I have recently begun thinking about going to the opera again. I saw three Stravinsky pieces at the Met a couple of years ago. The production strung together Le Sacre du Printemps, Oedipus Rex, and Le Rossignol, the latter being the only one of the three which is an actual opera. The production was designed by David Hockney and it was incredibly beautiful and impeccably performed. When you go to the Met to see an opera, you can be sure you will find an educated and motivated audience. How can I be sure? For one thing, tickets at the Met top out at $495. It’s no place for the unmotivated. Most of the people who go to the opera are there to listen to music.
I attend between 30 and 50 concerts a year and the reason I go is to hear music. I understand that there is a social dimension to concert going. I genuinely like people and love talking with them. It is not why I go to a concert, however. I am a musician. I love music and I go to concerts to hear music.
The last concert I went to at the New York Philharmonic was a performance that included two pieces—Brahm’s Violin Concerto, with Sarah Chang as soloist, and the rarely-performed Persephone by Igor Stravinsky. The first piece on the program was the concerto and it was very well performed by the orchestra and by Ms. Chang. I had heard the piece many many times, but it was wonderful hearing it live again. I did notice that the audience wasn’t quite as focused as it might have been. There was whispering and talking during the performance, including the seat holders on my right. It was manageable though, until the orchestra started playing the Stravinsky. To my astonishment, my neighbors to the right began an extended conversation about the Brahms and about Ms. Chang’s performance. I then noticed that the attention of the audience, in general, had drifted substantially.
I could scarcely believe it. I had first heard Persephone on a record album I borrowed from the New Castle Pennsylvania Free Public Library in 1968. I loved it immediately. Now, some forty years later, I was hearing it live for the first time—played by one of America’s premier ensembles in New York City, one of the cutural capitals of the world, and the audience was about as attentive as a movie audience in a Times Square theater.
Have I become a concert snob? Hardly. I watched the Met’s production of Turandot at home in a comfortable chair in my pajamas. The sound from my TV speaker is terrible, but I guarantee there was no talking during “Nessun Dorma.” I actually don’t care what people do during concerts as long as it is quiet. Please, text to your heart’s content, just remember to turn your phone to vibrate only. Read a book, check your email, gesture to your neighbor in sign language, get some sleep—feel free to experience the concert as you like, but please realize that some people go to concerts to hear the music.
There was an exchange of letters in the New York Times recently between people who believed that classical music was dead or dying. One writer lamented that many people don’t know how to behave in concerts any more, because they have received no education about it in school. Another writer blamed parents for not teaching their kids how to behave in concerts. And who will teach the parents? Cities started cutting arts programs from schools in the mid-seventies. We are well into the second generation of citizens without any training or experience in music in the schools.
Is classical music dying? I grow impatient with these kinds of discussions quickly. Who cares if the audience claps between movements? Keep it simple. Start with this. If you are not at a concert to hear the music, don’t go. Stay home. Download the Brahms concerto onto your iPod and eat corn chips out of the bag while you listen to Sarah Chang play the piece, but please, oh please, do not talk during the concert.
Lawrence Davis
