We are not the sorts to characterise classical music audiences as blue-rinsed dowagers in moth-eaten stoles that smell faintly of medicinal sherry. It’s now all black polo-necks and angular Scandinavian spectacles at the concert hall. Or so Tár has me believe. Still, there is a sense of constriction at such affairs. If you had any hair left you would rarely feel comfortable letting much of it down.
Hark unto the west. The good people of California have again flouted convention with their unforgivably relaxed attitude to filthy, filthy sex. Or have they? Last week’s reports from the LA Philharmonic have a whiff of “I choose to believe” about them. It seems that, during a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, the audience was momentarily distracted by a fellow music lover having a “loud and full body orgasm”.
Music producer Magnus Fiennes, author of that quote, was not alone in coming to the most Ken Russelly of conclusions. “I assume that she ... had an orgasm because she was heavily breathing, and her partner was smiling and looking at her,” Molly Grant told the Los Angeles Times. Other attendees suggested the lady may just have awoken with a noisy bellow (which, unfortunately, plays into the caricature of classical audiences we have already rejected). A few worried the person may have had a medical issue.
Never mind that. Unless the grunter comes forward, we can safely assume the world will evermore choose to believe somebody in the Walt Disney Concert Hall experienced la petite mort as the orchestra sawed towards its own climax. I can remember when it was unacceptable to clap between movements. Now, listeners are ... Well, we will leave speculation as to how she got herself in that flustered state to organs without a family readership. Maybe she just really, really likes Tchaikovsky.
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All this discipline is a relatively recent phenomenon. Mozart would not only have expected audiences to talk during performances, but also to wolf down pies and ale
The pious formality within modern concert halls often jars with the orgasmic structures of the music. How odd that, when Wagner’s Tannhäuser overture reaches its triumphant detonation, audiences are expected to sit primly as if listening to a lecture on flower arranging. Shouldn’t they be whooping, cheering, marching ... invading Poland?
Okay, I stole that last tasteless joke from Woody Allen. But the other rhetorical questions stand. Audiences at performances of the 1812 Overture are expected to pretend nobody is staging a war in the auditorium. There was no such passivity when Motörhead played Bomber.
Filmmakers have long appreciated the erotic potential of the great tunes. You get a lot of that in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. The same director used Rossini’s William Tell Overture to comic effect for Malcolm McDowell’s high-speed coupling in A Clockwork Orange. A few years before Ravel’s Bolero became inextricably linked with Torvill and Dean’s exploits on the ice, that tumbling tune was played as Dudley Moore had his way with Bo Derek in Blake Edwards’s 10. You will hear as much classical music in clenched-sheet erotic cinema as you will hear Prince or Barry White.
None of which is to suggest the Concertgebouw or the Wigmore Hall should open themselves up to mass orgies, but the connection between sex and what they used to call “serious music” is more robust than the funereal sobriety might imply. And all this discipline is a relatively recent phenomenon. Mozart would not only have expected audiences to talk during performances, but also to wolf down pies and ale. Audiences clapped between movements. They clapped during movements. If a particular twirl in Eine Kleine Nachtmusik took your fancy you were welcome to holler like a Lynyrd Skynyrd fan when Allen Collins crested during the guitar solo in Free Bird. It seems unlikely anyone would have noticed a lady achieving erotic completion in such a setting. A historian I’ve just made up tells me such activity was commonplace.
Pop gigs have now become almost as irritatingly civilised as classical events. Why are you shushing me? It’s not a library
For much of rock history the music was so damn-blasted loud no moratorium on conversation was required. You had to yell to make yourself understood. “DO YOU WANT ANOTHER WATERED-DOWN PINT?” But, at the top end of the market, pop gigs have now become almost as irritatingly civilised as classical events. Why are you shushing me? It’s not a library. It’s not an exam hall. It’s not a cinema, for Pete’s sake. We come to these things to behave badly. Ask Mozart.
There are other ways. Look at Last Night at the Proms. They wear Union Jack hats. They put up brollies during the Thunder and Lightning Polka (I bet). They scream along to songs about imperial plunder.
Okay, we don’t want that either. That’s just awful. We don’t want people rogering in the aisles. Nor do we want roasted goose in the front row. Maybe the anarchic alternatives are more appalling than the current buttoned-up civility. As you were. As you all were.
