This is the
way the crowd thinks of it. An artist is
bound to see it in some completely
confusing way, such as the following by
legendary pianist Artur Schnabel:
"Applause is a receipt, not a bill." He
was explaining his refusal to play
encores, but his argument seems simple
enough: I play for you, you pay me for it
afterward by pushing your hands together.
For much of musical history this was
considered the standard currency for the
payment of artists. We don't eat much.
What seems
simple enough, that applause is a
combination of enthusiasm and courtesy, is
actually an enormous conundrum. A person
who is responding to energy will tend to
clap more readily when a piece ends (or
doesn't, as we have just seen) with a
bang. A piece with a soft ending is more a
candidate for polite applause, if any. The
question, as always, is whether we do what
feels right according to our senses, or
what our brains tell us is an appropriate
cultural response. Logic, or feeling.
Enter the
artist. Before about 1780 there simply
weren't any public concerts. People could
sit on their hands in resplendent comfort.
There was very little resplendence to go
around among the general population, of
course, but the potentates of the various
little kingdoms all had their hireling
musicians to provide the royal music.
Haydn worked for a prince. Mozart chafed
in the service of an archduke. Bach spent
a portion of his life in the employ of a
lowly duke. It was probably considered
sufficient for the prince or whomever to
express his appreciation with a well-timed
"bravo!" Eventually, music began to move
outside of those regal establishments and
certain musical societies sprang up. What
their behavior was like after a splendid
sonata I don't know. But with the rise of
the middle class public concerts sprang
up, and it seemed necessary that some sort
of demonstration be made not only of the
artist's merit but the audience's
recognition of his worthiness. It became
customary to applaud.
Life was
simpler in those times. Notwithstanding
the constant wars, the short
life-expectancy, or the complete inability
to keep disease or discomfort at
bay. A brief look at what the public
concert would have been like, say, in
Mozart's Vienna, will reveal a couple of
interesting things. First we have to
remember that the concert was a pretty new
toy in those days, and the rules, those
seemingly immobile guides to behavior,
were just getting written. Second, we have
to remember that the public concert
included the participation of the
rabble, by which we mean everybody
who wasn't the aristocracy. The
unsophisticated multitudes! They
innocently assumed that anything worthy of
their admiration was worthy of applause.
Listen to Mozart boasting to his father on
the success of a recent piano concerto:
"a few
measures into the piece there is an effect
wherein the orchestra explodes in a sudden
fortissimo. When the people heard this
they broke into enthusiastic applause!"
In the middle
of the piece, no less! Apparently there
was no point in waiting; the audience
wanted to let the composer know right away
what portion of his composition pleased
them, and the best way to do that was to
let loose immediately upon hearing it.
There was no great air of discreet silence
in those days.
Mozart knew
that he was writing for two distinct
groups of people; those who knew music,
meaning those who had studied it and
acquainted themselves with its traditions
and conventions and who could, in all
probability, make their own, either in
executing it upon some instrument or in
composing it themselves, and those who
didn't know much about music, but knew
what they liked, a rather large group that
is still very much in vogue and adds drama
to our society even today by carrying a
similar attitude about making important
political decisions.
Those less
informed persons were probably more likely
to go in for immediate feedback because
what they were looking for was a passage
which dazzled them, a sound or an effect
which pleased them. In fact, Mozart takes
some pride in a letter to his father over
a concerto of his which contains some
passages written, he says, in a manner
that not only will the connoisseur
appreciate, but the less knowledgeable
also "cannot fail to be pleased, though
without knowing the reason why."
It has always
been the manner of the more civilized
among us to hold off on vigorous
demonstrations of that sort for fear of
looking foolish. But there soon rose an
artistic reason for holding applause. That
artistic reason's name was Beethoven.
Beethoven
changed the world of music dramatically.
He lived in a time when the political
world was also in ferment--the United
States was born when he was six years old;
the French revolution waited to happen
until he was 19. Democracy was afoot, and
he loved it. But in shunning the old world
of counts and countesses, princes and
dukes, he didn't leave the authoritarian
world entirely; he simply replaced it with
his own system. In his world, it was what
came from within a man that made him a
nobleman, and Beethoven was nothing if not
able to recognize his own genius.
Beethoven
only wrote nine symphonies, as opposed to
Mozart's 41, or Haydn's 104. Sometimes he
labored for years over a single work. Some
have made the mistake of substituting
spontaneity for genius; Beethoven was
simply working under a different rubric.
His symphonic creations are almost like
philosophical systems of thought;
everything that occurs in the opening
measures of a symphony is explained later,
every prophecy fulfilled, and every major
event foreshadowed even twenty minutes
before it occurs. It would not do to
applaud in the midst of such an unfolding.
He went further. The symphonic animal in
those days consisted of four pieces, or
movements, which meant that the orchestra
got to stop and wipe its brow on three
separate occasions before going on. In
Mozart's time, these pieces weren't even
played contiguously; sometimes, after the
first movement had been aired, the maestro
would trot out a singer, or a horn player,
or himself, and tick off several short,
unrelated numbers in the manner of a
variety show before getting back to the
sober business of the symphony's last
three movements. With Beethoven, this
would not do. Not only do the movements
have an internal cohesion which is
startling, but he begins to connect the
movements themselves, sometimes literally,
by instructing the orchestra to attack
the following movement without a pause, or
sometimes in a more subtle, thematic way.
In either case, the symphonic argument
isn't over, and applause is not the coin
of the realm, but a polite silence, which,
in our time, has been supplemented by
hacking fits from several corners of the
hall.
When Wagner
came to complete the tendency a generation
later, he required his congregation to
remain silent throughout an entire act of
his epic music-dramas, which after all,
contain no musical breaks, no separate
"songs," but a continuous texture. It was
Brahms, the symphonist, who produced music
for the orchestra after the spirit of
Beethoven, even approaching the act of
composing a symphony anxiously and in
fear, aware of the high-minded seriousness
of the task; but it was Wagner who made
listening to his music a cult of
subservience to its holy purpose.
Both of these
men lived over a century ago, and the era
of enlightened clapping has since
calcified into a custom, which is sad. On
the barbarian shores of America, classical
music devotees came to this sacred
attitude much later than their Wagnerian
forebears at the annual Bayreuth festival
in central Germany. Certain
traditions have risen up in which the
audience was expected to clap at the
"wrong time". For instance, it was long
thought perfectly acceptable to applaud at
the end of the first movement of the
Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto. The first
movement is nearly a piece by itself and
concludes with such a jubilant finale that
it almost needs an applause chaser. This
is really a leftover from the days when
each movement was an occasion for
clapping, and, if that segment of the work
pleased the folks greatly, they would
demand an encore before going on to digest
the succeeding portions. Musicians would
often record that they had had to repeat
the second movement before going on to the
third, or the first before playing the
second. In the days before recordings, the
audience might not get to hear that piece
again for a while--when Mozart had been
impresario he had written new pieces for
nearly every concert, so listening
experiences really were one-time deals.
You had to speak up then and there if you
liked something.
Every Christmas during performances of
Messiah, the Hallelujah Chorus is capped
off by healthy applause, whether it comes
before an intermission or not. Usually,
however, people are seized by dopophobia,
which is a fear of clapping at the wrong
time, and looking like a dope, or worse,
like somebody who's never been to a
concert before. Although I feel that it is
important to allow silence to bridge the
gaps between movements in a symphony of
Beethoven or Brahms (and, not
incidentally, allow the artist to control
how much time he wants to have until the
next movement begins), I wish people were
more at ease to just applaud when it
seemed natural to do so. There are
exceptions, but they can be eliminated by
paying attention to the people bringing
you the music. Watch the conductor! When
he is holding perfectly still, with his
arms in the air, he wants to preserve the
silence. Wait until he relaxes his
posture. If he doesn't hold a pose, it is
alright to begin clapping immediately. And
of course, applause in the middle of a
piece, as any jazz soloist knows, means
you are drowning out the next several
measures of music, and unlike a trained
comedian, the music cannot wait until you
are finished responding to the last bit.
Taken in sum,
my suggestions would result in a slight
increase in applause across the board, and
a concomitant relaxation of the fans in
the seats, but unfortunately, they are not
quite in keeping with the present-day
customs of those in the know--the
ones who like to keep the rest of us
ignorant ones in line.
Simply
stated, the rules of twenty-first
century concert-going America (both of
you) are that applause should be saved for
the end of any multi-movement work such as
a symphony, or even a suite (although
there again I have to express a difference
of opinion because a suite consists of
different pieces which are generally not
philosophically connected in any deep and
meaningful way--I don't see the matter
with sometimes applauding between
selections here). Anybody who is confused
by this can of course revert back to the
custom of waiting until the rest of the
Romans begin clapping. In Baltimore there
were always a few show-offs who wanted you
to be aware that they know every piece on
the concert backwards and forwards, and
were eager to boldly begin the applause
immediately after the last note was
executed, even if it was still ringing in
the hall. This applied not only to pieces
with an animated finish, but even those
that end mournfully, such as the finale of
Tchaikovsky's Pathetique Symphony, whose
last notes fade away slowly into oblivion.
Although I've not seen the score, I would
not be surprised if the composer had
indicated a measure of silence with a
fermata above the rest to show that the
concluding silence is an important part of
the music, something that composers often
do, while their accomplices with the baton
hold their pose for five or ten seconds in
order not to break the spell of the piece.
Finally, they relax their pose and the
well-trained audience lets forth the
rivers of applause. This is a good way to
respect the music. But these know-it-alls
would rather you be impressed by their
veteran ears that have absorbed all the
right pieces again and again.
I wish we
could get rid of those people!