A fight at the opera
A fight at the opera
Classical music used to be a riot
When was the last time you saw someone throw a punch at the Last Night of the Proms? Or a concertgoer thrown screaming from the highest balcony of the Royal Albert Hall, into that thronging pit of bobbing Union Jacks? Have you ever witnessed one tuxedoed man pile-drive another through his picnic basket at Glyndebourne?1
These days, classical music has a genteel reputation – one of muffled coughing and polite applause (though never between movements), and perhaps a glass of Picpoul at the interval. But ’twasn’t always so. Though it may seem to the neophyte to be an apolitical, even slightly anaemic form of entertainment, the symphony is one of the most radically charged artforms that has ever existed. So forget hardcore and hip-hop: today, The Chimera is diving into the mosh pit that is classical music fights and riots, new and old.
1763: Thomas Arne, Artaxerxes, London
We begin with a bit of a fudge: this fight wasn’t technically motivated by the music itself, but by ticket prices. In the 1760s, you could buy a ticket to the opera at a fraction of the price depending on when you decided to join the performance – to watch it from the start, you’d pay the full price, but entry was allowed at half-price if you only joined from the third act onwards (this seems odd to modern concert-goers, but imagine something more like a gig, where you might be in and out of the bar area during the band’s performance, and it makes more sense; plus, many people dined first and arrived for the last act or two of the opera). This had the happy effect of making opera accessible to a much wider range of people, but in February 1763 the rule was changed by the Theatre Royal at Covent Garden and the Drury Lane Theatre. Tickets would cost full price, no matter when you wanted to enter the venue.
This being the 18th century, pamphlets appeared condemning the change – because of course they did – and audience members rioted at both venues. They were only placated at Covent Garden when the manager, a man named John Beard, gave in to their demands. Unfortunately, on 24 February, the rioters returned to watch Thomas Arne’s opera Artaxerxes, and this time, Beard tried to enforce the full-price rule. The opera began, but the stage was stormed, and by 21:30, with management showing no signs of backing down, the rioters began to physically destroy the theatre. Amazingly, they managed to cause £2,000’s worth of damage at a time where a working person’s yearly salary might have been perhaps £5-6. Four people involved were “committed to the Gatehouse”, i.e. arrested.
Artaxerxes is largely forgotten now outside of relatively wonkish opera circles2, which is a shame, as the contemporary St James’s Chronicle seemed to rather fancy it: “The airs are most admirably set,” the Chronicle opined in 1762, “and all the accompanyments inimitable.”
1816: Gioachino Rossini, The Barber of Seville, Milan
I like this one because it reminds me a lot of modern-day fandoms. Essentially, Gioachino Rossini (he of William Tell Overture fame; Google it and you’ll know it) wrote a version of The Barber of Seville, which was itself based on Beaumarchais’s stage comedy of the same name from 1775. It wasn’t unusual, of course, to adapt an older work into an opera, and there had already been at least three different versions of Barber in the decades since Beaumarchais’s play debuted, including one by Giovanni Paisiello in 1782.
The fracas came about because supporters of the Paisiello version of the opera objected to Rossini’s adaptation, in particular the use of instrumentation commonly used in comic operas. Bear in mind this was more than 30 years after the veteran Paisiello had written his Barber of Seville; hell truly hath no fury like a stan who perceives an insult to his idol (and in this case, Paisiello himself supposedly did all he could to encourage his supporters to ruin Rossini’s premiere at the Argentina Theatre in Rome). And the performance was a disaster. Reports from the opening night suggest there were mishaps with costumes, injuries to cast members, broken instruments and even a stray cat appearing on-stage – all of which was soundtracked by boos and hisses from the partisan audience. To me, it screams nothing if not “Star Wars/Lord of the Rings/Game of Thrones fans who hate the new film trilogy/Amazon adaptation/spin-off series” – the overprotective types who claim to be motivated by “love” for their chosen franchise. Or perhaps they’re more like a horde of BTS stans, say, who object to another artist covering one of the boyband’s songs.
And yet. Paisiello died four months later, and Rossini’s Barber is generally considered one of the greatest works of opera of all time. Joke’s on them.
1830: Daniel Auber, La muette di Portici, Brussels
You probably haven’t heard of Daniel Auber’s La muette di Portici, or The mute girl of Portici.3 Nonetheless, if you live in Europe, there’s a good chance that you owe Auber and his opera at least a very partial thanks for your enfranchisement, because its performance in 1830 in Brussels marked one step in a chain of events that reshaped European history and suffrage.
La muette debuted in 1828. It follows a young woman during the uprising of the Neapolitans against the Spanish in 1647, which was (in real life) led by a proto-revolutionary fisherman named Masaniello. You can immediately see how such a story might inspire insurrectionary fervour, but if that wasn’t enough, the opera was (by the standards of the time) shot through with liberal ideas and politics, spectacularly staged, relied on a huge orchestra and chorus, and incorporated popular melodies – all of which combined to make it very popular. Today, it’s broadly considered the first canonical example of “grand opera”.
By August 1830, the opera was a well-known work, and though it had been banned in the Kingdom of the Netherlands during the chaos and violence in neighbouring France – the July Revolution, which overthrew a branch of the House of Bourbon – it was permitted for a special performance that would mark the 15-year anniversary of the reign of William I, to take place at the Thêatre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels. Both the city and Belgium, at the time, were part of the Netherlands, but the southern part of this country was distinct from the north, being more Catholic and ethnically Walloon and Flemish rather than Dutch. People in the industrial south had been made all the more restive through unemployment, while liberals resented the king and felt under-represented in the state’s General Assembly – all in all, Belgium was agitating from within the kingdom.
On 25 August, riots and looting broke out in the city, partially inspired by the July Revolution a month earlier. La muette was still staged as planned, but it proved a flashpoint for the pro-independence movement; many concertgoers were so moved by a duet – “Amour sacré de la patrie” or “Sacred love of the fatherland” – that they walked out mid-performance to join the protests. The Belgians quickly seized the whole city, fortified it, and after the Dutch were unable to recapture it over the course of the following month, they (the Belgians) declared their independence on 4 October. Richard Wagner would later write that “seldom has an artistic product stood in closer connection with a world-event”.
So, in a way, opera made a contribution to the establishment of Belgium as a sovereign state. More importantly, the following century or so would see more than a dozen smaller European countries either totally released from their imperial ties or agitating for independence, including during the 1848 Revolutions, which became known as the Springtime of Nations. To differing degrees depending on the country, everything from the abolition of serfdom and absolute monarchy to the expansion of suffrage and workers’ rights was achieved across the continent. Perhaps opera helped move the needle there, too.
1913: Alban Berg, Altenberg Lieder, Vienna
The first performance of Alban Berg’s Altenberg Lieder in 1913 became known as the “Skandalkonzert” for the outbreak of fistfights within the crowd. The reasons for this weren’t revolutionary, nor motivated by pricing, but were part of a wider public debate about musical composition. In essence, the concertgoing public in Vienna of the 1910s was generally conservative in taste, and modernist, experimental work was not always well received. Berg, meanwhile, along with his contemporary Anton Webern, was part of a loosely defined “Second Viennese School”, a group of composers who studied under the (actually more conservative) Arnold Schoenberg in the Austro-Hungarian capital – the School was considered broadly experimental and occasionally controversial, and Berg’s cycle of songs were no exception.
When the Lieder were first performed at the Musikverein in March 1913, the reaction among the audience was one of shock, then rising tension, then anger: they booed and catcalled throughout the performance, which was conducted by Schoenberg himself. Audience members supposedly shouted calls for Berg to be committed to an asylum, which was incendiary and in poor taste; Berg’s lyrics were based on text by modernist poet Peter Altenberg, who was himself widely known to have already been committed.
The fracas escalated; a writer and editor named Erhard Buschbeck, who had helped organize the concert as a member of the “Akademischen Verbandes für Literatur und Musik” – the Academic Association for Literature and Music – supposedly slapped an audience member in the face.4 He was later sued; composer Oscar Straus, a witness, remarked that the slap had been “the most harmonious sound of the evening”.
1913: Igor Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring, Paris
Barely two months later, the most (in)famous episode in the history of classical music took place: the debut of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in Paris. This one’s a little harder to parse, because the reaction of the crowd to Stravinsky’s ground-breaking ballet has been mythologised not just as a riot at a concert, but as a metaphor for the febrile atmosphere surrounding modernist works of art in pre-war Europe in general.
If you believe the most elaborate stories, the concert went something like this: the newly built Thêatre du Champs-Elysées in Paris was set to host the 1913 season of the world-famous Ballets Russes, which was directed by its founder, Sergei Diaghilev. Diaghilev had previously paid the young, then-unknown Stravinsky to compose several works for the company from 1910 onwards; he did this again for the 1913 season, and the result was The Rite of Spring, an interpretation in two parts of “pictures of pagan Russia” as imagined by Stravinksy. The “rite” of the title refers to a (made-up) celebration of the coming of springtime in which various primitive rituals take place, culminating in the sacrifice of a young girl, who dances herself to death.
On the night of 29 May, the theatre was packed for the premiere. Chopin’s ballet Les Sylphides was performed before the Rite, without incident. But then, as the Rite got underway, laughter and noise began within the crowd, which grew during the first dance, entitled “The Augurs of Spring”. This dance involved a lot of stamping on the ground, and audience members might have felt they were being mocked by choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky; supposedly, it was soon impossible to hear either the music on stage, or Nijinsky’s shouted instructions to the dancers. Stravinsky left the auditorium in disgust when the audience laughed at the music, and went to watch from the wings of the stage.
Things escalated throughout part one of the piece, as pro- and anti-Rite factions developed between the progressive, bohemian concertgoers, who acclaimed the experimentalism of the ballet, and the wealthier bourgeoisie in the boxes, who generally attended the ballet for traditional, beautiful performances. Mixed in with these were various pro- and anti-Russian factions who were predisposed to oppose or support the Ballets Russe in general. Forty members of the audience were quickly ejected from the theatre, but despite being pelted with objects, the orchestra continued playing, and the piece was finished; supposedly, by the time of the final dance – the sacrifice-by-dancing – the audience was much calmed.
It didn’t take long for accounts of the premiere to accumulate. On 7 June, the concert was reported across the Atlantic in the New York Times, which quoted a Frenchman in translation: “‘The public could not swallow this. They promptly hissed the piece. A few days ago, they might have applauded it.’” A journalist called Carl van Vechten claimed that a man behind him in the audience became so carried away that they started “to beat rhythmically on top of my head with his fists”. Veteran French composer Camille Saint-Saëns saw said to have stormed out of the performance, deeply offended.
In the century since, the premiere of The Rite of Spring has become a byword for the shock of the new – the sweeping away of dusty Victorian mores and morals in favour of a spirit of creative invention that would last until the Second World War. The Rite itself preceded spring, sure, but it also heralded the Futurists and Dada, Virginia Woolf and Fritz Lang and D.H. Lawrence and Egon Schiele and Thomas Mann.5 It was provocative modernism in an evening, offensive to the bourgeoisie and rapturous for the avant-garde.
The only problem is that it probably didn’t really happen that way. Saint-Saëns did not storm out of The Rite of Spring, because he was not in the concert hall in the first place. And a letter published in 2013 shows that Van Vechten wasn’t actually at the first night of the ballet either, but the second (as to whether or not a man beat him on the head in time to the music, the jury is out). Modern scholarship today suggests that reports of the riot largely stemmed from the 1920s, and that what violence did take place was likely pre-meditated as a protest, rather than spontaneously inspired by the madness of Stravinsky’s music and Nijinsky’s choreography. There definitely was hissing, and laughter, and controversy throughout the Rite’s run – but perhaps not quite the uproar that classical-music mythology has historically suggested.
1923: George Antheil, Sonata Sauvage, Paris
In 1923, avant-garde composer George Antheil’s Sonata Sauvage was performed at the Champs-Elysées Theatre (the same venue as The Rite of Spring ten years earlier). The American had moved to Paris aged 21, and lived in a flat above legendary bookshop Shakespeare & Co. The shop’s owner, Sylvia Beach, introduced Antheil to her circle, which included Erik Satie, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and Jean Cocteau; on the occasion of his Paris debut, Pound and Satie were in the audience, as were Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp.
The story should by now be familiar: polite society in Paris was scandalised by Antheil’s compositional experiments, which included jazzy glissandi and loudly percussive sections. A riot broke out halfway through the performance, and Antheil reported later that “people were fighting in the aisles, yelling, clapping, hooting!” Pound, Léger and Satie were in a box together, and Satie clapped and acclaimed the performance throughout, while Man Ray supposedly punched someone in the nose, and Duchamp shouted abuse at other audience members. “Paris hasn’t had such a good time,” said Antheil, “since the premiere of Stravinsky’s Sacré du Printemps [Rite of Spring],” which may give you a hint as to how he felt about the riot.
And in fact, the whole thing might have been started deliberately: the riot was filmed, possibly for inclusion in a film directed by one of Léger’s friends and artistic collaborators.
1973: Steve Reich, Four Organs, New York
The violence that took place at a concert of Steve Reich’s music at Carnegie Hall in 1973 was self-inflicted, but it still counts. Reich, who is a – say it again, as with all the others – experimental composer, has always been as controversial as he is celebrated, and his Four Organs proved too much for the New York audience. The roughly 16-minute piece features a maraca keeping time, while four organs repeatedly play an eleventh chord which, over the course of the piece, lengthens from a 1/8-beat note to one 200 beats long. It’s obviously hard to explain, so it might be better just to listen to it; the effect is one of being beeped at over and over again by a car horn, for increasingly obnoxious periods of time:
For the response, I’m going to rely again on the New York Times: “The audience reacted as though red-hot needles were being inserted under fingernails [sic]. After a while there were yells for the music to stop, mixed with applause to hasten the end of the piece.” One woman stood up, walked up to the stage, took off her shoe, and banged it on the stage, calling for the piece to stop, while someone else allegedly sprinted down the aisle and shouted “All right! I confess!” (Some reports also have this person banging his or her head repeatedly on the stage, which fits with the general vibe of New York in the 1970s.) And while I’m all for the avant-garde, listening to Reich’s piece on Spotify at my kitchen table, I can’t really help but sympathise.
2022: Gustav Mahler, Symphony No. 5, Berlin
A live recording of Mahler’s Fifth descended into an on-stage brawl when amateur enthusiast Eliot Kaplan, a conductor recently drafted in to lead the Berliner Philharmoniker in the performance following allegations of bullying and sexual predation against the originally intended conductor, maestro Lydia Tár. Tár somehow gained access to the stage wings, and charged Kaplan during the symphony, kicking him to the ground and beating him before being pulled off by shocked members of the orchestra. She was later—
—Okay, this one didn’t really happen. But one of the things that I love about Tár – because if you haven’t seen it, the above is a description of a tumultuous scene near the end of the film – is how it emphasises that classical music is a leaving, breathing, and therefore deeply political artform.6 In the first scene of the film, Lydia Tár herself, despite being an awful human being in her personal life, appears on stage in conversation with The New Yorker to fight the corner for the importance and relevance of Mahler; she engages with a class at the university where she teaches and – mercilessly, it must be said – offers a rebuttal to a student who suggests that the great composers of the past be dismissed over their gender, sexuality and race.
Tár more generally offers a cautious defence and a dark celebration of the idea of the genius and the masterpiece, and the idea that high art can be enjoyed by the masses, and that it can remain politically relevant. (And – spoiler! – the very final scene sees Tár, the woman, brought low and condemned to conducting ha’penny gigs of video-game soundtracks in the Far East for an audience of cosplayers, the very epitome of “low” culture.) Hopefully, the charged history of operas, ballets and symphonies moving people to literal violence is confirmation of that same thesis. Next time you go to the Proms, you might want to take your knuckle dusters.
In my introduction to The Chimera, I promised this blog would one day visit (“visit”) Glyndebourne. Reader, I am a man of my word.
Though it was revived by the ROH in 2009, on the 300th anniversary of Arne’s birthday.
I’m not giving you much credit here; I know that some of you may have, but you get my point.
The concert is sometimes also called the Watschenkonzert, or “slap concert”, as a result.
The Futurists themselves staged a concert in 1914 in Milan, which used experimental “instruments” called intonarumori; predictably, it ended with Futurism’s main man and fascism enthusiast Filippo Tommaso Marinetti fighting with audience members in the stalls.
Again, I am sure many of you already know this and take it as read, but I think if you were to ask the man in the street, he would (inaccurately) describe something rather more staid.