Quiet Riot

In my last post I rambled on a bit about some of the responsibilities of the conductor in art music as prompted by tales from Howard Taubman’s biography of Toscanini, The Maestro. While Toscanini’s relationship to the score piqued my curiosity as a conductor, I found equally intriguing the interactions he had with the listening public. As I noted last time, Toscanini came to be known in part for his propensity for butting heads with the listening public to the point of even walking out in the midst of a performance. A number of things about that struck me.The opera-going public of Toscanini’s time was accustomed to an operatic score being manipulated in performance to allow soloists to show off, often by either altering the printed music for the sake of virtuosity or by permitting repetitions of an aria at the audience’s behest. Toscanini, servant to the printed score that he was, would have none of that, and his stripped-down and literal performances, inspired though they might have been, rubbed many listeners the wrong way. Taubman retells several stories in his book about crowds that grew restless to the point of staging coordinated protests before, during and after performances involving the Italian maestro.

Now, I believe that these malcontents could have expressed their displeasure with Toscanini’s unwillingness to bend in a more civil fashion than by—as one disgruntled musician reportedly did—setting off a small explosive behind the theater during a performance. Perhaps had they chosen to try to understand Toscanini’s musical philosophy and methodology more carefully, they may have grown to appreciate him more easily. But perhaps there is also something to be learned from these opera-goers.

Maybe, just maybe, the listening public today has grown too passive in its listening and appreciation of art music. We certainly don’t need to have people throwing bombs and making threats to musicians or conductors. But honestly, when was the last time art music had a good riot at a performance? When was the last time that the majority of art music enthusiasts could claim to care more about the content of what they were hearing rather than their status as so-called music connoisseurs?

In one of my first columns, I spoke with excitement about how these days in art music, anything goes. I spoke of how we can now hear serialism intersect in a single musical work with anything from Romanticism to Rock and how invigorating such artistic freedom has the potential to be.But this passivity from listeners is the ugly other side of that coin. If we as listeners passively accept everything we hear, without honest thought about its content, sensibility and design, then we are not appreciating anything at all. Instead, we are letting it wash over us. Truly, if the conductor has her responsibilities, this should be the responsibility of the listener: to stay always actively involved with the music, to turn it over in the mind and continually rediscover it from new angles. And perhaps, every now and then, to riot in the face of an artistic travesty.