This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
As I stepped down from a lectern in Tel Aviv, a man came up to me and said: “For what you just said about Mahler, I could shoot you.”
Seeing a sidearm bulge at his hip, I took evasive action, but part of me was rather gratified — not so much by the death threat as by the man’s crazed passion for music.
Back then, it wasn’t unusual to find music lovers with strong feelings. I saw two portly chaps squaring up in a Liverpool lavatory over the order of movements in Mahler’s sixth symphony — a fairly esoteric cause but it takes all sorts.
I stepped in and calmed them down, explaining that Mahler could not decide whether the “violent, vigorous” opening movement should be followed by a no less relentless Scherzo or, alternately, by the gentle Andante. Mahler tried both ways and left the matter open. His publishers, pedantic to a fault, prescribed a fixed order. Conductors do mostly as they please, and few listeners bother to discuss it.
I recently attended a shattering account of the sixth by Vasily Petrenko and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in a well-filled Royal Albert Hall. They played the Andante before the Scherzo. The conclusion received a voluminous ovation, a full three minutes, before everyone raced for their buses and restaurant reservations. I sat there thinking, is that it?
Gustavo Dudamel once asked me: “What can we do after the sixth symphony? It seems wrong to go out to eat.” I proposed giving an audience a psychotherapy session at Walt Disney Hall. Some 200 people stayed behind for 50 minutes to reflect on Mahler’s vision of a world without hope. The bar takings crashed and, so far as I know, the session was not repeated.
The sixth symphony belongs to a pre-1914 era when audiences were expected to vent feelings, to react to what they heard. Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring was famously disrupted at the Théatre des Champs-Elysées by customers blasted out of their comfort zone by a wonky bassoon, blistering rhythms and the sacrifice of bucolic virgins.
No less responsive was the Vienna audience that heard Arnold Schoenberg’s second string quartet go off the tonal scale. Fearing that civilisation was in peril, patrons used house keys as improvised whistles. Gustav Mahler, Schoenberg’s patron, shouted at them to shut up. “I whistle your symphonies, too,” replied one man.
From which I deduce that audience response was common at that time, even normal. When Schoenberg was heard in London, the critic Ernest Newman noted that one-third of the hall hissed, one-third laughed and the remainder were “too puzzled to do either”. The image of a concert hall as a place of silent contemplation is a modern construct.
In Paris, Erik Satie wandered around recitals of his music, urging people to talk loudly amongst themselves. A ballet by five Satie apostles, Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel, ended in punch-ups and police batons. The piece tilted at a phallic symbol of Parisian pride. Patrons were aroused in much the same way as their ancestors had been when they stormed the Bastille.
Two world wars put an end to the fun. A 1945 Paris demo against the “reactionary” Stravinsky, led by the student Pierre Boulez, made no headlines at the time, entering legend only once Boulez gained radical-chic celebrity.
Boulez tried sitting audiences on the floor and engaging in post-concert group analysis. That lasted maybe a season or two. He called for opera houses to be burned down, to little avail. He refused to conduct Mozart.
One day President Pompidou called with an offer he could not refuse — an Institute for Research and Co-ordination in Acoustics and Music in the bowels of Centre Pompidou. Been there recently? The Bastille is now an opera house, IRCAM a virtual museum and Boulez a member of the Pantheon.
Where, I wonder, did the emotion go, the dreams and the passion? How did the sound and the fury vanish from our halls? When did Beethoven’s Ninth become a black-tie enclave where financial elites sip champagne behind red velvet ropes and metal stanchions? When, how and why did the once-responsive art of orchestral music become so bloody safe?
The aging of the urban audience accounts to some degree for loss of venom. The elderly seek familiarity; the young hold it in contempt. It is not cool to take a date to a Mahler sixth, or even a Boulez Pli selon pli. Orchestral concerts are a mature recreation, like bowls.
But there is a more insidious manipulation at work. We are exposed to a backdrop of classical radio that burbles, all day and through the night, that music exists to ease, to please, to dispel tension, to make us feel good.
“Wasn’t that wonderful?” is the stock back-chat on Classic FM and BBC Radio 3, on France Musique and Bayerische Rundfunk. Music is neutered on radio, made polite and deferential. It must not alienate advertisers, bruise artist egos or prompt a Zimmer-frame riot in care homes. It does not disturb or interrupt, challenge or distract.
Gone are the provocateurs and stimulators, the David Munrows and Reinbert De Leeuw. Classical radio has reset the tone of orchestral music, live or late. The new setting is nice. There is no comeback to a warm flannel.
That’s why you don’t get fights any more in concert aisles. The audience has been lobotomised, reprogrammed to a narrow set of radio responses. The only available protest is to leave early, very quietly.
A clipboard usher asks: What did you think of Bruckner’s Ninth? Lovely. Rite of Spring? Charming. Mahler’s Sixth? That was nice.
