feed, clothe and lodge / the whole body of the people / should have such a share of the produce / of their own labor.” The passage, though often plucked as evidence of Smith’s socialist sympathies, is better understood as a statement about the conditions necessary for a functioning market system. A society of impoverished laborers is, for Smith, self defeating. The poorly fed, after all, are less productive. It is a case for decent wages that arises from the logic of the market rather than demands of redistribution, and exemplifies the complementary relationship between self-interest and social good that makes Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations” so compelling. Mr. Lang’s work, brought to life by the talents of Mr. Dudamel, Ms. Barron, Mr. Tines, and the Philharmonic’s orchestra and chorus, ends up vindicating this thesis.

New York Philharmonic Transforms ‘The Wealth of Nations’ Into an Oratorio Showcasing Free-Market Capitalism

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