674. How Does a Composer Feel After the World Premiere?

What It Covers

Composer David Lang reflects on the world premiere of his oratorio *Wealth of Nations*, set to Adam Smith's 1776 text, performed four times by the New York Philharmonic under Gustavo Dudamel. Lang, Philharmonic CEO Matthias Tarnopolsky, and political scientist Glory Liu assess the piece's reception, economics, and cultural resonance.

Key Questions Answered

• •Post-premiere psychology: Composers routinely experience depression after major premieres, with the depth of that low correlating directly to the scale of the triumph. Lang's strategy for managing expectations: define success as simply not appearing incompetent, which lowers the psychological stakes enough to allow genuine satisfaction when the work lands well with audiences.
• •Rehearsal as community-building: Orchestra rehearsals are not primarily about learning notes — musicians practice their individual parts at home beforehand. The rehearsal process is specifically about 100-plus people learning to function as a coordinated community, a model applicable to any large collaborative project requiring synchronized individual expertise toward a shared outcome.
• •Artistic framing of economics: Lang's structural choice — opening with Adam Smith's broad economic theory, then narrowing to individual human voices expressing need for bread and shelter — creates emotional devastation in the second half. Sequencing abstract systems before human consequences is a narrative technique that makes structural inequality viscerally felt rather than intellectually processed.
• •Patronage and critical content: The New York Philharmonic operates on a roughly $90 million annual budget, heavily dependent on philanthropic donors — the same concentrated wealth the oratorio critiques. Tarnopolsky reports zero patron complaints across four performances, suggesting audiences with financial power can engage critically with art that challenges their position when civic identity is also at stake.
• •Adam Smith's overlooked equity argument: Smith explicitly wrote that no society can be flourishing when most members are poor and miserable, and that justice, liberty, and equality are the "very simple secret" to broad prosperity. Lang's deliberate inclusion of this passage reframes Smith away from the free-market-only interpretation that dominates contemporary political discourse on both left and right.