How often have you seen a performer raise a hand to hush the applause breaking out after the first movement of a symphony or a concerto? Perhaps you’re one of those people who turn angrily towards the ‘offenders’ to hush them up. If so, I doubt Mozart is on your side. He was delighted with the applause in Paris that greeted an effect in the last movement of his symphony for that city: a very quiet beginning, which made the audience hush their companions so that it could be heard, then a sudden loud outburst.
Yes, people used to talk during the performance, and not just as they still do from time to time in countries such as Italy and Spain. A report from Amsterdam in 1808 describes audiences beginning to chat during the slow movements of Beethoven symphonies. Eighteenth-century composers took this for granted; Mozart, for example, who wrote to his father about Count Salern because that gentleman really listened to the performance of a Mozart divertimento, whereas the other courtiers went on talking, taking snuff and so on.
Louis Spohr, in similar circumstances, asserted himself in favour of the music. In 1801-2, when Spohr was in the service of the Duke of Brunswick, concerts were listened to in silence when the Duke was present; when he was not, so that the Duchess’s card party would not be disturbed, the orchestra was forbidden to play loudly, a carpet was spread to deaden the sound, and the bidding of the card players was often louder than the music. On one occasion, Spohr relates, he forgot the prohibition, and played ‘with all the vigour and fire of inspiration, so that I even carried the orchestra with me. Suddenly, in the middle of a solo, my arm was seized by a lackey, who whispered to me “her Highness sends me to tell you that you are not to scrape away so furiously”.’ Enraged, Spohr played even more loudly, and was rebuked by the marshal of the court.
Before you think ‘those were the bad old days’, pause a moment to reflect that this is still the way most people experience music. On radio or recordings it is often background to other activities, and at rock or jazz concerts people talk and applaud without guilt during the performances. There’s something very unusual about the concert experience in which you are participating as you read. In its earliest days, this new, less participatory concert behaviour seemed unusual. A music journalist in Leipzig in the 1820s commented with pride that ‘symphonies are played here as they ought to be played elsewhere but unfortunately rarely are in other places, namely entire and complete, with no other pieces between the movements’.
Not everything heard with equal attention
The Leipzig burgher subscribers were proud of their attention span. They believed serious listening was the solution to the problem of keeping a passive audience from boredom. In Beethoven’s day this problem had been tackled by kaleidoscopic programs, including arias, solos, and choral works as well as symphonies, and inserting other pieces between the movements of a symphony. At the premiere of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in Vienna, Franz Clement followed the first movement by playing a solo holding his violin upside down! Concert programs were much longer than ours, but not everything was expected to be heard with equal attention.
If the middle-class concert, as opposed to the salon or court concert patronised by the aristocracy, became shorter, it was partly because busy people earning their living had to rationalise their time. But there was more to it than that. Applause is the clue. Percy Scholes, whose Oxford Companion to Music is a valuable contributor to the cultivation of the ‘music appreciation’ needed for the new kind of concert, comments that in matters of applause ‘we tend to be more restrained than our forebears’. Clapping after singers’ arias, he comments, is more common at the opera than at orchestra concerts, since their audiences ‘are usually more knowledgeable than those at the opera’. Scholes seems unaware of the question-begging and snobbery in this statement.
A form of audience participation
Applause is, after all, a form of audience participation, and appreciation – perhaps the only one left to the audience at a symphony concert. Throughout the 19th century, musicians and their public seemed uncertain whether they were participating in a ritual or an entertainment. Mendelssohn, for example, helped pioneer the new kind of concert in Leipzig and elsewhere (the kind in which pieces were heard whole, in which representative masterpieces from the past were included along with contemporary compositions, and in which the key elements became the concerto and the symphony). These concerts were recognisable precursors of our ‘subscription orchestral concerts’. Yet Mendelssohn recognised that applause would break in – a tutti, he thought, should always be inserted by a composer after the soloist’s cadenza, lest applause disrupt the rest of the movement.
Wagner, who more than Mendelssohn advanced the cult of the virtuoso conductor, had even more influence on the transformation of the performance venue, whether it be opera house or concert hall, into a kind of temple. Edward Dent, in Opera, tells us we owe it to Wagner that the doors are shut and latecomers are made to wait outside, and that applause is reserved for the end of an act. It was Wagner, too, who insisted that the auditorium be darkened as a matter of course during a performance. This has been generally applied in the opera house, but not in the concert hall, where it is still a matter of some controversy.
Printed programs
Those who would enforce the rule that the concert ritual should be heard in silence often favour dimming the house lights. This, however, works against another doctrine of modern concert-giving: that the audience, to become knowledgeable, must be informed. Quite early in the 19th century, audiences were provided with printed programs listing the performers, the pieces, and even the movements. In the second half of the century explanatory program notes were included, as an expression of the movement for ‘concert reform’. One purpose of the printed program is (like an order of service) to indicate when participation is required and allowed. Hence the careful listing of movements, with dashes to indicate which are continuous. The audience must know where it is up to so as not to disturb the ritual with untimely (and embarrassing) applause.
There is something moral about all this: gone are the pauses for refreshment, the wandering in and out. The mood must not be disturbed. No accident that Leo Tolstoy, in his novella The Kreutzer Sonata, finds something deeply inappropriate in applause after such a piece as that sonata’s first movement:
Is it right to play [it]…and then to applaud it, and immediately afterward to eat ice-cream and discuss the latest scandal? Such pieces as this should only be performed in rare and solemn circumstances of life, and even then only if certain deeds that accord with the music are to be accomplished.
The aristocratic Tolstoy takes to a moralistic extreme the idea that music has a moral function, one which for the bourgeoisie was more often expressed as education. Aesthetic contemplation of music meant it was not only to be enjoyed, but to be ‘understood’, which forced audiences to listen silently.
The audience, in the new kind of concert, participates silently, experiencing each overture, concerto and symphony, played whole and uninterrupted by applause, as a self-sufficient entity, worthy of sustained attention, which should take the form of silently retracing the act of composition in the mind. This ideal emphasises preparation (which is one reason programs, as well as artists, are announced well in advance), knowledge and the developed listening skill of an audience, whose members are not, by contrast with their aristocratic precursors, as likely to be practising musicians themselves.
“…highly concentrated, rarefied, and extreme occasions…”?
There is a widespread feeling today that the consensus on which modern concert-going was built no longer exists – that instead concerts have become an alienating experience for audiences. The question of why they keep coming is answered in an extreme way by the Palestinian-American cultural commentator and writer on music Edward W. Said, who points to the social abnormality of the concert ritual, and suggests that ‘what attracts audiences to concerts is that what performers attempt on the concert or opera stage is exactly what most members of the audience cannot emulate or aspire to’. The listener sits in ‘poignant speechlessness’, witnessing specialised eccentric skills of interpreters, themselves ‘fenced in’ by ‘obligatory muteness’, but providing an onslaught of such refinement, articulation and technique as almost to constitute a sadomasochistic experience. Thus performances of Western classical music are highly concentrated, rarefied, and extreme occasions, in which performance has been completely professionalised, and performance can only be experienced under relatively severe and unyielding conditions.
Debating Said’s claims would take another essay. Within the terms of this one, however, two final observations. First, it is true that some of the public do seem to be seeking more of these extreme performance experiences, whether sadomasochistic or not. Catering to the demand for the sensational virtuoso and the cult conductor will draw (perhaps always has drawn) some people away from the idea of a balanced, representative range of musical experiences, educative and enjoyable at the same time, which is what an orchestral subscription series represents.
Yet, and secondly, there is a feeling among musicians and concert presenters that a new audience may exist for just such a non-extreme way of experiencing music, if only the rituals which surrounds it could be demystified, made less alienating, even removed. That’s something to think about next time you hear clapping between movements.
First published for Symphony Australia in 1994