At the Heart of Brand Experience: The Power of Leitmotiv

EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay is reprinted here with the gracious permission of both the author and Interbrand, who published the author’s important and pertinent book Metaluxury: Brands and the Culture of Excellence, which we encourage you to read for its enlightening discussion of the business strategies and philosophies elemental to success in the realm in which classical music lives.

Few characters in modern history are as controversial and divisive as German composer Richard Wagner. Many of his political writings and personal views are rightly considered an indelible and embarrassing stain, forcing virtually all critics to draw a clear distinction between the man and the composer. And even when considering only the latter, his creative work counts both fervent devotees and equally vehement detractors.

There is one point, however, which finds everyone in agreement, and it is Wagner’s unparalleled influence on the history of music and on the wider world of the performing arts. Whether one loves or loathes Wagner’s work, its significance cannot be overstated. Perhaps a simplistic indicator of this is the fact that the adjective “Wagnerian” has transcended the musical vocabulary, and now describes something grandiose and extraordinarily ambitious. There is no equivalent example; independent of the greatness of these composers, expressions such as “Beethovenian” or “Mozartian” have never crossed the borders of music.

Literally hundreds of books have been written about Wagner’s revolutionary, sweeping music; to the extent, for instance, that some of those books focus on a single chord, known as the “Tristan” chord (the four-note combination which introduces the musical drama Tristan und Isolde), which many take as signaling the birth of modern music. To Wagner, however, fundamental as it was, music was an ingredient, which blended with the narrative, the lyrics, the scenography, and the actual staging – all of which he had full authorship of.

He created the stories, such as Parsifal’s reinterpretation of the legend of the Holy Grail. He imagined the characters, inspired by ancient tales, such as the Nibelungs and the Valkyries in the colossal Ring cycle. He accompanied his scores and librettos with prescriptive visual references. And when he had the opportunity to oversee the construction of his own theatre in Bayreuth, Germany, he developed a concept (as we would call it today) combining a number of innovations which now seem obvious: the dimming of the lights in the theatre; the use of stage and lighting effects; and the disappearance of the orchestra from the audience’s view. These three simple, but hugely effective, design choices ensured the audience’s deep engagement. In essence, one could argue that Wagner invented cinema before the technology existed.

All of this shows that Wagner did not conceive his works merely as musical performances or operas. Rather, he was effectively masterminding monumental immersive experiences – and he was doing it to convey precise messages to his contemporaries, be it the creation of a shared Germanic culture through the reinvention of a mythical past, or to expose the dominance of man’s desire over rationality, years before Freud’s work.

Ultimately, Wagner believed in the power of experience to change the way people thought. He spelt it out in one of his best-known quotes: “Imagination shapes reality.”

Concept. Design. Experiences. Messages. Strange as it may seem, there are profound analogies between Wagner’s creative vision and our evolving thinking around brands.

Today, creating compelling experiences is the chief way in which brands can credibly express their raison d’être, as well as what differentiates them. Organizations wanting to extract immense, even disproportionate, value from their brands must, like Wagner, work as polymaths; they must be great storytellers, impeccable orchestrators, innovative designers, consummate engineers, as well as uncompromising perfectionists.

They must (like Wagner) own a single sense of purpose (the message) and bring it alive through emotionally intense content (the music and the drama) and the effectiveness of touchpoints (the staging). Most importantly, they must weave all this into a seamless, cohesive texture.

But how can that be achieved in our fragmented world, where the stage is at once nowhere specifically, and potentially everywhere? Where the audience is not sitting in a theater for hours, but is connecting on demand for minutes? Where each spectator is an active, and sometimes influential, critic?

The answer is, interestingly, in one of the musical tools that Wagner became most famous for:

In order to help us perceive a character’s feelings or motivations, Wagner needed tools at his fingertips. One such technique is his use of fragments of melody, rhythm, or harmony as calling cards of a character, a place, an idea, an object, or a memory. These musical cells, from which he created the whole web of the music, he called leitmotiv. At its simplest, leitmotiv is a straightforward association of a nugget of tune with a character. Every time the character appears, or is mentioned or thought of by someone else, we hear that nugget. In the Ring, every character has his or her own leitmotiv, or signature tune. Other motifs in the story are attached to concepts, such as “spear,” the “gold,” or the “River Rhine.” There are in fact hundreds of leitmotivs in the Ring. They became a vast tapestry on which the music and the story hang.*

It is inspiring to think of this as the brand leitmotiv: a signature concept that the brand owns, and that can be brought to life through a variety of expressions while always being instinctively associated with the brand. Just like in Wagner’s music, the leitmotiv is sometimes hard to distinguish; however, it is always effective in evoking the brand. It’s almost never explicit, but you know when it’s there – you just feel it. And it brings the entire brand experience magically together, giving the brand the status of a ubiquitous, indispensable presence.

A brand’s leitmotiv is not, for instance, a visual, verbal, or aural element; these are, rather, codes. The leitmotiv is the overall, unifying theme and concept that those codes should help express.

This reflects the fact that the days in which a brand could manifest itself through elements of a visual identity are gone. In a multidimensional world, brands must be able to manifest themselves through a far broader and nuanced spectrum of means. Developing a brand leitmotiv is a way of owning a relevant, wider concept that creates salience for the brand. It is also a way of superseding the increasing limitations of traditional intellectual property and creating an association which, if successfully consolidated, results in uniquely strong differentiation – the kind that provides stronger protection than any trade mark could ever guarantee.

burberry
Think of Burberry, a brand that has driven impressive business growth by creating a coherent and compelling experience across a wonderfully diverse set of existing and newly created touchpoints. What makes the Burberry experience particularly effective is its omnipresent leitmotiv, Britishness. Whether it’s the choice of British testimonials or the falling leaves in a pictorial, or even the use of materials and furniture in its Regent Street store, Britishness is what consistently underscores this brand’s presence. Or even its absence, in fact: introduce Britishness as a theme, and, by now, Burberry will be a very likely association.

In retrospect, the turning point for this brand was the shift from owning merely a code – the once over-exposed check pattern – to owning a leitmotiv (a much more flexible, engaging, and purposeful property).

prada
For a brand like Prada, the leitmotiv could possibly be defined as being avant-garde. This echoes through the maison’s bold, provocative product design, the adventurous architecture of its flagship Epicenter stores; it vibrates across the brand’s selective artist collaborations, its landmark Fondazione Prada in Milan, and its involvement in the Venice Biennale. Prada’s leitmotiv is implicit, but it can be felt across every single public act of this brand. As a result, it brings everything beautifully together, giving the brand a salience that goes beyond its industry. This also provides the brand with a strong edge: when you think about it, Prada is very similar (in terms of its Tuscan origin, products, touchpoints, and business model) to the likes of Gucci and Ferragamo. Yet, Prada’s brand leitmotiv allows it to conceive and design an experience that creates, all other things equal, deep differentiation.

Or, think of Red Bull, a brand whose leitmotiv is at the border between energy and bravado. That leitmotiv is at the heart of the entire experience: from its F1 investment to Felix Baumgartner’s near-orbital drop and everything that’s in between, Red Bull has succeeded in creating a relevance that stretches far beyond its product – an energy drink. By finding highly impactful ways of playing to its leitmotiv, this brand has touched audiences that would have been completely indifferent to traditional product-focused communication initiatives.

These examples show the power of the leitmotiv in providing these brands with a “gravitational field” that expands far beyond the reach of their products as such.

To this end, a brand leitmotiv is rooted in, but radically distinct from, constructs such as a purpose, a positioning, or a proposition. While these concepts, in various ways, represent what the brand stands for, the leitmotiv is what will stand for the brand.

The leitmotiv translates a brand’s competitive position into a compelling, universal concept which can be successfully sublimated into a meaningful, narrative experience; an aura that is indispensable in igniting demand and desire in today’s fragmented world.

Endnote

* Howard Goodall, The Story of Music, London: Vintage Publishing, 2013. The historical and musical context reported in this article owes much to this book.

The Relevance of Classical Music, Part I

As Sir Roger has explained elsewhere on this site, the relevance of classical music lies in its irrelevance in relation to practical, worldly concerns. If classical music has an educational quality, it is to be sought in something like the education of the imagination, as that which helps to humanize and refine the emotions and to stimulate ethical and moral awareness. This last expectation is a fruit of the Enlightenment, born of speculations that art has a moral/ethical component and welcomed as a new accolade for artists who were looking for liberation from servitude to court, church, or nobility. Since Beethoven, the idea that serious art music, and especially the “abstract”/“absolute” variety represented by symphonic writing, has an ennobling spiritual influence has appeared in many writings about musical aesthetics. (Of course there is music that serves more mundane purposes, such as entertainment or songs that accompany manual labor and the like, but that is not our subject here.) So, the high art variety of music may be irrelevant to practical, worldly concerns, but it is very relevant to the formation of the personality and thus can function as an important stimulant in educational processes.

But what do we mean by “classical music?” Does traditional art music in cultures other than our Western one count? For the sake of our argument we will consider only Western classical art music as it is practiced in our central performance culture, since the music of other cultures operates in a very different historical and social perspective. Western classical music can be divided into two categories: 1) all serious music from Gregorian chant onwards, up to and including music of the late Baroque era; and 2) the music from the second half of the 18th century onwards, up to and including 20th-century classical music. This distinction is based upon performance practice and instruments. The regular, classical performance world has developed from the classical repertoire as seen from a 19th-century perspective: Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven formed the basis of a performance culture that set standards in both performance and composition quality, and for the first time in Western history, works from the past began to form a venerated canon, to which new works began to relate, both in terms of performance practice and composition, however obliquely at times. In the 20th century, the music of pre-classical times was explored, and a new performance practice was created next to the central performance culture: the Historically Informed Performance practice (or HIP). The study of lost ways of performance led to both the attempt to create an “authentic” rendering of scores (which were often rather poor in information density) and the building – or rather, reconstruction – of pre-classical instruments together with the re-creation of the art of playing them. All this comprises the Western classical tradition, which continued alongside the development of 20th-century atonal modernism. That in turn created yet another category: the field of sonic art – or, as the Germans have appropriately named it, Klangkunst. (This purely acoustical art form will not be part of these deliberations for reasons that will become clear in the course of the argument; but it will be dealt with in part II of this essay.)

All Western classical music thus described has been intended to communicate something – but what? Not clear information, as one might communicate using language. It was meant to create an effect in its listeners that embraced more than the perception of its sounds alone; it was meant to have an effect deeper than words, deeper than rational thought, and touching the emotions and that mysterious thing which the poets call “the soul.” Music was considered, by its composers as well as by its performers and audiences, to be an expressive art – an art that had to “say” something that could not, or could only inadequately, be put into words. In these terms, we must think not only of Romantic music, but also of quasi-abstract works like Bach’s Goldberg Variations, which express something very different than does a Schumann song cycle or a Mahler symphony. These incredibly beautiful and introspective variations could be understood as an expression of the composer’s meditative reflections on the order of the universe, or on the religious vision of the world and the human soul. (The German poet, novelist, and cultural philosopher Goethe said of the Goldberg Variations that it sounded like God musing on Himself.) All this points towards the obvious conclusion that classical music was meant to create an effect on the inner life of the listener, bypassing language and reason, and touching those layers of inner awareness that we might relate to intuition, dream, instinct, and soul. Where words were used, as in church music, it was assumed that music would render the deeper meaning of the texts, making the message more emotionally powerful and therefore more convincing than if the words were simply recited alone. The setting of religious texts was therefore carefully monitored by the religious authorities and, where necessary, restricted by rules which kept the clarity of the words intact. In the Lied tradition of the 19th century, it was accepted that the music was directly expressing the emotional dimension of the text, thereby doubling the effect of the words; the same with opera which attempted to engage the audience with a combined spectacle of words, stage action, music, and the creation of some sort of stylized reality.

In spite of the many successive changes in style, form, purposes, and social and political circumstances, serious art music in the West has always been relevant, i.e. it was a fully integrated part of the best that the culture of a time and place could offer. The ambitions which drove composers, performers, and commissioning patrons were always focused upon “the Best,” in any and every sense. Relevance has never been an issue, and it would have been very difficult for a composer or performer in those periods to articulate the relevance of his art, as it would have been hard for a fish to explain the relevance of water. So it was until our own time: with democratization and emancipation of the masses, social mobility, technological progress, the development of an extensive media culture, and the abundance of information channels and distribution networks, authority no longer goes unquestioned. And classical music, as an art form that costs a lot of money (in Europe, mostly from the tax payer’s purse), is – for the first time – coming under pressure to justify its existence and its funding. This is, by all means, not an altogether bad development, since it forces musical professionals to rethink what they are doing and to what purpose. In a time where all the parameters of our civilization are shifting, and especially considering the current rise of populism everywhere in the Western world – a populism that is hostile to anything that may give the impression of “elitism” – it is of the greatest importance that the nature and purpose of classical music be articulated and argued, that it be protected from erosion and attacks based upon ignorance and misunderstanding.

There are already many efforts underway to make classical music more accessible and to counter the impression that this is a museum culture for the happy few, like the numerous educational and “community projects” that orchestras all over the world have initiated. And in general, they seem to work well. One is sometimes surprised to discover that “classical music” is being presented as something that it is obviously not: hip, easily understood, and entirely in touch with modern times. In 2010, Holger Noltze, a music journalist and lecturer at the Technical University in Dortmund, published his book Die Leichtigkeitslüge (The Lie about Easiness), in which he criticized the way that classical music is increasingly presented to potential new audiences as something “easy.” He explains that complexity is an inherent quality of the art form, and claims that culture should be allowed not to be easy at all – that it can be painful at times for the audience, that it may hurt, and that this demonstrates its power and meaning. He has nothing to say against the element of entertainment in classical music, but claims that something important is lost when all of it is approached as nothing more than another form of aural fun. The book stirred up public opinion in Germany – and the fact that it was written in the Holy Land of Classical Music at all is a phenomenon which invites serious reflection. If even in Germany, the European country that sees itself as a “Kulturnation,” there are rising doubts about one of its greatest cultural assets, we all have to worry. So there is indeed a problem with classical music as a genre, a problem that goes to the heart of its nature and meaning and which can be best described as the problem of relevance in the context of the modern world, in relation to modern life which is in many ways so different from the art form and the times and places of its birth.

The problem which Noltze describes – making classical music “easy” – grows out of the idea that this art form is old, that it comes to us from premodern times (at least the heart of its repertoire does), and that the only way to make it relevant for modern times is to make it in some way compatible with the modern age. That means, not only making it “easy,” but also combining it with elements which typify our world today: visuals, media’s various cultural artifacts, a promotional cult surrounding it like that of pop music marketing, performers who adopt the images of pop idols complete with “bling,” and new concert halls which outdo each other in their efforts to look like futuristic space ships from sci-fi TV series or computer games. Central to this approach is the reassuring suggestion that classical music is as quickly digested and understood as all the other offerings of modernity. These are all attempts to rescue the art form from its historic shelter and to bring it into the bright daylight of our own time, with its intense and evanescent life experiences.  But here we touch the real problem which is ignored in these attempts: the real nature of the art form is its interiority.

We could point towards classical music as a repository of emotional knowledge and civilizational values, as an emotionally uplifting experience, as a signifier of cultural identity and a symbol of ethical awareness, but since these things have different meanings for every individual, it is much better to describe the art form in a way which includes all of these things: as offering an alternative to the modern world, contrary to the idea that classical music should be a reflection of the modern world. Where modernity draws modern man out of his own inner realm, classical music offers a place of inner restoration, anchoring one’s Self and creating a point of orientation and awareness from which the outward, modern world can be seen and dealt with. In this way, it protects the Self from being constantly bombarded with contradictory and confusing stimuli that cannot be properly digested because there is no coherent filter to manage them. So then, classical music is not a form of escapism but a balancing act to keep the inner world sane.

But how is this possible at all – the repertoire of classical music has been created in a time and place where the rattling of passing carriages was the worst sonic distraction, where none of the raging noises of modernity could even be imagined? In those times, people had enough time on their hands to reflect upon life, upon their experiences, to be aware of their own reactions to them, and to quietly contemplate the perspectives of the past, present, and future. People had the time and the attention to allow ideas to sink in, to mature, to take on individual and collective form; craft had a long trajectory of development accompanied by constant reflection. The result of such a life was that the experiences of interiority were close to the surface and artists were strongly aware of them. The “interior world of individual experience” was the normal wavelength on which they operated. And since music is an abstract art, i.e. non-conceptual, composers could embed their experiences in the structures of their music, where those experience shed their temporality and specifics to become universal.

This means that the “old repertoire” which forms the mainstay of classical music, together with its aesthetic values, has never become old at all, but remains as fresh as ever, reflecting interior experience which is accessible to every new generation. In our modern world this interiority has become rare and something to be wrestled from the modern world; the noisier the world becomes, the more valuable the realm where people can restore their inner balance and awareness of individuality.

The implications of the true nature of classical music as the art form of universal interiority are drastic: they call not for its adaptation to modern life, but instead offer an utterly contrasting experience that makes classical music an indispensible part of the modern world. It is the very thing the modern world desperately needs if it wants to preserve the common sense and equilibrium it needs in order to function at all.

Continue to Part II.

The Relevance of Classical Music, Part II

EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay is the second part of a three-part series.
You can read the first part here.

If classical music is the art of “therapeutic” interiority, then thinking about presentation, marketing, funding, etc. needs to be developed from this insight. “Selling” music in wrapping paper which belies its nature will inevitably lead to disappointment: the regular listeners will feel their experience is being diminished and dumbed down and may stay away in the future; potential new audiences – especially the younger generations without much exposure to classical music – will feel cheated when they find out that a Mahler symphony does not sound at all like heavy metal or hip-hop. One could revisit the many rubbing points that characterize the problems of classical music with this perspective in mind and try to find new and better ways to connect the art form to the needs of modern society instead of trying to make it compatible with modernity. Symphony orchestras especially, vulnerable because of their complex bureaucracy and great expenses, could find explorative trajectories to anchor the institution within society in a way that secures their existence in the present and in the future. And at the heart of such considerations lies the way in which the orchestra as an institution is perceived from the outside, from the modern world to which it offers a much-needed alternative space.

A short word about the sonic art performance culture is appropriate here. Since the Second World War, this entirely new art form has developed aesthetic and, especially, psychological receptive frameworks which differ fundamentally from those of music. This has meant an entirely different approach to composition, performance, education, and marketing. Sonic art does not intend to address the listener’s interior life but instead wants him to become aware of the aesthetics of pure sound patterns, which is more like an observation process of patterns which are not means of any communication of interior, emotional experience, but are objective, independent entities to be enjoyed for themselves, as natural phenomena are. Sonic art is not an art of interiority but an objective art that belongs to the world of objective entities. Given the ideological nature of much sonic art and its promotion, which insistently relates it to the specific character of modernity, it can never offer the contrast to modernity as explained in the first part of this essay. It belongs firmly to the modern world to which classical music, as the art of interiority, in contrast offers an alternative experience. In other words: audiences who want to immerse themselves again in the modern experience will seek sonic art; listeners who long for an experience that confirms their inner life and universal humanity will try to find this in classical music.

Let us now try, with the concept of interiority in mind, to find indications of possible solutions that can help to preserve classical music in the future. What follows are mere general suggestions which, however, can be further explored in specific cases and thus may offer new and fertile trajectories.

Education

Educational programs of classical music should be organised from primary schools onwards and clearly presented as an alternative music to pop, in the way healthy fruit is presented as an alternative to fast food, ice cream, and candy. It should not be treated as something old-fashioned but instead as something that has proven, by experience, to be wholesome to people’s emotional development. Active playing and singing, however simple, should be part of such programs. Comparisons with pop music which children will hear elsewhere in abundance, comparisons in which classical music is told to be superior, should be avoided, since patronizing overtones of a truth hinder communication; children will have to discover for themselves the quality difference when they engage in classical music; and if they do not, that’s too bad – but you cannot force love and appreciation. At least children who do not appear to be sensitive to classical music will know it exists and that it is important for a lot of people, and a normal part of civilization.

At the level of secondary school, the case of interiority and timelessness can be discussed around active playing and informative listening sessions. And at the university level, music history and general education in classical music culture should be a normal part of the humanities and of first-year, or preparatory, orientation programmes. Every student leaving university should know the basics of the classical music culture, irrespective of the profession he has been prepared for. As for “diversity”: since classical music is universal (because human interiority is universal), it is not bound to culturally-defined mental territories; it is open to everybody with enough interest and sensitivity to spend some effort and time on it, and will give its full and rich rewards to listeners irrespective of ethnic background or culture. Such music information courses at the university level should not be part of gender studies, or musico-sociological courses where music history is treated as part of political or social agendas; however interesting such courses may be, they do not touch the heart of the art form which transcends such contexts.

Marketing

When information given in the media and on websites about concerts, ensembles, orchestras, and opera houses, apart from the practical data, is presented in a style which does justice to the dignity of the art form and which refrains from any association with vulgar commercial advertisement, such an approach will be an honest and correct service to prospective listeners. Where orchestras and opera houses also include the more popular genres like musicals and cross-over programs, the style of presentation should be as different as possible from the presentation style of the classical programs, so that it will be clear to prospective listeners that classical music is really a different genre and will address the more sophisticated and developed inner life of audiences.

The star cult around brilliant performers has always been part of the classical music culture, and it would be much too puritanical to bring up arguments against it, since the real, live presence of such artists is one of the great attractions of a concert. But it makes quite a difference whether performers are presented as the main subject of the event, or as serving the music. A certain measure of dignity and chastity will keep the balance right (one thinks of pianists dressed up like pop stars, or singers almost drowning in their cleavage – a misapplication of the idea of interiority – which creates a barrier between the listener and the music by exaggerating the outer appearances of the intermediate).

If the promotion and marketing of concerts focus on the contemporary need for interior experience, one has the best chance to get audiences, both old and new, who will recognize the value of the event and will come back for more. When attracting young and new audiences, it will not be references to the modern world, or pop, or superficial glamour that will bring them around more than once, but the argument that they will find something of their own inner identity touched and confirmed by classical music. Surely young people, still finding their way into life and into a confusing and often insecure world, will be interested to experience something that will strengthen their sense of Self, that will stimulate aspirations, and that connects them to the long organic chain of generations, an experience which may insert some awareness of human greatness, individual potential, and all the important human values which cannot be defined by “the market” or fashion or hip technologies.

A short word upon “diversity,” a term which often crops up in government reports, fundraising initiatives, and defenses of the art form in relation to social changes. The classical repertoire was created in times and places which were different from our own times. The idea that the art form should be accessible to all community types within society is perfectly legitimate and right; given the universality of classical music, it cannot be nailed down to a mere product of dead, white males from undemocratic times and thus an expression of white, male, European dominance. The music transcends such narrow-minded notions. It is not anti-women, anti-proletariat, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-gay, anti-whatever, but addresses itself to any human being prepared to open her heart and ears (probably the latter in the first place). So, programming which seeks to meet requirements of diversity by including works which do not belong to the genre is creating a barrier: listeners from backgrounds where Western classical music is not heard should not come to the concert hall to recognize something of their culture at home, but to be invited to explore an art form which may be unfamiliar at first but which can be absorbed by their own inner Self in the same way that it absorbed their own cultural symbols and metaphors, and thus may provide an enrichment without any suggestion of “giving up” something of their own cultural identity. Programming works which supposedly reflect the cultural backgrounds of non-Western listeners hinders the acculturation of Western classical music which such concerts are supposed to offer. As Western listeners can learn to understand and experience Indian traditional music, Indians can do the same with Western classical music. Because of its all-embracing universality, Western classical music is particularly suited to the needs of our own globalized, and therefore increasingly neurotic, times.

Funding

As we know, funding of classical music differs from country to country and especially from the USA to Europe. Where concerts are dependent upon private donors and corporate sponsorship, again the contemporary need for interior experience that classical music offers, best be at the heart of the fundraising exercise. Also references to permanence, continuity, and the civilizing influence of the art form should help to attract donors who feel themselves committed to such values and corporate sponsors who wish their products to be associated with an art form contributing to compelling, interior experience. (A good example of the presentation of classical music with a dignified emanation of quality – and with a discrete reference to sponsorship but without the suggestion that music is a mere luxury product – is the website of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, where a mere little clock on the left indicates that the orchestra has a sponsor relationship with Rolex.)

Where governments support classical music, as they do in Europe, orchestras’ existence is secured by structural subsidies. Spending tax money on such institutions has to be politically motivated and this results in the dependence of the institutions – orchestras, opera houses, concert halls, etc. – upon just how politicians think about cultural identity and the political gain they may derive from supporting the arts or else cutting the subsidies (as recently happened in Denmark and the Netherlands, both countries gravely suffering from populist inroads into the cultural sector). Most countries in Europe, however, still have a strong traditional cultural identity in spite of the erosion that comes with globalization. Germany and Austria understand themselves as Kulturnationen, “nations of culture,” where classical music especially forms an important part of national self-understanding. France still cultivates its patrimoine, the total of cultural monuments, artifacts, and traditions which have come down through the ages, not to mention Italy and Spain with their rich inheritances. The arguments that institutions have to regularly present to the state funding bodies have to relate to the political agendas of the reigning parties, and where the political landscape changes these arguments change as well. The current rise of populism, which infects many political parties who had been immune against such erosion before, means that musical institutions have to find other accents in their arguments to justify their function within society. In the discourse with governments, the populist agenda is entirely against any culture which claims high quality experience since any such suggestion is considered “elitist.” The best an institution could do when confronted by such an agenda is to stress the accessibility of classical music and its therapeutic effect on all levels of the community – and be silent about its relationship to notions of “European civilization,” its artistic qualities, its level of craftsmanship, and the like. As for the concept of interiority: this will probably be much too difficult to understand for populist politicians and thus better left untouched.

Concert Halls

A concert hall is not merely a practical space for live concerts; it also creates the appropriate mood where classical music can be experienced in the most appropriate way. But what is the most appropriate way? To begin with, this space will have to underline its separateness from the outside world, not only acoustically (a practical consideration) but also psychologically, to underline the interior nature of the art form. The great concert halls of the 19th century, when public music life found its first anchoring in public space, were created like temples, separate from the noise of daily life, often with solemn classicist design and richly-sculpted decorations out- and inside the hall, which had the advantage of both creating an atmosphere of dignity and elevation and spreading and distributing the sound waves in such a way that the music comes into its own right. In the 20th century, however, architectural modernism sought to stress the contemporaneity of the concert hall building, with the effect that the music being performed inside began to seem “outdated” and “historical.” Together with the splitting-off of the avant-garde from the central performance culture, modern concert halls seemed to underline the museum-like nature of the classical, pre-modernist repertoire. The inescapable conclusion is that, if classical music should be best served in its concert spaces, we need to build concert halls in a classical style, as happened in Nashville with the Schermerhorn Symphony Centre.

Community work

Fortunately, many musical institutions have extended their activities to educational programs in the communities of their cities, trying to interest young people and hoping to build new audiences for the future. Some of these community programs have taken on the character of a social engineering exercise, as if classical music could heal the social problems of underprivileged neighbourhoods suffering from crime and racism, thereby suggesting that the influence of music should be able to change attitudes in the social sphere. But classical music is not an instrument of social change in a direct sense: if it has an influence, it works in an indirect way by civilizing the emotions, awakening aspirations, confirming the Self. But it cannot solve the problems resulting from the lack of these things. Those problems are (for music) too far down the chain of cause and effect. Active participation in music-making in ensembles, sponsored by either donors or the state, can certainly improve problem neighbourhoods as many reports have shown, but one should not expect miracles from classical music in such areas.

The last subject related to the relevance of classical music, the repertoire problem, will be treated in part III of this series.

The Relevance of Classical Music, Part III

EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay is the final part of a three-part series.
You can read the first part here and the second here.

Last but not least, the burning question of repertoire. For classical music as a genre to survive in modern times, renewal of the repertoire is a fundamental requirement: without renewal, the art form petrifies and audiences will stay away because they will have the repertoire of works on CD at home. An obvious way to rejuvenate the repertoire is to explore works of the past which have gone out of fashion or which have been unjustly overlooked – the filter of history is by no means an “honest” one and many unmusical factors have an influence upon the formation of the repertoire that appears to survive the times. There are works by well-known composers which were once popular but then fell out of fashion, as well as works by these composers which were never very popular but are nevertheless definitely worthwhile. Among the examples which come to mind are César Franck’s symphonic poem Le Chasseur Maudit and his Variations Symphoniques for piano and orchestra; Fauré’s Ballade for piano and orchestra; the operas of Cherubini (highly appreciated by Beethoven); symphonic poems by Saint-Saëns; the neoclassical repertoire by Stravinsky and De Falla. Music which has been overshadowed by “the Greats” can also offer surprising works, like Reger’s Romantic Suite (a most remarkable work), or the many engaging works by British composers of the early 20th century (Vaughan Williams, Holst, Delius). The 20th-century tonal tradition, much maligned and pushed to the margins by modernism and academia, offers a veritable treasure trove of interesting music which, fortunately, is currently explored by recording labels and which has been thoroughly mapped by Canadian musicologist Herbert Pauls. There is so much unfamiliar and engaging music already written that it won’t be very hard, with some serious time spent on it, to find additional repertoire which enriches concert life with an injection of adventure and exploration.

And then there is contemporary production, which, on the surface, seems to carry the stronger symbolism of renewal and development for the art form. But this invokes some quite complex questions. If renewal means programming a new, still unknown work, then how do we know beforehand that it is worthwhile, given the immensely wide range of idioms and the fact that a lot of new music is unsuited for classical music’s performance format? How to find your way into that jungle, and with which value framework? How do we know beforehand that announcing the new work won’t reduce ticket sales – since an unknown or contemporary name on the program often invites grave suspicion with prospective audiences that it may be one of those indigestible pieces that are painfully endured rather than a compelling and interesting experience? And then, could a new work which is painful on first hearing not be a great work after all when performed more than once – and if so, how could we know? After all, orchestras, opera companies, and smaller ensembles can function perfectly well without any “unfamiliar” work, the established repertoire being so large and varied. Orchestras and opera companies work under strong pressures to get the planned performances realized in the best possible way. The many letters, proposals, and recordings they receive from composers, their agents, or their publishers every day create mountains of unsolicited mail in corners of their offices and they simply don’t have the capacity to deal with those masses of information which are mostly seen as a mere threat to their working routine. In general, orchestras and opera companies don’t have a specialized staff member dedicated exclusively exploring such material, and the staff dealing with artistic planning can’t afford to lose valuable time assessing material they are not equipped to judge.

Another problem is the sheer amount of new music being produced every minute of every hour nowadays. Because the musical fashions that have arisen since WWII claim total freedom from traditional musical standards and aesthetic norms, composing has become open to anybody – including people with the ambition but without the talents to really write meaningful music. And they are many. What’s more, current computer technology makes putting something together that one could call a “composition” possible for people who in former periods would not have dreamed of becoming a musician, let alone a composer. This has resulted in the current proliferation of “composers” thronging at the doors of orchestras, ensembles, and opera houses, creating a dense fog that is looked upon with suspicion and gloom from the closed windows of artistic leadership. It has thus become very difficult for institutions to find new, valuable works.

What is the role of conductors in introducing unfamiliar works? They compete for restricted opportunities in the field, and career choices are often given priority over interest in content. But fortunately, quite a few conductors – mostly of the younger generation – understand that restricting their repertoire to warhorses will not benefit either their career or the art form itself, and proposals from conductors to the planning staff are a possible route to performance. But conductors who have earned the trust of the orchestral staff, whether of their own orchestra or of other orchestras where they make guest appearances, generally have little time to explore the labyrinth of new music and to react to the flood of proposals coming their way.

Orchestras and opera companies try to give as many performances as possible to exploit the available financial and practical resources to the fullest. Well-known works of the repertoire only need rehearsing for the “how” and not for the “what,” so works from the standard repertoire are cheaper and more practical than unfamiliar or new works. Most of the time, new works are only rehearsed for the “what;” and where the music in itself does not intend to transcend the sound level, where the “how” consists in getting the notes and timbres in the right place and nothing more (which is mostly the case with postwar music), preparations are finished when the structure is more or less correct. But this does not leave listeners with the impression of communication and a deeper musical meaning. The result is that the work is soon forgotten and not repeated because it does not invite more hearings. What happens to the rare works in which, as in “older” music, the level of sound is a mere carrier of musical expression? Extra rehearsal time is needed to create the opportunity of exploring the expressive dimension, and that is only possible when first the “what,” the right notes in the right place, has been realized. Given the cost of rehearsal time, this rarely happens, with the result that works which may offer the unique opportunity to add to the repertoire are put in the same category as the superficial, musically-empty products and share the same fate of oblivion. Postwar modernism and its hip progeny, in combination with the expensive cost of operation for orchestras and opera houses, created barriers which hinder renewal of the repertoire – a self-destructive mix, pushing classical music into the corner as a “museum culture.”

The only possibility for orchestras and opera houses to find new repertoire, with the chance that they hit upon something of real value, is to preserve a practical framework: the one which defines the fundamentals of the art form. This means ignoring the postwar modernist ideologies of progress – because there is no progress in the arts – and requiring of new repertoire that it be suited to the medium as it has developed over time. In other words, new music should be rooted in some sort of tonality, create the possibility of communication and expression, and offer the players (and singers when in opera) the opportunity to create a coherent total musical experience which can be combined with existing repertoire and which avoids disruption of the general format of the art form –which, after all, is merely a means to an end: the compelling musical experience. Only then will the expensive extra rehearsal time needed for a satisfying result be justified. Does this sound “conservative?” Is preserving fundamentals of a precious art form “conservative?” Or is it merely common sense? If we want classical music to survive in modern times, it should be its intrinsic, artistic quality which carries developments, not its deviations from the only format within which the art form can thrive. New music which needs to deconstruct the fundamentals of the art form to make its mark is dealing not with content but with the outer form, which points toward a lack of artistic motivation. Even the most deviating works in the past, like Stravinsky’s Sacre, made use of the basic format of classical music to introduce a highly original treatment of melody, harmony, rhythm, and instrumentation – all of which were rooted in music that existed already at the time. The Sacre was not avant-garde and modernist (which is modernist jargon) but highly idiosyncratic and an extreme version of an existing musical tradition: the one of Russian folklore, being prepared and practiced long before Stravinsky laid his hands on it.

Thus two possibilities readily present themselves regarding the renewal of the repertoire:

  1. Exploring unfamiliar works from the past, of which there are many that deserve a new hearing; and
  2. Looking for contemporary music which conforms to the fundamentals and medium of our performance culture (orchestra, ensemble, opera house).

Either way, it would be best if orchestras and opera houses appointed a special staff member to explore and select new ideas for programming. Someone with both performance experience and an extensive education in music history and aesthetics would be ideal for such undertaking and able to intelligently discuss new ideas with the conductor(s) concerned.

Fortunately, there is already much effort being spent on the survival of classical music by both the established institutions and many ad hoc initiatives. However it is to be hoped that musical institutions will, in the course of time, become still more adept at navigating their routine pressures which, though entirely understandable, in the long run may prevent necessary reform. In spite of all the stories of “a dying art” and the completely unfounded criticism that it is “outdated’ and “incompatible with modern times,” Western classical music as a genre remains one of the greatest human achievements and inspires hope that we will, at some stage, be capable of creating a civilized world in which the benefits of the mind and spirit can flourish.

A Case for Quality

EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay is reprinted here with the gracious permission of the Boston Symphony Orchestra who published it in their program book and retain its copyright.

Last April I had the opportunity to perform Mahler’s Ninth Symphony with the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) at Symphony Hall and on its spring European tour. The ninety-minute symphony is a challenge both for the musicians and audience. Its relentless intensity and extended tonality keep it always outside the edge of our aural comfort zone, especially compared to the facile lyricism of a Tchaikovsky or Dvorák. When the Symphony Hall performance ended and the musicians stood up to take our bows, I looked out into the audience. There usually is enough light in the hall to see the faces of concertgoers applauding, at least near the stage. Their expressions are a good gauge of how much they enjoyed the concert.

What I saw was more than gratifying. Not only was it clear the performance had been deeply appreciated, I was pleasantly surprised to see a fairly evenly balanced demographic division of people in their twenties and thirties, forties and fifties, and sixties and seventies. And it wasn’t just a fluke. It turned out to be the case time and time again – in Vienna, in Leipzig, in Dresden, in Luxembourg – as well as at Symphony Hall. I suppose I was surprised because there has been a drumbeat of naysayers who prophesy the doom of symphony orchestras, telling us in somber tones that only rich, old folks go to concerts these days. I’m sorry, but that’s not how I’ve seen things. Is there a greater preponderance of older people attending symphony concerts than rock concerts? No doubt. But no one seems to worry about Justin Bieber’s future simply because his audience is severely limited to teeny-boppers. And to the notion that symphonies have priced themselves out of the entertainment market: going to a symphony concert is no more expensive than the average ticket for a Red Sox game, and a lot less than a box seat. So if you can afford to sit in the bleachers and polish off a Fenway frank and a Samuel Adams, you can afford the Boston Symphony.

A prevailing narrative, promulgated, amazingly enough, by some symphony orchestras’ own administrations (though fortunately not the BSO’s), runs like this: (A) Symphony orchestras are in dire trouble. (B) The traditional symphonic format – the repertoire, the two-hour concert, the white-tie-and-tails, the formidable concert hall – is no longer relevant to contemporary society. (C) For the concert experience to be meaningful, and therefore in order for orchestras to survive, it has to connect with a more diverse local community and compete more actively in the entertainment arena. The proposed solution: Orchestras need to jettison the “standard” repertoire and create new formats in less formal, more personalized settings that will attract a more contemporary crowd.

In other words, symphony orchestras should cool it with the symphonies. Otherwise, we might as well pack our bags and go home. I admit I’m exaggerating the argument, but not by much. Nevertheless, I find this narrative not only to be frightening, considering that the source of it is often the organization itself, but also flawed. First, I don’t see that orchestras are on the verge of extinction. On the contrary. People who make this argument are myopically fixated on only the top tier of professional symphony orchestras, and even in this regard it’s somewhat of a fiction.

There is no doubt that, as is the case with most nonprofits, raising money is a nonstop challenge. When economic times are tough, orchestras struggle. (Yes, there are some orchestras that continue to struggle regardless of the economy, and some have tragically shut their doors, but in general when times get better, orchestras rebound.) In other words, they’re like any other business. We don’t write off the retail industry when Sears hits the skids. Why would we do that with orchestras? And don’t forget that during the supposed “golden age” of American symphony orchestras in the 1930s and ’40s, when radio stations like NBC supported their own magnificent in-house orchestras and even movie theaters had their own live musicians, there were comparatively few orchestras that provided anything close to a year-round concert schedule and full-time employment for the musicians, let alone health care and retirement benefits.

Going beyond fully professional orchestras, when you look how deeply embedded the culture of symphonic music is in American society, including hundreds of semiprofessional, community, youth, college, festival, and school orchestras, a strong case can be made that symphony orchestras have never been healthier. The same week that I played the Mahler with the Boston Symphony at Symphony Hall, I performed as a soloist with the Long Island Youth Orchestra, which was celebrating its fiftieth anniversary!

The same week I played the Mahler at Tanglewood, I coached the string section of the all-amateur Stockbridge Sinfonia for their well-attended annual concert. Going beyond our own shores, the explosion of symphonic music in Asia and South America over the past half-century has been nothing short of mind-boggling. Even if classical music in the U.S. and Europe were suddenly to cease tomorrow, the future of orchestral music would still shine brightly around the world.

And you know what music everyone’s playing? Mozart and Beethoven, Mahler and Strauss, Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, Debussy and Ravel. You know why? It’s simple: they composed great music. Musicians love to play it and audiences love to hear it. So far, no one has tired of gawking at the Mona Lisa or the statue of David. Why should listening to Beethoven’s Fifth be any different? Should symphony orchestras program more music of contemporary, ethnically diverse composers? Absolutely! If it’s worthy music, by all means. But it’s ass backwards if the motivation is out of fear that otherwise symphony orchestras will die.

But what about the format? The presentation? What about those stuffy concert halls where you have to sit quietly for two hours and not use your cell phones? Isn’t there a better way to connect with the community? Outreach and education activities are great, especially considering the dwindling funding of public school music education. The more the better. But how can such activities “save the symphony” if at the same time the raison d’être – playing symphonies – is devalued by the very organizations trying to “save” it? What would the purpose be of such efforts? If a group of symphony musicians playing Piazzolla tangos in a pub floats their boat, that’s great. That would be a lot of fun. Go for it! Getting to know the musicians up close and personal is a wonderful way for the public to connect. And maybe it would eventually attract some people to go to a real symphony concert. (Personally, when I’m at a pub, I’d rather watch a ball game while I’m drinking my Rolling Rock than listen to string quartets. But, hey, that’s just me.)

But here’s the problem. Outreach has its limits. It’s a challenge to play Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony in a bar. I’m not sure how you’d squeeze all those brass players in there. Maybe behind the pool tables. At some point it comes back to concert halls. Symphony orchestras have no choice but to play symphonies in concert halls. And you know what? Some people think it’s very special to go to a concert hall. In fact, a lot of people feel that way. It gives them a sense of being part of something unique and special. Maybe that’s why they’ve kept coming for three hundred years. We are fortunate that the Boston Symphony was founded upon that principle and has steadfastly maintained it to this day.

In this day and age when we’re surrounded by external stimuli 24/7, when our world view is reduced to a two-by-four-inch cell phone screen, when our computerized existence frames us into thinking and feeling and responding in nanoseconds, the appeal of two hours in an impressively expansive and comfortable concert hall, listening to an engaging Rossini overture, a sublime Mozart piano concerto, and a heartwarming Brahms symphony may actually be something that people are more inclined to enjoy more now than ever before. To paraphrase Mark Twain, the reports of the death of the symphony orchestra have been greatly exaggerated.

In Memory of David Modell, and a Few Things Orchestras Might Learn from the NFL

I am finally sitting down to write this after the effervescent and ebullient football legend David Modell was laid to rest – at the age of only 55 – at the Baltimore Basilica, a few blocks down the street from my home this morning. I have procrastinated in writing this piece for years. It was originally intended to be an article about the lessons that American football can teach orchestras; it was to be anecdotal and prescriptive – something I wanted the Future Symphony Institute (FSI) to get into much later, only after the philosophical foundations of our argument were firmly established.

But God orders life according to His timing, and my esteemed friend left this world before I could show him that I really was taking notes during our many talks. Dave was one of my very first supporters and not only encouraged me, but backed me in the hard work of establishing FSI. He was rooting for me to help not only our home team, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra (BSO), but perhaps other orchestras all around the country to seize the many opportunities that he and I plainly saw waiting for them.

I met Dave sometime around 2003, when we were serving together on a committee formed by the BSO. That committee was charged with the task of getting more young people to attend concerts. Symphony Rocks was the BSO’s early version of the efforts now undertaken by orchestras everywhere to try to make themselves “cool” and to get more “young professionals” to attend. Dave and I hit it off immediately for we shared a similar roving and imaginative conversational style – what might sound a lot like ADD to someone overhearing us. But each time we bantered back and forth, what seemed pretty obvious to both of us was that what was lacking at symphony concerts was simply something about the social experience around the music. Together we would envision what might be done with our concert hall lobby and beyond it, stepping out of this or that event, where we regularly collided, to enjoy his really great Cuban cigars.

Back then, as now, the main impetus of the music community’s conversation across the nation is what we might call “declinism.” Driven by the idea that our art form was in a tailspin, leaders of the major foundations and the League of American Orchestras concluded that we had to keep up with the times, embody “cool,” get over our fixation on the music of dead, white, European men, and mimic the successes of mass entertainment through marketing and “innovations” in programming while breaking down the walls of musical styles – and thus becoming somehow relevant to people who had never before shown interest in what we were doing.

Dave, who was himself a smashing success, quickly earning a Super Bowl victory in only the fifth year at the helm of his father’s team, shared my sense that our greatest achievement as Baltimore’s orchestra would not come through trying to be something that we were not, or through trying be all things to all people, but by being even more of what an orchestra is really and already inherently about. The opportunity for us lay in the possibility of enhancing the overall patron experience – and this is something the NFL knew all about.

Before moving to Baltimore in 1996 to establish the Baltimore Ravens, Dave was raised in Cleveland where his adoptive father, the storied Art Modell, had been owner of the NFL franchise the Cleveland Browns. Cleveland has long been a city facing challenges very similar to Baltimore’s: a post-industrial city struggling with class conflict and high unemployment. They also have a world-class orchestra, to which Art was a subscriber from 1977 to 1996. As Dave told me in our last meeting together on a bright, sunny afternoon,

My dad loved classical music, especially The Cleveland Orchestra, and introduced me to it by taking me out to the car where we would sit in the driveway, listening to the radio. I’ll never forget the first piece he taught me, Scheherazade. I still love that piece because he opened up a whole world of music to me through a story I could follow in the music. As I grew up, we frequently attended the Cleveland Orchestra together as a guys’ night out. There was never any mistake about what we were witnessing: greatness, an A -team to the last player, and that it was the orchestra that was main thing. Like another sports team, the Cleveland Orchestra was highly respected in our home and was a main source of the city’s pride.

It’s hard to think of the Cleveland Orchestra or the NFL as anything but wildly successful, but Dave reminded me,

Back in the 60s, professional football was lagging behind college football, baseball, and even boxing and horse racing. Of course, television changed everything, especially Monday Night Football, but we also did a bunch of other things that really expanded our audience and gained us huge sponsorships, which was really the name of the game.

Speaking broadly from the perspective of the NFL, “Building better, more comfortable stadiums like we did in Baltimore made a huge difference. The luxury skybox with all its amenities has been great for revenue but even more so for sponsorships. We were able to make great gains from the people who could afford it.” Indeed, the average ticket price for the Baltimore Ravens in 2016 was $216. Clearly, the NFL doesn’t lose sleep over the fear that they might be charging too much for tickets. Over the years, I would chat with Dave about the challenge we orchestras believe we faced: asking ourselves how we could manage to charge less for tickets. “That’s crazy,” Dave would say. “You have to make your product seem as valuable to people as possible. Even the folks with little money spring for NFL tickets and the team jerseys if that’s something they really want. What’s so hard to understand about that?”

It simply rubs an arts administrator with an egalitarian mindset the wrong way to try to push up prices. Yet, people from all economic strata in Baltimore do fork over the big bucks for Ravens games. The Ravens and the Orioles, with their legendary Camden Yards, are the best shows in town – aside from the BSO, of course. Not everyone attends every game or every concert. Some people don’t attend any, but those who do pony up gladly.

I told Dave about my dream of redesigning our concert experience, changing it from a two-hour sit-down-listen-and-leave routine to a five-hour window during which people show up in time to eat, drink, and be merry, the orchestra playing not just a world-class concert but also the world-class host. In short, the concert hall would become a destination for atmosphere, music, and hospitality. And Dave jumped all over this one:

Well, that’s exactly what the NFL did. We expanded the whole concept of the game into a bigger time slot – an event with tons of pregame and postgame activities. Tailgating in our parking lots has been huge. For lots of people, that’s the best part: the socializing and drinking.

So, social context matters. The event brings people together to enjoy each other under a pretext that for some might even be secondary. It’s not the game but who one goes to the game with – and the opportunity to spend the day and make memories with them. That was the truth I was trying to get to. In this day and age, I think it is too much to expect most people to come to a concert simply because we are playing Mozart or Stravinsky or whatnot. But to have a great time with others while they get know this thing called classical music, that seems entirely plausible and in keeping with the times. The idea of wedding our art form, the concert, with other forms of high quality diversion became what I hoped we could pull off. And history apparently supports the notion: concerts used to be fun and lavish social events before some puritans got hold of the concert format.

Dave would go on about all the perks you get by being a season ticket holder. “It just keeps getting better the more you buy into the team. For so many people it becomes a lifestyle that consumes them.” Yes, a sense of membership, and a membership that had its privileges. Being a cheeseheaded Green Bay Packers fan from Wisconsin, I certainly could relate. The closer one gets to Green Bay, the more one notices everything being painted green and gold, including people’s garage doors, cars, and the occasional dog. Their football stadium, Lambeau Field, is one of the top places for weddings in Green Bay – right on the 50-yard line. As the Toscanini of football, Vince Lombardi once said, “Think of only three things: your God, your family, and the Green Bay Packers – in that order.” But, I digress.

The idea I got from Dave was how welcoming the NFL tried to make itself, getting fans to regard the stadium as a home away from home, a Great Third Place, as we call it. I wanted to make our concert hall lobby into our own version of such a home. After all, so many of our patrons had been coming to the BSO for 50 years or more! Talk about loyal fans. They certainly deserve a comfortable place to sit when they come to “their happy place.” That so many  of our patrons are retired made it seem to me that it was even more incumbent upon us that we make our friends comfortable first and foremost.

Dave once asked me, “Why do you guys care if your audience is so old? That’s your niche.” For his own part, he seemed to have no illusions that the NFL could or should be for everyone. He said that he got that part, but he also recounted some important forward progress they made. The NFL nearly doubled its audience when it figured out how to appeal to women:

We learned a lot by asking women what it would take to make them want to come to games. It boiled down to making it easy for them to understand what was going on in the game, selling women’s sports apparel, which is a big part of fan life, having comfortable seats, good bathrooms and enough of them, food they liked, and places to keep warm. They also really liked knowing the backstory to the players’ lives, the human interest. In sports, the focus is always right on the team itself – where it has to be. It’s not about the coaching staff or the conductor, really. It’s about you guys. I want to know you guys. You know, to this day, women are still our biggest growth segment.

Indeed, today women account for 45% of NFL attendees.

It was about that same time that I discovered from the Knight Foundation’s report published in the late 90s that women bought the vast majority of orchestra tickets – and that for every four people who attend a concert, it was another person (a women usually) who had bought their tickets for them. It became really important to me that we get to the women who are doing the purchasing and to get their men to go along with them. Since concert audiences skew towards women, Dave and I mused about what we might learn if we did something like what the NFL did, but in reverse – if we asked men what it would take to make them more excited about coming to concerts.

Dave, releasing a luxurious cloud of hand-rolled Cuban puffery, declared, “Easy. A killer single-malt Scotch list, great beers, a place to smoke cigars, and more legroom.” Sounded familiar: cater to their creature comforts. The Cleveland Orchestra was spending a small fortune on gingersnaps that were of such great repute in their donors’ lounge that they didn’t dare cut them lest they incur donor backlash. They learned this the hard way, I was told.

It wasn’t long before orchestras got into the Great Cupholder Debate, while Dave and I sat on the sidelines asking, “Why the heck not?” Besides wanting to get the full service bar going at our hall, I wanted the high rollers that we needed to court to be able to have drinks brought to them – and for everyone to be able to take their drinks to their seats. We needed cupholders. Apparently, the NFL has already figured that one out. But to this day, it would seem this is an insurmountable challenge for symphony orchestras, raising grave concerns over red wine and carpets or something like that. I did hear that recently the cupholder barrier was broken down somewhere. I wish I had had a chance to tell Dave about that.

Ravens Nation Says Goodbye To David Modell

The Abduction of Opera

EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay is reprinted here with the gracious permission of City Journal, who first published it in the Summer 2007 issue of their magazine.

Mozart’s lighthearted opera The Abduction from the Seraglio does not call for a prostitute’s nipples to be sliced off and presented to the lead soprano. Nor does it include masturbation, urination as foreplay, or forced oral sex. Europe’s new breed of opera directors, however, know better than Mozart what an opera should contain. So not only does the Abduction at Berlin’s Komische Oper feature the aforementioned activities; it also replaces Mozart’s graceful ending with a Quentin Tarantino-esque bloodbath and the promise of future perversion.

Welcome to Regietheater (German for “director’s theater”), the style of opera direction now prevalent in Europe. Regietheater embodies the belief that a director’s interpretation of an opera is as important as what the composer intended, if not more so. By an odd coincidence, many cutting-edge directors working in Europe today just happen to discover the identical lode of sex, violence, and opportunity for hackneyed political “critique” in operas ranging from the early Baroque era to that of late Romanticism.

Until now, New York’s Metropolitan Opera has stood resolutely against Regietheater decadence. In fact, its greatest gift to the world at the present moment is to mount productions – whether sleekly abstract or richly realistic – that allow the beauty of some of the most powerful music ever written to shine forth.

The question now is whether that musical gift will continue.

The Met’s new general manager, Peter Gelb, hit Lincoln Center last year like a comet, promising to attract new audiences by injecting more “theatrical excitement” into the house. Predicting what that would ultimately mean was difficult enough before another bombshell exploded this February: New York City Opera, the smaller company across the plaza from the Met, announced that it had hired Europe’s most prominent exponent of Regietheater as its next general manager. The shock waves at Lincoln Center still reverberate.

This time of critical transition is an opportune moment both to celebrate the Met’s role in preserving a central glory of Western culture, and to consider the great opera house’s future. To see how much is at stake, one need only glance across the Atlantic and, increasingly, at other opera companies here in the United States.

The reign of Regietheater in Europe is one of the most depressing artistic developments of our time; it suggests a culture that cannot tolerate its own legacy of beauty and nobility. Singers, orchestra members, and conductors know how shameful the most self-indulgent opera productions are, and yet they are powerless to stop them. Buoyed with government subsidies, and maintained by an informal alliance of government-appointed arts bureaucrats and critics, the phenomenon thrives, even when audiences stay away in disgust.

The injury that Regietheater does to Mozart, Handel, and other benefactors of humanity is heartbreaking enough. But it also hurts the public, by denying new audiences the unimpeded experience of an art form of unparalleled sublimity. The seventeenth-century Florentines who created the first operas sought to recover the power of Greek tragedy, which united drama and song. Since then, opera has expressed a limitless range of human emotions, set to music of sometimes unbearable exquisiteness. Initially devoted to the exploits of kings and gods, opera by the end of the nineteenth century had conferred on the passions of workers and shopkeepers an equal grandeur, worthy of the majestic resources of the symphony orchestra.

 

The trajectory of the Komische Oper’s Abduction from the Seraglio – from the object of an in-house revolt to a sold-out triumph – is a fitting introduction to the decadence of Europe’s present musical culture. The episode presents a depressing variant on Mel Brooks’s The Producers: whereas Max Bialystok knew that his Springtime for Hitler was garbage and expected failure, the director of thisAbduction, Calixto Bieito, assumed that his travesty would be a success – and it was.

Bieito is the most offensive director working in Europe today. Accordingly, he is in high demand; he has mauled Verdi, Puccini, Mozart, and Richard Strauss in London, Copenhagen, Barcelona, Hanover, and numerous other venues. Like many Regietheater directors, the Catalan Bieito piously claims to take his cues from the music itself. “I think I am very loyal to Mozart,” he notes. “There is nothing more to say.”

Actually, there is a lot more to say. The Abduction from the Seraglio is a humorous tale of the capture of a group of Europeans by a Turkish pasha, who tries to win the love of one of them; Mozart lavishes joyful, driving rhythms – led by piccolo, triangle, and cymbals – on its Turkish themes, and adds a rich lode of elegant solos, particularly for tenor. Bieito transferred the Abduction to a contemporary Eastern European brothel and translated the dignified pasha of Mozart’s sadly irrelevant tale into the brothel’s sick pimp overseer. To give the production’s explicit sadomasochistic sex an even greater frisson of realism, Bieito hired real prostitutes off the streets of Berlin to perform onstage. Needless to say, neither the streetwalkers nor the whippings, masturbation, and transvestite bondage are anywhere suggested in Mozart’s opera. In one representative moment, the leading soprano, Constanze – who has already suffered digital violation during a poignant lament – is beaten and then held down and forced to watch as the pasha’s servant, Osmin, first forces a prostitute to perform fellatio on him and then gags the prostitute and slashes her to death. Osmin hands the prostitute’s trophy nipples to Constanze, who by then is retching.

The episode perfectly illustrates the opportunistic literalism typical of culturally ignorant – and musically deaf – contemporary directors. It takes place as Constanze is singing one of the most difficult arias in the soprano literature, “Martern aller Arten” (“Tortures of Every Kind”). “Martern” is an obstacle course of leaps and trills accompanied by melting winds and propulsive harmonies, all meant to convey Constanze’s nobility in refusing the pasha’s demands for her love. It belongs in the long literary tradition of tragic rhetoric; its mention of torture is not a stage direction. Mozart immediately follows the number with a buoyant aria by Constanze’s maid and a return to the lightest farce – making clear that nothing untoward has happened to Constanze or to anyone else in the opera. But Bieito seizes on the torture reference, stripped of its musical and dramatic context, to justify his pornographic mayhem.

Like all Regietheater directors, Bieito has little tolerance for happy endings – or for any set of values at odds with his own clichéd worldview. In the conclusion to Mozart’s opera, the four European captives sing a hymn of praise to the pasha for granting them liberty and for renouncing revenge for a cruelty done to the pasha by a captive’s father long ago. Such celebrations of enlightened rule, even by a Muslim, were standard in Baroque and Classical operas; there is no reason to think that Mozart didn’t fully embrace the sentiments behind the convention.

Bieito doesn’t, however. In the finale of his Abduction, after a gruesome massacre of the writhing prostitutes, Constanze shoots first the pasha and then herself. So the concluding chorus of “long live the pasha” is mystifyingly directed at a dead man. No matter. Better to make nonsense of Mozart’s libretto than to allow such outdated sentiments as forgiveness, gratitude, and nobility to show up on an opera stage.

The orgies and boorish behavior that Bieito demands of his characters do violence to the music above all, so it was fitting that the Komische Oper’s orchestra members were the first to rebel. The musicians nearly mutinied during rehearsals for the 2004 premiere, according to the online magazine Klassik in Berlin, and backed down from a threatened walkout only after angry negotiations with Bieito and the musical director. Opera staff observing a late rehearsal stormed out of the house, and a palpable depression settled over the chorus. “Such a thing does not deserve to be seen on our stage… on any stage,” one chorus member said. The opening-night audience shared the musicians’ dismay. “Mozart didn’t intend this!” shouted protesters. But audience sentiment has little purchase in Europe’s subsidized opera houses. At the cast party after the premiere, Berlin’s top corporate and political leaders rubbed shoulders with strippers and whores, resulting in one of the most scintillating events in years, reported Klassik in Berlin.

Then a DaimlerChrysler official said that he didn’t think that the company should support such work with its grant money, guaranteeing the production’s success by conferring on it the exalted status of victim of corporate censorship. (Private support for Berlin’s three opera houses is still marginal compared with government funding, though.) Defending the importance of Bieito’s production, Berlin’s culture senator – a bureaucrat who dispenses government arts subsidies – argued that its “description of blood, sex, and violence is a true reflection of social phenomena.” Perhaps the senator was unaware that there are no such “social phenomena” in Mozart’s Abduction. Or perhaps it no longer matters.

DaimlerChrysler, facing a public-relations fiasco, recanted penitently. The production sold out for the remainder of its run and has been twice revived. Any first-time listener who came away with the slightest intimation of the charm of Mozart’s Singspiel must have had an extraordinary ability to rise above squalor in pursuit of the sublime.

 

Other Regietheater directors may not yet have achieved the sheer volume of gratuitous perversion and bloodletting that Bieito managed to cram into his Abduction – but their aesthetic obeys the same impulse. Gérard Mortier, City Opera’s incoming general manager and the current head of the Paris Opera, staged a Fledermaus at the Salzburg Festival that dragooned Johann Strauss’s delightful confection into service as a cocaine-, violence-, and sex-drenched left-wing “critique” of contemporary Austrian politics. An American tenor working in Germany remembers another Fledermaus with a large pink vagina in the center of the stage into which the singers dived. The innocent sea captain’s daughter, Senta, in the Vienna State Opera’s Flying Dutchman has posters of Che and Martin Luther King in her bedroom instead of a picture of the mysterious Dutchman, and burns herself to death with gasoline rather than jumping into the sea to meet her phantom beloved. Don Giovanni is almost invariably an offensive slob who masturbates and stuffs himself with junk food and drugs, surrounded by equally repellent psychotics, perverts, and sluts. (Operagoers can thank American director Peter Sellars for this tired convention.) Handel’s Romans and nobles come accessorized with machine guns, sunglasses, and video cameras, while jerking like rappers to delicate Baroque melodies.

The world at large got a glimpse of Regietheater last year, thanks to the furor over the Deutsche Oper Berlin’s Idomeneo; unfortunately, the controversy focused on the wrong issue. The real outrage was not that the company considered canceling the show for fear of a Muslim backlash but that the potential provocation of that backlash – Mohammed’s severed head perched jauntily on a straight-backed chair – had absolutely nothing to do with Mozart’s opera. Director Hans Neuenfels had injected Mohammed’s and other religious figures’ heads into the classical Greek story simply to register his personal dislike of religion. Neuenfels’s next project: a Magic Flute with a large penis for the flute.

The list of tone-deaf self-indulgences could be extended indefinitely. Their trashy sex and disjunctive settings are just the symptom, however, of a deeper malady. The most insidious problem with Regietheater is the directors’ hatred of Enlightenment values. Where a composer writes lightness and joy, they find a “subtext” of darkness. A recent modernized version of The Marriage of Figaro at the Salzburg Festival showed Figaro angrily slashing the page Cherubino’s arm and smearing him with blood during the jaunty aria “Non più andrai.” That aria, in which Figaro teases the young dandy about his upcoming banishment to the army, is gently mocking, not dark and violent. But in a transgressive director’s hands, humor, reconciliation, happiness, and above all else, grandeur must be exposed as mere fronts for despair, resentment, and the basest instincts. No positive sentiment can appear without a heavy overlay of irony.

Just because our age regards grand ideals with cynicism, however, that does not license us to write them out of the great works of the past. Doing so only impoverishes us. “There is considerable intellectual laziness in the idea that the past must be problematized and that older works must be ‘rescued’ from their ideological presuppositions,” says New Yorker critic Alex Ross. “Looking at the extraordinary mess the world is in, you might suppose that it’s our ideological presuppositions that are inherently flawed, and that we can actually draw useful moral lessons from the past.”

Regietheater directors undoubtedly think of themselves as sophisticated when they unmask courtly decorum as just a cover for fornication. The demystifiers’ awareness of desire is so crude that they cannot hear that the barely perceptible darkening of a voice or the constricted suffusion of breath into a note can be a thousand times more erotic than a frenzy of pelvic thrustings. And they rage against aesthetic conventions whose complexity challenges their simplistic understanding of human experience. Peter Sellars created one of Regietheater’s most horrifying images in his production of The Marriage of Figaro, set in Trump Tower: Cherubino, clad in hockey uniform, humping a mattress like a crazed poodle during the breathless aria “Non so più cosa son.” In the aria, Cherubino sings of his confusion in the presence of women and his compulsion to speak about love – “waking, dreaming, to water, to shadows, to the mountains.” “I know, it’s all just about sex!” giggles Sellars, like some 12-year-old with his first Playboy. Well, no, actually, it’s not. This sexual dumb show is inimical to the delicacy and innocence of the aria, whose beauty consists in part of sublimating desire into the artifice of pastoral poetry. Sellars’s staging belongs with a Snoop Dogg rap rant, not with Mozart and his librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte.

 

Europe is cursed with critics just as musically insensate and aesthetically illiterate as the directors whom they promote. Lydia Steier of Klassik in Berlin applauded the Bieito Abduction for “cut[ting] through any sentimental membrane protecting the opera from the stomach-churning brutality of such modern phenomena as human trafficking and snuff films.” This statement may well be the stupidest ever offered in defense of Regietheater. There is no “sentimental membrane” protecting Mozart from snuff films; there is not even the remotest connection between the two. The Guardian’s opera reviewer, Charlotte Higgins, was mystified that Bieito’s production of Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera at the English National Opera garnered “furious headlines.” By Higgins’s own account, it contained the usual “transvestites, masturbation, simulated sex, nudity and, in the opening scene, a row of men sitting on toilets.” So what’s the big deal? asked Higgins. “The fact that you can get all that and more on TV every night seemed not to deter the carpers, presumably because opera is supposed to be respectable,” she sneered. But serious operagoers aren’t protesting transvestites or masturbation per se, only the minor detail that they have nothing to do with the sound world of Verdi.

Singers generally detest transgressive productions, but have little clout. No one wants to acquire a reputation for being obstructionist. Even the great American baritone Sherrill Milnes felt that he had to compromise on an outrageous demand during a German production of Verdi’s Otello. During the third-act duet in which Otello accuses Desdemona of being a whore, a “well-known stage director,” as Milnes describes him, wanted Milnes’s Iago to crawl on his belly across the stage. And then, says Milnes, “he wanted me to jerk off and have an orgasm.”

Milnes was astounded. “I won’t do it, it’s wrong on every front,” he remembers responding. “At the very least, it’s rude to interrupt the focal point of the scene between Desdemona and Otello. It’s not about Iago’s reaction.” (In fact, Iago is not even supposed to be onstage.) “No way I’ll put my hand on my crotch; it’s embarrassing for Sherrill Milnes and it’s embarrassing for Sherrill Milnes as Iago.” But Milnes gave ground: “I came on the stage, but not as long as the director wanted, breathed a little hard and exited.”

A few singers have walked out on productions, but more often they grit their teeth and just try to get through them. Diana Damrau, a rapidly rising German soprano, draws herself up with icy haughtiness when asked about her participation in the infamous Bavarian State Opera Rigoletto, set on the Planet of the Apes. “I fulfilled my contract,” she says scornfully. “This was superficial rubbish. You try to prepare yourself for a production, you read secondary literature and mythology. Here, we had to watch Star Wars movies and different versions of The Planet of the Apes…. This was just…noise.”

Well into the twentieth century, conductors controlled opera staging, and in theory they could still beat back Regietheater today. But they, no less than singers, worry about jeopardizing their careers. “You need courage to oppose it,” says Pinchas Steinberg, former chief conductor of the Vienna Radio Symphony and former principal guest conductor of the Vienna State Opera. “People start to say: ‘You can’t work with this guy, he creates problems.’” Conductor Yuri Temirkanov did quit a production of Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades at the Opéra de Lyon in 2003. “I wouldn’t be able to live with my conscience if I conducted that [garbage],” he told the general director. Such showdowns are rare, however.

That leaves the audience as the final bulwark against the trashing of opera. But even when audiences stay away in droves – and “sometimes in those productions you could shoot ducks in the auditorium and not hit anyone,” says Milnes – the managerial commitment to Regietheater usually remains firm.

 

None of the conventional explanations for the rise of Regietheater in opera is fully convincing. Certainly the prevalence of massive state subsidies allows European opera managers to shrug off paltry box-office numbers. And to justify those subsidies, opera houses currently feel compelled to prove that they are not “elitist” institutions, observes Alex Ross. “Alleged critiques of the bourgeois order, the conservative establishment, etc. fit the bill.”

But while subsidies may be a necessary condition for Regietheater, they are not a sufficient one. European opera has been subsidized to varying degrees throughout its centuries-long history without generating the musical abuse that is now so common. And Regietheater productions are creeping into the US, where opera relies overwhelmingly on private support. The Spoleto Festival USA, for example, has presented the usual masturbating Don Giovanni; a recent Rossini Cenerentola (Cinderella) in Philadelphia featured a motorcycle and large TV screens projecting the characters’ supposed thoughts; City Opera mounted a Traviata in the 1990s that ended in an AIDS ward. Manager Pamela Rosenberg tried to make the San Francisco Opera a premier venue for European-style directing in the early 2000s, but she is gone now, after losing thousands of subscribers. The market provided the necessary corrective in San Francisco, but other managers, seeking elite acclaim, will make similar attempts in the future.

Germany’s postwar reaction to Nazism also undoubtedly contributed to the emergence of transgressive stagings there in the 1970s, yet more as a pretext than as an actual cause. The most radical reaction to Nazism in the opera world to date had nothing to do with today’s trashing impulse. When the Bayreuth Festival, Richard Wagner’s shrine, reopened in 1951, Wagner’s grandson, Wieland Wagner, discarded Richard’s own naturalistic sets and replaced them with light alone. Jettisoning Richard Wagner’s picturesque realism, which had come to be associated with National Socialism, was revolutionary, but it did not arise from any assumption on Wieland’s part that he was licensed to “deconstruct” his grandfather’s works. Today’s bad boys of German opera may puff themselves up with the belief that they are contributing to denazification, but nothing in that project compels their aesthetic choices. Nor does anti-Nazism explain the attraction of Regietheater outside Germany.

The current transgressive style of opera production is better understood as a manifestation of the triumph of adolescent culture, which began with the violent student movement of the 1960s. Even as West Germany forged ahead economically, its intellectuals, students, and artists became infatuated with the prosperity-killing Marxism practiced in stumbling East Germany. West German opera houses began inviting East Berlin directors to bring their heavy-handed critiques of capitalism, staged on the backs of Wagner and other composers, to Western venues. The situation was the same across Europe. “Student dissatisfaction with materialism… echoed in the theaters, notably in repertory and styles of production that were critical of bourgeois values and the status quo,” writes Patrick Carnegy in Wagner and the Art of the Theatre. In Paris in the late 1960s, City Opera manager-in-waiting Gérard Mortier led a group of student provocateurs who loudly disrupted opera productions that they considered too traditional.

The defining characteristic of the sixties generation and its cultural progeny is solipsism. Convinced of their superior moral understanding, and commanding wealth never before available to average teenagers and young adults, the baby boomers decided that the world revolved around them. They forged an adolescent aesthetic – one that held that the wisdom of the past could not possibly live up to their own insights – and have never outgrown it. In an opera house, that outlook requires that works of the past be twisted to mirror our far more interesting selves back to ourselves. Michael Gielen, the most influential proponent of Regietheater and head of the Frankfurt Opera in the late seventies and eighties, declared that “what Handel wanted” in his operas was irrelevant; more important was “what interests us… what we want.”

Nicholas Payne, former general director of the English National Opera and champion of Calixto Bieito, echoes this devaluing of the past. “Director’s theater or whatever you want to call it is an attempt to grab the material and make it speak to the spirit of today’s times, isn’t it?” he says. “I’m not saying that the only way to do [Monteverdi’s] Poppea is to make Nero the son of the chief guy in North Korea. Nevertheless, if you’re bothering to reproduce Poppea, it has to have some way of speaking to people now.” It’s hard to know whom that statement insults more – contemporary audiences or Monteverdi. Payne assumes that Monteverdi’s works are so musically and dramatically limited that they cannot speak to us today on their own terms, and that audiences so lack imagination that they cannot find meaning in something not literally about them.

 

The dirty little secret of Regietheater is this: its practitioners know that no one will bother to show up for their drearily conventional political cant unless they ride parasitically on the backs of geniuses. Bieito has said that his purpose in staging The Abduction from the Seraglio was to highlight abuses in the contemporary sex trade. Let’s pretend for a moment that Bieito actually cares about the fate of “sex workers.” His path is clear: keep his grubby mitts off Mozart and write his own damn opera. But without Mozart or Verdi, the Regietheater director is nothing; he cannot even hope for third-rate avant-garde status. In a world where displaying bodily fluids in jars, performing sex acts in public, or trampling religious symbols will land you a gig at the Venice Biennale and a government grant, the only source of outrage still available to the would-be scourge of propriety is to desecrate great works of art.

Occasionally, Regietheater proponents admit to their aspirations to shock. More often, however, they package themselves as the saviors of art. Gérard Mortier says that in updating operas, he seeks to “transform a work dated in a certain era so it communicates something fresh today.” He has it exactly backward. There is nothing less “fresh” than the tired rock-video iconography, the consumer detritus of beer cans and burgers, or the anti-imperialist, anti-sexist messages that Regietheater directors graft on to operas to make them “relevant.” What is actually “fresh” about a Mozart opera, besides its terrible beauty, is that it comes from a world that no longer exists. And it is, above all, the music that bodies forth that difference. The Baroque and Classical styles in particular convey an entire mode of being, one that values grace and artifice over supposed authenticity and untrammeled self-expression.

Regietheater directors are infallibly deaf to the dramatic imperatives in the music that they stage. Bieito says that he hears in Don Giovanni, that work of unbearable grandeur, the “nihilism of the modern world” – a confession that should have disqualified him even from buying an opera CD. Nicholas Payne, who brought Bieito’s Don Giovanni to the English National Opera, says that he is particularly fond of the moment in the Bieito production when Don Giovanni sings his canzonetta to Donna Elvira’s maid, “Deh, vieni alla finestra,” into a phone, instead of serenading her underneath her window with his mandolin. “There’s something a little bit twee about getting out that lute, isn’t there?” Payne asks. Suggestion to directors: if the troubadour tradition embarrasses you, you should not be in the business of producing opera.

The real problem with Payne’s admiration for Bieito’s canzonetta setting, however, is that it completely misjudges the music. Bieito makes the scene yet another depressing episode in the “nihilism of the modern world”: Don Giovanni is sitting alone in an empty bar strewn with the refuse of heavy partying. After singing the serenade, weighed down with despair, he drops the phone – there is no indication that anyone is on the other end – and lays his head on the table in front of him. This tableau has nothing to do with the music or text. The sinuous “Deh, vieni alla finestra,” far from being a moment of morbid paralysis, is the very emblem of the Don’s irrepressible will. Though he has recently been caught out and denounced as a hell-bound libertine by his fellow nobles, he is happily back at his conquests, pouring seductive power into the crescendos of the canzonetta. Bieito’s listless Giovanni could not possibly sing the music that Mozart has given him.

Jonathan Miller seethes with contempt for American audiences in general and the Metropolitan Opera in particular, which he accuses of mounting “kitschy” and “vulgar” productions. Yet at New York City Opera this season, he set Donizetti’s pastoral comedy L’Elisir d’Amore in a 1950s American diner, complete with gum-chewing Elvis fans and Jimmy Dean iconography – as hackneyed a set of visuals as any in the Regietheater director’s puny bag of tricks. Asked if Donizetti’s poignant melodies really match the sock-hop antics on stage, Miller responds defensively: “The music works perfectly well with my setting; it’s a witty transformation, that’s all. It’s as good as those staid pieces of rusticity which satisfy Met audiences because they want sedentary tourism.” But doesn’t music provide a check on how a work can be staged? “Music doesn’t have any checks in it,” he insists. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Moreover, when directors yank operas out of their historical contexts, they close a precious window into the past. Most operas’ assumptions about nobility, virtue, and the duties of rulers and subjects, as well as of parents and children, could not be more alien to our modern experience. If we refuse to take such values seriously, not only do we render the plots incomprehensible; we also cut ourselves off from a greater understanding of what human life has been and, by contrast, is now. Update Don Giovanni to a contemporary setting where a mandate of premarital chastity is unthinkable, for example, and make the peasant girl Zerlina and the noblewomen Donna Anna and Donna Elvira all aggressively promiscuous – as is the case in virtually every modernized version since Peter Sellars’s Spanish Harlem travesty – and Zerlina’s cries of desperation when Don Giovanni hustles her off for a conquest become absurd, as does the nobles’ response of “Soccorriamo l’innocente” (“Let us rescue the innocent girl!”). And the avenging triumvirate’s subsequent warnings to Don Giovanni that retribution awaits him are meaningless in the amoral universe in which Regietheater directors inevitably set the opera.

 

Regietheater promoters imply that following a composer’s intentions in staging a work is easy; genius lies in modernizing it. Mortier has even coyly suggested that his updating project gives him an affinity with Mozart. “You couldn’t name one great composer – not that I want to compare myself to them – who did not have to fight,” he says. “Think of Mozart selling his silverware to go to Frankfurt when the emperor could have given him a commission for his coronation.” In fact, finding a visual language to convey the meaning of the music and the world it represents is where directing makes its claim to greatness. Stephen Wadsworth, for example, is one of the most historically sensitive directors working today; his understated productions of Handel’s Rodelinda and Xerxes and of Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito at the Metropolitan Opera and New York City Opera are among those houses’ treasures. The slightest gesture of a hand in a Wadsworth staging can convey the refinement and melancholy of the Baroque. Such details are part of what he calls the “vernacular” of the past.

Wadsworth unapologetically embraces one of the most toxic words in the operatic lexicon today: “curating.” The last thing a solipsistic director wants to be accused of is lovingly preserving and transmitting the works of the past. Wadsworth, however, accepts the charge. Those given responsibility for an opera production are akin to those given responsibility for great paintings, he believes. “It is not our job to repaint them. We should only be concerned with: Where to hang it? How to light it? In what context? How do we present it to the public in a way that the public can appreciate what it is, perhaps even contextualize it in terms of that painter’s body of work or some other trend or school or idea? The list of curatorial concerns and responsibilities is long. And I think that a lot of productions that we see simply fail to meet them.”

 

In a few decades, Regietheater opera has destroyed what took centuries to develop. Long before Wagner called for the Gesamtkunstwerk (the total work of art), opera composers sought to enforce in the productions of their works a unity of music and dramatic action. Arrayed against this synthesis were singers, who treated opera as simply a platform for virtuoso recitals, and stage designers, who tried to cram as many awe-inspiring but irrelevant special effects onto the stage as their arsenal of fireworks and machinery would allow.

By the twentieth century, however, a revolution in attitudes toward the music of the past was under way – fueled, no doubt, by the recognition that no more pieces like those wonders were coming along. Gone was the carefree mutilation of scores by publishers, conductors, and performers that had been standard throughout Western musical history. In its place, an unprecedented reverence for the composer’s work rose up. Singers reined in self-indulgences, and directors worked to unleash the music’s dramatic potential. A profile of the German director Carl Ebert in a 1950 issue of Opera magazine underscored the new standard: “For Ebert, the music dictates how the actor should move, should look, how the scenery should be planned in shape as well as in color. Ebert achieves with his singers something like visible music for the listener.”

Regietheater has reversed that revolution, producing a disjuncture between the music and the visual and dramatic aspects of a production that is unprecedented in operatic history. Even as every other aspect of the music business continues on the path of greater professionalization and devotion to authenticity, opera directors have received the license to ignore the basic mandates of a score and libretto. This bifurcation results in such weird pairings as a period-instrument ensemble in the orchestra pit, sawing away at Baroque instruments in the hope of sounding just like Prince Esterhazy’s court orchestra, while onstage, singers in baggy sweat pants, torn T-shirts, and baseball caps slouch through twenty-first-century cultural blight.

 

Standing against such disintegration is the Metropolitan Opera, regarded by the transcontinental opera establishment either with condescension or admiration as the last bastion of faithful production. The Met has always presented great singers and, more sporadically, renowned maestri, but for much of its existence the caliber of its stagings lagged behind that of its musical talent. This deficiency was due in large part to the woefully ill-designed backstage area of the opulent old opera house on West 39th Street, which housed the Met from its birth in 1883 until its move to Lincoln Center in 1966. When a taxi driver told Sir Thomas Beecham during World War II that he couldn’t take him to the Met because gas restrictions banned rides to places of entertainment, the conductor replied: “The Metropolitan Opera is not a place of entertainment, but a place of penance.” Stage discipline was often weak; some of the Met’s most famous singers simply refused to rehearse.

But despite the limitations of the old house, the Met’s greatest leaders progressively made the “sights… more harmonious with the sounds,” as Rudolf Bing, the aristocratic general manager from 1950 to 1972, promised upon taking over. Indeed, Peter Gelb often sounds as though he is channeling Sir Rudolf, who brought the best stage and film directors of his time to work at the Met. Bing’s theatrical ambitions were aided by a growing circle of donors, who paid for new productions, sometimes single-handedly, when the board was unwilling to front the money. Charismatic philanthropists like Mrs. August Belmont created novel mechanisms for harvesting private support, including the first women’s opera auxiliary guild. Even during the troubled 1960s and 1970s, when the Met struggled with union protests and severe budget problems, it forged ahead artistically, aided by the superb technical capacities of the new Lincoln Center facility.

The Met’s role as the guardian of opera integrity emerged in the 1980s and 1990s. As the abuse of composers’ intentions became more flagrant in Germany and then the rest of Europe, general manager Joseph Volpe deliberately separated the Met from the trend. “There was a conscious effort to avoid” Regietheater, says Joe Clark, the Met’s peerless technical manager. “The idea was to get the best possible director with the best musical sense. We weren’t always looking for traditional and realistic settings, but rather a realization that was musical and would show something appropriate to the opera.” Robert Wilson’s minimalist Lohengrin met that criterion as much as Zeffirelli’s opulent Turandot. Conductor James Levine, the most important music director in the Met’s history, is equally committed to fidelity to the music. “It is inspiring to work with a man who wants to put [an opera] on stage as the composer meant it,” Levine said recently, praising director Jack O’Brien’s staging of Puccini’s Il Trittico.

 

Regietheater advocates caricature the Met as addicted to lavish, overblown scenery, associated – again, in caricature – with such masters of realism as Franco Zeffirelli and Otto Schenk. In fact, no competing house can boast such a variety of production styles, says critic Charles Michener. But what really makes the Met stand out today is language like the following, from theater director Bart Sher, who mounted an energetic Barber of Seville this season. The Met is unique “among our many great institutions of public art and life,” Sher says, in its “capacity for creating beauty beyond the heart to hold. You sit there and go: ‘Western culture’s an incredible thing.’ ” It is unimaginable that the directors who create the most buzz in Europe today would use such language. Asked about a director’s responsibility to the beauty of a piece, Jonathan Miller responds: “To hell with beauty, it’s a kitsch notion; I don’t feel this business of being overwhelmed by it.” And Miller, unlike the most violative directors working today, actually has created productions of great delicacy, such as his 1990 Marriage of Figaro at Vienna’s Theater an der Wien.

Equally unthinkable from a Regietheater wunderkind is the unabashed enthusiasm of Broadway director O’Brien for the composer’s intentions. “The author and composer are my household gods,” says O’Brien, whose comic ensemble work in Il Trittico was infused with energy so taut as to make breathing difficult. “I don’t think that my opinion is more important than theirs; I don’t want to take my Magic Marker and scrawl over their works. Puccini’s knowledge, control, and insight into dramatic literature is staggering; there’s not a bar of music that is not dramatizable if you are sensitive to what the composer is asking you to do. I am never interested in a ‘point of view,’ only in making love to these pieces.”

Peter Gelb could do worse than make these sentiments a litmus test for every director he brings into the house: Can the prospect unashamedly use the words “beauty” and “love” to describe music? It is a positive sign that Bart Sher is one of Gelb’s additions to the Met’s directing roster (O’Brien, also new to the house this year, was hired by Volpe).

 

Gelb has said that the Met has become “artistically somewhat isolated from the rest of the world” and reliant on “somewhat conservative patterns of thinking,” and he has pledged to keep it “more broadly connected to contemporary society” through “exciting theatrical visions.” One hopes that he is speaking as the master promoter that he is, creating a sense of newness to attract new audiences – and not in anticipation of a move toward the less conservative “patterns of thinking” and “theatrical visions” prevalent in Europe.

Still, a dedicated opera fan can be forgiven for being a little worried about what exactly Gelb means, since Regietheater is nipping everywhere at the Met’s heels. Joseph Volpe says that as general manager, he constantly had to fend off demands for more “progressive” productions. “I was always criticized for not bringing in Peter Sellars,” he says, “but I was brought up with Zeffirelli and other great directors, for whom the intentions of the composer were of the utmost importance.” Sellars is in fact closing in, having turned Mozart’s Zaïde into a pretentious critique of sweatshops for Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival last year, and having staged his video extravaganza, The Tristan Project, in Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall this year. And with Mortier bringing his relentless updating agenda to the New York City Opera in 2009, Gelb will face the most glamorous exponent of Regietheater right next door.

Ideally, Gelb will choose a strategy of product differentiation, branding the Met as the place where you can still see opera as its composers intended it. But if the press falls for Mortier – and some of New York’s critics already disparage any production that they find too traditional – Gelb may face pressure to go Euro.

If Gelb’s offerings to date exemplify his ideal of cutting-edge theatrics, the house will be well served. Anthony Minghella’s Madam Butterfly was a lacquered blaze of jewel-colored light; its stylized, Asian-influenced use of puppetry and props was beautiful and consistent with Puccini’s vision. Bart Sher’s Barber of Seville was even more reassuring. Despite Gelb’s efforts to package the production as a startling new twist on the story, primarily through an alleged emphasis on Figaro’s virility, neither that aspect of Figaro’s character nor the production itself represented a break from valid performance traditions. Sher simply directed an elegant, fast-paced Barber that pulsed with Rossini’s comic genius (despite two lapses from good taste: the gratuitous lesbian lovemaking in Figaro’s mobile barbershop and a wholly unmotivated visual pun on the name of a rock band that concluded the first act). The final production with a Gelb-chosen director this season – Richard Strauss’s Die Ägyptische Helena, mounted by David Fielding – took the greatest liberties with the setting, but Fielding’s storybook, surrealistic design matched the weirdly magical Hofmannsthal libretto without interpolating any self-indulgent political gloss.

The future, however, is more clouded, since some of Gelb’s hires for upcoming seasons have revisionist productions on their resumés. Luc Bondy, engaged for The Tales of Hoffmann in 2009, staged a bloody Idomeneo at La Scala this year that simply shaved off Mozart’s score when it conflicted with Bondy’s dark rewriting of the story; his Don Giovanni at the Vienna State Opera in 1990 was a bizarre farrago of historical and futuristic settings and costumes. Patrice Chéreau, scheduled to mount Janáček’s From the House of the Dead at the Met in 2009, directed a Ring cycle at Bayreuth in 1976 that became a landmark in Regietheater – and led to the formation of the Wagner Protection Society, so scandalized were patrons by Chéreau’s injection of anticapitalist, environmental politics into the story. His Janáček, however, reportedly avoids heavy revisionism. Matthew Bourne will be staging Carmen at the Met; he has already shown a predilection for homoerotic themes in that opera, as well as in two ballet productions, The Nutcracker and an all-male Swan Lake. Richard Jones is one of Britain’s bad boys of opera – but since his Hansel and Gretel at the Met next year is part of Gelb’s new holiday family programming, he will probably tone down his usual intrusions.

Having done transgressive work in the past need not disqualify directors from working at the Met, as long as Gelb makes clear at the outset that he is not interested in their opinions on contemporary class or sexual relations. Directors should be able to work with that stipulation. When Giancarlo del Monaco, who set Verdi’s Old Testament story Nabucco in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq for a German production, arrived at the Met in the early 1990s, he said: “I have a Eurotrash face for Europe and a classy face for the Americans.”

Gelb has made one unequivocal aesthetic stumble, however. In a bid to link the Met with the trendy downtown art scene, he commissioned an opera-inspired work from Richard Prince, among other art frauds, to display in a small new “art gallery” in the Met’s lobby. Prince’s contribution, “Madame Butterfly Is a Lesbian,” is a wall-size array of hundreds of cheap wallet-size porn shots of naked women engaged in lesbian sex. Scrawled over the photos is Prince’s idea of clever commentary: “I went to the opera. It was Madame Butterfly. I fell asleep. When I woke up the music was by Klaus Nomi and Cio-Cio-San had turned into a lesbian and refused to commit suicide. It was a German ending.” Apparently, neither Gelb nor anyone else in the Met’s press or fund-raising office was willing to say that such a work was inappropriate for a family institution seeking to spread the culture of opera, much less that it stank as art. Met patrons had better hope that the Prince display is just an aberration, of no deep meaning for the future.

 

The Met’s board and audience may restrain any inclination that Gelb might have to dabble in Regietheater, but the final check should be Gelb’s sense of the Met’s history. Generations of hard work and artistic passion have gone into the house’s current level of professional excellence. Gelb has sound business reasons for trumpeting a new beginning and an infusion of cutting-edge theatrical values. But it is important to remember how extraordinary the current state of the institution is. Though a certain type of opera lover perpetually mourns a lost golden age, arguably the golden age is now.

Gelb will earn a place in opera history if he maintains the Met’s artistic character while continuing the inspired promotional blitz that he has already begun. Nothing he touches in the area of marketing escapes a massive infusion of glamour; the brochure for the 2007–08 season is as luxurious as a Bergdorf Goodman Christmas catalog. “He’s a genius at selling,” says Herman Krawitz, who ran the Met’s complex backstage operations for years. “Gelb was a better press agent at age 18,” when he worked as an usher at the Met, “than anyone there.” His ideas for expanding the venues for opera – into movie theaters, schools, public spaces – are groundbreaking. “When he broadcast Madam Butterfly in Times Square, people here were amazed at the concept of this,” says Vienna-based critic Larry Lash. Gelb’s efforts are having a spillover effect: not only are other houses imitating his ideas – the Vienna State Opera will beam every performance into the plaza outside its house next season – but interest in local opera companies is rising in cities whose movie theaters have shown the Met’s productions.

As its season wound down this year, the Met had sold out every remaining seat – this, without having made a single step in the direction of trendy transgressive productions. Contrary to the usual hand-wringing about an aging audience, young and middle-aged adults already appear to make up a surprisingly high percentage of patrons. They are coming to see not a twisted rewriting
of the great works, but the thing itself, drawn to what opera promises: sublime musical beauty and human drama. For all the deservedly hyped new productions this year, the greatest experience to be had at the Met came in a production of Verdi’s Don Carlo first mounted in 1979. German bass René Pape turned the extraordinary opening scenes of Act 4, in which the authoritarian King Philip II of Spain confronts first his own emotional isolation and then the ruthless Grand Inquisitor, into an unbearable portrait of anguish. There were no cutting-edge theatrical techniques in those two scenes, just singing and acting that left one’s hair standing on end and one’s head pulsing with Verdi’s obsessive contrapuntal harmonies and dark grinding dissonances.

By all means, Gelb should commission as many new productions as his budget will allow, and then sell the pants off them, with all the creativity that he has already demonstrated. And certainly contemporary political commentary has a place at the Met – so long as it is integral to a new work, rather than strapped like a suicide bomb onto the back of an old one. But Gelb should remember that he is the guardian of a tradition that generations have built. That tradition approaches the magnificent works of the past with love and humility, recognizing our debt to them. The Met will remain a vital New York and world institution for another century if it allows those works to speak for themselves.

Youth Concerts: A Critique

Last November I took part in a series of Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO) Family Concerts. We put these concerts on under the rubric “Members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.” The musicians of the CSO are invited to play or not as they wish; payment for these jobs is over and above our base salary, since they take place concurrently with a full subscription concert schedule. If not enough actual CSO musicians sign up, the orchestra is augmented with freelancers. To save money, there is only one rehearsal and we play with a reduced orchestra; about six players are cut from each string section. Since the wind, brass, and percussion players are all responsible for their own parts, they are on stage in full force and they overwhelm the strings when they are called upon to play loudly.

The show was pretty good, as far these concerts go. We had a celebrity guest, a man named Geoffrey Baer who is frequently on WTTW, the Chicago PBS station. On his TV show he tours local landmarks and shares his considerable knowledge of Chicago lore. The concert was called “Downtown Sounds” and the unifying thread was to tie the music we played to places in the city. For example, Smetana’s great tone poem “The Moldau” supposedly described a water taxi ride on the Chicago River. A movement of Ibert’s “Paris” Symphonic Suite, entitled “Le Metro,” was used to represent the El. The famous “Sunrise” that opens Strauss’s “Also Spracht Zarathustra” was summoned to bring to mind the mighty Chicago skyline. And so on.

As is often the case in these programs, the theme of the show was at cross-purposes with the music. The kids were never informed about what had actually inspired the music they heard; all of the pieces were retrofitted to the Chicago theme. There was a silhouette of the Chicago skyline created with shadows on the wall behind the stage. To make this visible, it was necessary to darken the stage, and so we were given stand lights. I find this a bit puzzling. I would hope that the point of doing these shows is to introduce young people to the orchestra. Why put the musicians in the dark, and hide them behind stand lights? To our management’s credit, the lights were turned up a bit on the second day after I wrote an email addressing this issue.

The kids certainly seemed to enjoy the concert, although my sense was that there was often a discernible rumble of conversation while Mr. Baer and the conductor Scott Speck (who is perhaps most famous for having written the book Classical Music for Dummies) were talking – despite the fact that they were both quite skilled at relating to the young audience. While I may not be entirely unbiased, I believe it was the music that really grabbed the kids.

So were these concerts successful? I am not sure how to judge. As far as I know, a very simple question has never been asked: What is it exactly that we wish to accomplish in these concerts? Is it to entertain and to amuse? Is it to give a young audience a favorable impression of a trip to Orchestra Hall? If so, then the concerts were a success. Both the adults and kids applauded enthusiastically at the end.

But I would argue that the Chicago Symphony should not be in the business merely of entertaining a thousand or so kids for an hour. Any number of video games can do that at least as well as we do. It seems to me that our role in this society is to ensure that classical music survives into the future long beyond our own life spans. I believe that everything we do should serve that goal. And I do not see how this was accomplished with “Downtown Sounds.”

I noted earlier that the conductor, Mr. Speck, authored Classical Music for Dummies. I have played and spoken at concerts in school gyms and auditoriums all over Chicago during the past three decades, and I have learned that it is all too easy to underestimate the intelligence of young audiences. There is no need to dumb down the programs; indeed what works best in these situations is to play great music (the quartet I currently play with has Beethoven, Dvorak, Schubert, Mozart, Ravel, and Shostakovich in its repertoire for these concerts) and to perform it at the highest possible level.

I regret that I did not sense the same respect for the audience’s intelligence at this show. For example, before the Ibert, the kids were told to imagine riding on the El, and asked to determine when their El ride was “smooth” and when it was “bumpy.” They were instructed to bounce up and down in their seats when it was “bumpy.” So they were thinking about bouncing up and down, and maybe they were thinking about riding on the El. One thing we made no effort to get them to think about was the music itself, beyond this oversimplified distinction between “smooth” and “bumpy.” It seemed that we had lost track of the thing that we were actually presenting.

This is not the only way that we are selling the kids short. When we throw together these shows on one rehearsal, with an undermanned orchestra augmented by freelancers who perhaps have never played together before, we are again denigrating the intelligence of our audience: “They won’t know the difference.” In my experience, this is profoundly wrongheaded. I have found that when I help to create a concert for children, the most important element in our success is the quality of the performance.

The same week that we played these concerts, we played the Bach Brandenburg Concertos for our subscription concerts in the evenings, featuring wonderful virtuosic turns by many of my colleagues and by an astonishing young harpsichordist in the Fifth Concerto. The conductor was articulate and charming. Surely we could have played some of the more athletic and immediately appealing movements from those works, and given the children a far more nourishing experience.

So why can’t we experiment with fashioning youth concerts out of the repertoire we are playing in the same week for subscription concerts, featuring the actual Chicago Symphony Orchestra in music that has been adequately rehearsed? I realize that there will have to be schedule changes to accommodate this. Perhaps children’s concerts could replace some of our Sunday afternoon concerts. Or we could schedule these concerts on the weeks when we put together our subscription concerts on three rehearsals – such as the weeks that feature “After Work Masterworks” concerts early on Wednesday evenings. We have never been able to sell that series anyway; the Gallery, the Terrace, and often much of the Upper Balcony are unsold for “After Work Masterworks.” Why not trade them in for a Thursday morning youth concert? We have contract negotiations coming up; I can hardly imagine this would be among the most difficult issues to hammer out.

No doubt, there are many viewpoints on what constitutes a successful youth concert. But may I make a modest proposal? Why don’t we play really great music, play it extremely well, and find somebody who can convey to the kids a profound love for and commitment to this music? When my quartet goes into the schools, we find this formula to be quite successful.

A Double Role for Musicians

“This is helpful.” A very successful, retired, corporate lawyer and his wife were reviewing a personalized update on The Cleveland Orchestra’s activities over salad with me and a development staff member who had been entrusted with this donor relationship. “But, do you know what would really make me give more? If my musician friends in the orchestra asked me themselves, I’d be falling over myself to increase our gift!”

“We play the music. They raise the money. If they ran the orchestra as well as we played, there would be no money problems. There’s plenty of money in this town. They just have to go get it.” Emphatic advice from more than one senior musician colleague – and advice I’ve heard from musicians in several major orchestras.

It’s true that there is plenty of money in Cleveland – and in probably every metropolitan area of any significant size. But our donor put his finger on a truth that escaped my colleagues. It goes to the heart of why we became musicians.

Music touches people. It moves them and inspires them. After a great performance of a Mahler Symphony, or of another piece representing the great achievements of mankind, we should be different people than we were before the experience. And when someone touches us, shares with us a rare and special experience, we want to know them. This is how our donors feel about us as musicians in their orchestras.

While some donors and board members support the orchestra out of a sense of civic obligation or to enhance business relationships, the true leaders and the ones who recruit other donors and board members are passionate about music and about their orchestra. These are the leaders who would walk through fire to save their orchestra, and they’re the ones who come to the fore during a crisis. The same dynamic is in play as you move down through the donor ranks – passionate orchestra lovers are committed subscribers and donors. And they love “their” musicians.

It was a crisis that led me to adopt my dual role as a musician and development staff member at The Cleveland Orchestra. After a brief strike (lasting 30 hours) in 2010, the musicians and board of The Cleveland Orchestra both arrived at the conclusion that we need more communication and more relationships between us. Ultimately, this led to musicians being invited to attend board committee meetings as unofficial “members” of those committees. I served as a musician delegate to the Fund-raising Committee, because of my interest in learning more about development and because of my realization that success in fundraising is essential to our future as a great orchestra.

More than half of our operating revenue comes from fundraising and endowment. Our Annual Fund provides more revenue than ticket sales for our main subscription series. As we look at the future for a major orchestra in a city with stagnant or tepid growth, the need for a much larger endowment and continued Annual Fund growth becomes stark. Nothing will have a greater effect on the remaining couple of decades of my career.

Our trustees who serve on the Fund-raising Committee have a deep commitment to the orchestra, and most of them have spent decades raising money for us. They were thrilled to have a couple of musicians join them. Volunteering at the highest level and giving financial support is how they demonstrate their love for the orchestra, and it resonates when musicians show their commitment in the same ways. It’s speaking their language. We made it a point to thank them for their dedication and hard work at every meeting.

Eventually, my desire to learn more and my participation on the Fund-raising Committee led to my accepting a position as a major gifts officer in our Philanthropy & Advancement department. I took a six-month sabbatical from my playing position (I joined the bass section in 1997), and worked full-time in development. Upon my return to the bass section, I have continued in a part-time role as a major gifts officer for the past year.

I expected resistance from my musician colleagues. I thought they might see taking a second position at the orchestra as a contradiction of our assertion that playing in the orchestra is truly a full-time job. Certainly, some have perceived me as “close to management” and have adopted a certain distance. Surprising to me though is the fact that the greatest source of objection was the staff members outside the development department. Some key staff members were unable to envision a musician filling any staff role. It took a great deal of time to reach the point where I could even be offered the opportunity officially. Now it is no longer remarkable.

My role is to identify current donors and subscribers who may be able to increase their annual giving to substantially higher levels and who may also be able to make a major endowment gift or estate commitment. While a frighteningly high percentage of our revenue comes from fewer than a thousand donors, we have thousands of other donors who may never have been asked personally to increase their support, and who may have no relationship with the orchestra other than attending concerts and receiving an occasional fundraising letter.

I seek opportunities to meet these patrons and invite them to join me for coffee or lunch where I can share our plans, hear about their experiences, and begin to develop a personal relationship. The best approach has been for me to greet them at their seats before a concert and introduce myself and thank them for their support. When I follow up with a phone call or email, even the people who initially decline a further meeting usually have a few questions about the orchestra. After we’ve had a chance to interact, they often reconsider and respond positively to another invitation.

I find that I never need to sell the orchestra or the idea of giving. These are patrons who have already demonstrated their interest. The most common reason for not increasing their gift is that they are already giving at the highest level they can afford. This is both encouraging and sobering. A minority of the patrons I meet with do become more interested once they feel like insiders. These supporters are the source of our growth.

Here’s what donors want to know when we meet. They want to know that we’re successful – that the institution and the art form are not headed down the drain. They want to know that we’re in internal alignment – that the musicians and management are pulling in the same direction. And, they want to feel like part of the family. Our dependence on contributed revenue makes it indisputable that they are necessary; it’s up to us to make them feel our respect and gratitude.

Orchestras are often characterized by a cliché: European imports that exist exclusively for the enjoyment of the very wealthy. But that completely disregards of course the fact that American orchestras developed contemporaneously with European orchestras (the Boston Symphony is older than the Berlin Philharmonic), and the fact that so many major composers had an American presence (Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Bartok, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Rachmaninoff, etc.). It is an unfair charge. Our donors could have an exclusive orchestra, but they support the orchestra because they want to share it with their community. It’s really important to them to know that we’re growing and reaching new audiences.

As members of the development team, we can make them feel like part of the family, but growing audiences and demonstrating success is something that takes institution-wide efforts. Everyone needs to be on-board.

As musicians, we are in a unique position due to our job longevity, our musical knowledge, and our institutional memory. Development jobs do have a fair amount of turnover and tend not to be held by people with professional orchestral backgrounds. However, effective performance with donors requires a thorough knowledge of the orchestra’s finances, business model, organizational strategy, and the roles of key personnel and volunteers.

People often ask how I fit my jobs together. It certainly helps that they are in the same building. I try to arrive at work around 8:30 on weekdays and leave at 5:30 or 6. If the orchestra is rehearsing, I go to rehearsal; if not, I’m in the office or meeting with donors. On concert nights, I may even have a pre-concert dinner to attend. If I am disciplined, I’ve put my practice time in my calendar and find opportunities to head to a practice room in the basement. Keeping everything going certainly requires better time management skills than I have, but I’m improving.

Another issue that is raised occasionally is that of being a member of a collective bargaining unit and an FLSA-exempt employee at the same workplace. My roles are completely separate, and I have no supervisory role, so there is not a legal issue. Lew Waldeck of ICSOM used to refer to our collective power as an organized bargaining unit. That power consists of being able to say “no” to proposals we can’t live with in order to force changes. It seems to me that to focus exclusively on power ignores our chance to have influence. My experience has been that thoughtful, good-faith influence has great effect and is an ever more necessary part of moving orchestras forward in challenging times. Having a direct role in increasing our financial resources seems to me to be an effective use of influence on the organization.

Finally, I am sometimes asked if I think there are other musicians who would be interested in pursuing a similar role. I am sure that there are, but I do not yet know who they are, or how they would create their roles. I suspect that the roles will be unique to each musician, given our differing backgrounds and experience. The key questions revolve around time, where they are in their careers, management background, and personal strengths. Adding musician involvement to development is not the same as hiring to fill certain positions. The position will have to be shaped to fit the person who fills it.

In our orchestra, musicians are involved in paid and donated playing services, donor events, stewardship, solicitation calls with development staff, and donor thank-you calls, etc. Nearly one third of the orchestra participates as volunteers. I think it’s worth remembering the amount of work that goes into creating and preparing for those opportunities. That is what differentiates the work of paid staff from volunteer generosity. All of it is appreciated by the donors, of course.

Musicians can better their institutions and improve their situations by taking advantage of patrons’ natural desire to know their musicians better. The joy we bring through our music-making creates a bond between us and our audience. Their sense of being part of the family helps them stay close to the orchestra and inspires their support. There is no one better suited to make that happen than we.

Classical Music’s New Golden Age

EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay is reprinted here with the gracious permission of City Journal, who first published it in the Summer 2010 issue of their magazine.

Anyone inclined to lament the state of classical music today should read Hector Berlioz’s Memoires. As the maverick French composer tours mid-nineteenth-century Europe conducting his revolutionary works, he encounters orchestras unable to play in tune and conductors who can’t read scores. A Paris premiere of a Berlioz cantata fizzles when a missed cue sets off a chain reaction of paralyzed silence throughout the entire sorry band. Most infuriating to this champion of artistic integrity, publishers and conductors routinely bastardize the scores of Mozart, Beethoven, and other titans, conforming them to their own allegedly superior musical understanding or to the narrow taste of the public.

Berlioz’s exuberant tales of musical triumph and defeat constitute the most captivating chronicle of artistic passion ever written. They also lead to the conclusion that, in many respects, we live in a golden age of classical music. Such an observation defies received wisdom, which seizes on every symphony budget deficit to herald classical music’s imminent demise. But this declinist perspective ignores the more significant reality of our time: never before has so much great music been available to so many people, performed at levels of artistry that would have astounded Berlioz and his peers. Students flock to conservatories and graduate with skills once possessed only by a few virtuosi. More people listen to classical music today, and more money gets spent on producing and disseminating it, than ever before. Respect for a composer’s intentions, for which Berlioz fought so heroically, is now an article of faith among musicians and publishers alike.

True, the tidal wave of creation that generated the masterpieces we so magnificently perform is spent; we’re left to scavenge the marvels that it cast up. The musical language that united Bach, Schubert, Mahler, and Prokofiev finally dissolved into inaccessible atonalism by the mid-twentieth century; subsequent efforts to reconstitute it have yet to gather the momentum of the past. But in recompense for living in an age of musical re-creation, we occupy a vast musical universe, far larger than the one that surrounded a nineteenth-century resident of Paris or Vienna. We can hear the beauty in the poignant chromaticism of Gesualdo and the mysterious silences of C.P.E. Bach, no less than in the by now more familiar cadences of Beethoven and Brahms.

And at a time when much of the academy has lost interest in history, contemporary classical-music culture is one of the last redoubts of the humanist impulse. The desire to know the past has grown white-hot among certain musicians over the last 50 years, resulting in a performance revolution that is the most dynamic musical development in recent times.

 

A twenty-first-century music lover plunged into the concert world of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would find himself in an alien land, surrounded by strange customs and parochial tastes. Works that we now regard as formally perfect were dismembered: only a single movement of a work’s full three or four might ever be performed, with the remaining movements regarded as inessential. Musical forms, such as the sonata, that are central to contemporary performance practice were kept out of the concert hall, considered too difficult for the public to absorb. And the universal loathing directed by today’s audiences at the hapless recipient of a mid-performance cell-phone call would have struck eighteenth-century audiences as provincial, given the widespread use of concerts and opera as pleasant backdrops for lively conversation.

But the greatest difference between the musical past and present is what we might call musical teleology: the belief that music progresses over time. That belief had consequences that many contemporary listeners and musicians would find shocking. Throughout much of Western history, older works held little interest for average listeners – they wanted the most up-to-date styles in singing and harmony. Seventeenth-century Venetians shunned last year’s operas; nineteenth-century Parisians yawned at the elegant entertainments written for the Sun King. Composers like Bach, today viewed as cornerstones of Western civilization, were seen as impossibly old-fashioned several decades after their deaths. In his 1823 Life of Rossini, Stendhal wondered: “What will happen in twenty years’ time when The Barber of Seville [composed in 1816] will be as old-fashioned as Il Matrimonio Segreto [a 1792 opera by Domenico Cimarosa] or Don Giovanni [1787]?” Stendhal’s musical crystal ball obviously had its flaws.

Berlioz was in many ways a musical teleologist himself, but he fiercely opposed the widespread outcome of the belief in musical progress: the posthumous rewriting of scores. Performers and publishers unapologetically revised works that we now regard as transcendent, seeking to correct their perceived deficiencies and bring them up to newer standards of orchestration and harmony. After describing a particularly brutal mauling of The Magic Flute for its 1801 Paris premiere and a dumbing-down of Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz, Berlioz erupts: “Thus, dressed as apes, got up grotesquely in cheap finery, one eye gouged out, an arm withered, a leg broken, two men of genius were introduced to the French public! …No, no, no, a million times no! You musicians, you poets, prose-writers, actors, pianists, conductors, whether of third or second or even first rank, you do not have the right to meddle with a Shakespeare or a Beethoven, in order to bestow on them the blessings of your knowledge and taste.”

Conservative pedagogues altered scores as well – on the ground that they were too modern. Berlioz headed off at the last minute what he called “emasculations” to Beethoven’s avant-garde harmonies that the influential music critic and teacher François-Joseph Fétis had surreptitiously introduced into a forthcoming edition of Beethoven’s symphonies.

For all Berlioz’s efforts to preserve the score’s integrity, however – during a performance of Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride, he shouted from the audience: “There are no cymbals there. Who has dared to correct Gluck?” – he could not dislodge the practice of “improving” older works of music. Virtuosi added to a piece whatever fireworks the composer had carelessly neglected to include. In 1837, Franz Liszt had a pang of conscience over his habit of pumping up his performances of Beethoven, Weber, and Johann Nepomuk Hummel with rapid runs and cadenzas. He briefly saw the error of his ways: “I no longer divorce a composition from the era in which it was written, and any claim to embellish or modernize the works of earlier periods seems just as absurd for a musician to make as it would be for an architect, for example, to place a Corinthian capital on the columns of an Egyptian temple.” But he soon fell off the wagon and went back to crowd-wowing revisions, reports Kenneth Hamilton in his mesmerizing study of Romantic pianism, After the Golden Age.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, the concept of a musical canon emerged and displaced the zeal for new music in concert programming. Yet the updating of scores continued. Gustav Mahler added new parts for horns, trombones, and other instruments when he conducted Beethoven’s symphonies. An influential edition of Beethoven’s piano sonatas by the pianist and conductor Hans von Bülow recommended that pianists substitute Liszt’s ending of theHammerklavier Sonata for Beethoven’s own, “to give the closing measures the requisite brilliancy.”

Even in the canon-revering twentieth century, the teleologists remained cheeky. Arnold Schoenberg explained his reorchestration of Handel’s Concerti Grossi, op. 6, as remedying an “insufficiency with respect to thematic invention and development [that] could satisfy no sincere contemporary of ours.” At the start of a 1927 recording of Chopin’s Black Key Étude, the pianist Vladimir de Pachmann announces: “The left hand of this étude is entirely altered from Chopin: it’s better, modernized, more melodic, you know.” A contemporary listener, drawn to Beethoven, Handel, and Chopin precisely for what is unique in their voice and sensibility, can only marvel at the confidence with which earlier generations declared such music in need of improvement.

 

In the second half of the twentieth century, a performance practice broke out that rejected, in the strongest possible way, the teleological understanding of music. An overwhelming drive possessed certain conductors, instrumentalists, and singers to re-create the music of the pre-Classical era – from the medieval through the baroque periods – as it was performed at the time of its composition.

These musicians discarded the modern steel-strung and -armatured instruments that had evolved in the nineteenth century and learned to play the gut-strung, fragile instruments of the Renaissance and baroque periods. They pored over music treatises, prints, and other historical materials to discover, say, how a seventeenth-century violinist attacked his instrument, how he handled the shorter, curved bow of the period, how he phrased and ornamented a line, how much vibrato he used. Needless to say, any thought of “modernizing” a score’s harmonies or orchestration was out of the question. These history-obsessed musicians didn’t want to bring the music of the past into the present; they wanted to enter the past on its own terms. The stylistic particularities of older music that, according to the teleologists, limited its potential, were for these revolutionaries its very essence.

The results were a revelation. The sound of these performances of Bach, Handel, and Vivaldi was light and nuanced; the music pulsed with energy. Trading the large modern orchestra for small baroque ensembles of temperamental instruments was like exchanging a leather-upholstered Cadillac for a frisky, unbroken colt. The premodern horns – unreliable and highly prone to indiscretions – blared out with a glorious astringency. The timpani shot from the orchestra with hair-raising force. Conductors emphasized the dance elements in baroque music, inflecting certain beats within measures as a courtier might beckon to his dance partner. An unfamiliar and seductive voice – the countertenor – emerged to take on roles in baroque operas and masses that castrati originally sang.

This “early-music” movement (also known as “period-instrument” and “authentic-performance”) was a deliberate strike against the classical-music establishment. It provoked a counterreaction and a sharp philosophical debate about the nature of performance and the proper role of historical knowledge in music-making (see appendix). Listeners and performers remain divided over whether the music of Bach and Mozart is best realized by a nineteenth-century-era orchestra using contemporary methods of expression (violinist Itzhak Perlman maintains: “I’m certain Haydn and Mozart would have adored our modern approach to phrasing and vibrato”) or by a small period-instrument ensemble seeking to re-create earlier performance techniques.

But regardless of such disagreements, the value of the movement to our musical life has been indisputable. It has unleashed arguably the most concentrated rediscovery of lost music in history. Composers that had lain silent for centuries – Jean-Féry Rebel, Johann Friedrich Fasch, Heinrich Ignaz Biber, to name just a handful – are heard again. Hundreds of groups of specialists are busily digging into twelfth-century plainchant and thirteenth-century troubadour traditions. Unfamiliar repertoire by overly familiar composers is also being restored. The Naïve label, in one of the greatest recording projects of the early-music movement, is releasing all of Vivaldi’s operas. A wind blows through these magnificent, mostly unpublished works, but even when the rhythms are most propulsive, a deep melancholy pervades the music. Naïve’s recording of the haunting duet for mezzo and chalumeau (a proto-clarinet) from the oratorio Juditha Triumphans, “Veni, me sequere fida,” is alone a contribution to civilization.

The public’s ear for this music has expanded accordingly. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a few aristocratic salons hosted private performances of Renaissance and early baroque music, but outside those elite settings, there was no commercial demand for pre-Classical music. Today, by contrast, enough people are eager for works from remote eras to put the medieval a cappella ensemble Anonymous 4 on the top of Billboard charts. Jordi Savall’s Renaissance music group Hesperion XXI brings audience members to their feet during performances. Early-music festivals have even reached Missoula, Montana, where Heinrich Schütz’s Musikalisches Exequien was performed in March 2010, and Indianapolis, which offered Spanish ballads from the time of Cervantes in June 2010. The New York vocal group Polyhymnia invites its audience to “glimpse behind the tapestried walls of the ducal court at Munich, to hear the psalms kept for the private use of their patron,” assuming in their listeners the same desire to know the past that animates the performers themselves. Amateurs also perform this previously discarded music. Camps teaching medieval chant are ubiquitous, from Evansville, Indiana, to Litchfield, Connecticut. Reed, viol, and lute players can brush up on their skills at the Summer Texas Toot in Austin; San Jose, California, hosts a workshop for recorder players.

The movement has also demolished one tiresome credo of classical-music critics: that the way to revitalize the concert tradition is to program contemporary music. It is surely the case that the concert repertoire, derived from a narrow slice of the musical universe, is in desperate need of new music. But the critics are wrong in defining “new music” exclusively as contemporary. The public could not be more unequivocal: it finds little emotional significance in most contemporary classical music, especially that produced in academic enclaves. The early-music movement offers two alternative definitions of “new music”: the standard repertoire, such as Mozart’s symphonies, performed in entirely new ways; and unknown repertoire from the pre-Classical period. Though the reinterpretation of the standard repertoire has had the biggest commercial impact, it is the second definition of “new music” that should animate concert programming today. Countless compelling works, not just from the pre-Classical period, cry out for rediscovery: Haydn’s Sturm und Drang symphonies, Dvořák’s piano music, and virtually unknown composers such as Zdeněk Fibich. Thousands of listeners, frustrated by the constricted concert canon, would eagerly support the performance of unknown old music.

 

The caliber of musicianship also marks our age as a golden one for classical music. “When I was young, you knew when you heard one of the top five American orchestras,” says Arnold Steinhardt, the first violinist of the recently disbanded Guarneri Quartet. “Now, you can’t tell. Every orchestra is filled with fantastic players.” Steinhardt is ruthless toward his students when they’re preparing for an orchestra audition. “I’ll tell them in advance: ‘You didn’t get the job. There are 250 violinists competing for that place. You have to play perfectly, and you sure didn’t play perfectly for me.’ ”

The declinists who proclaim the death of classical music might have a case if musical standards were falling. But in fact, “the professional standards are higher everywhere in the world compared to 20 or 40 years ago,” says James Conlon, conductor of the Los Angeles Opera. A vast oversupply of students competing to make a career in music drives this increase in standards.

Much of that student oversupply comes from Asia. “The technical proficiency of the pianists from Asia is staggering,” says David Goldman, a board member at New York’s Mannes College of Music, where applications are at a record high. “They arrive here with these Popeye arms, and never miss a note.” Asia has fallen in love with classical music; many parents believe that music training is an essential part of their children’s development. “The only way to survive when you’re in a pool of literally hundreds of thousands of other Asian kids is to outwork your competition,” says Tom Vignieri, the music producer of the effervescent NPR show From the Top, which showcases school-age classical musicians.

Far Eastern countries are trying to build up their own conservatory system to meet the demand for music training – Robert Dodson, head of the Boston University School of Music, recalls with awe the Singapore Conservatory’s 200,000 square feet of marble – but so far, demand outstrips supply. When Lang Lang, today an internationally acclaimed pianist, was admitted to Beijing’s Central Conservatory in the early 1990s, he was one of 3,000 students who had applied for just 12 fifth-grade spots. And those 3,000 were the cream of the 50 million children who study music in China, including 36 million young pianists.

For now, the West’s conservatories continue to attract Asia’s top talent. Nineteen-year-old Meng-Sheng Shen, a slender freshman at Juilliard, dreamed of a concert career while still a piano student in Taiwan. “In Taiwan, I felt: ‘It’s not that hard to win,’ ” he says. In New York, however, “you see a lot of people who play really well,” Shen marvels, and so this acolyte of Chopin, Liszt, and Rachmaninoff has recalibrated his plans to include the option of teaching as well as concertizing.

Plenty of young Americans, too, are pursuing training in the nation’s 600-plus college music programs, whose unlikely locations, such as at California State University, Fresno, testify to the far-flung desire for musical sublimity. An efficient talent-spotting machine vacuums up promising young oboists and violinists from every Arkansas holler and Oregon farm town and propels them to ever-higher levels of instruction and competition.

The poise and exuberance of these budding performers can be breathtaking. At the 2007 finals for the Metropolitan Opera’s National Council Auditions, a young tenor’s eyes shone with the erotic power of commanding that massive house, a smile of mastery playing over his lips, as he flung out the high Cs of “Ah! mes amis” from Donizetti’s La Fille du Regiment. (The moment was captured in the documentary The Audition.) A self-possessed black pianist from Chicago, Jeremy Jordan, coolly unfurled the feathery arpeggios and midnight harmonies of his own virtuosic transcriptions of Wagner, Richard Strauss, and Saint-Saëns at a Juilliard student recital this year. Beneath Jordan’s laconic demeanor lies a deep belief in classical music. “It’s not as if kids don’t like music like this,” the lanky 20-year-old insists. “Liszt, Wagner, Chopin – it’s beautiful; it just takes one hearing.”

 

But however vibrant classical music’s supply side, many professionals worry that audience demand is growing ever more anemic. Conlon calls this imbalance the “American paradox”: “The growth in the quantity and quality of musicians over the last 50 years is phenomenal. America has more great orchestras than any country in the world. And yet I don’t know of a single orchestra, opera company, or chamber group that isn’t fighting to keep its audience.” The number of Americans over the age of eight who attended a classical-music performance dropped 29 percent from 1982 to 2008, according to the League of American Orchestras (though attendance at all leisure activities plummeted during that period as well, including a 36 percent drop in attendance at sporting events).

Recent conservatory graduates, struggling for work, find their commitment to a music career tested almost daily. “The culture seems to have a shrinking capacity for what I love,” says Jennifer Jackson, a 30-year-old pianist who studied at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore. The audience has a limited ability to follow serious music, Jackson says. “To make a profit, you have to intersperse lots of things that people can handle musically.”

These perceptions, however valid, should be kept in historical perspective. Much of today’s standard repertoire was never intended for a mass audience – not even an 1820s Viennese “mass audience,” much less a 2010 American one. Nineteenth-century performers regarded the music that constitutes the foundation of today’s repertoire with trepidation, since they feared – rightly at the time – that it would prove too challenging for the public. Composers wrote sonatas and chamber works either for students or for private performance in aristocratic salons, not for public consumption. True public concerts – those intended to make a profit – resembled The Ed Sullivan Show, not the reverential communing with greatness that we take for granted today. Light crowd-pleasers – above all, variations on popular opera themes – leavened more serious works, which were unlikely to be performed in their entirety or without a diverting interruption. At the 1806 premiere of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in Vienna, the violinist played one of his own compositions between the concerto’s first and second movements – on one string while holding his violin upside down. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony premiered at Paris’s leading concert venue in 1832 with romances and tunes by Weber and Rossini spliced between the third movement and the choral finale, according to James Johnson in Listening in Paris.

By the end of the nineteenth century, public concert practice more closely resembled the norm today, with symphonies and sonatas usually performed in their entirety and without other works spliced into them. Many soloists began performing marathon recitals of highly demanding works. This programming of exclusively serious music for public consumption in the late nineteenth century was no more consistent with how that music was originally performed than it is now, and it represented as much of an unforeseen advance in the listening capacities of the public.

 

Today’s classical-music culture differs from the past in one more important way: recording technology. No composer before the advent of the gramophone ever anticipated that his music would be endlessly and effortlessly repeatable. At best, he might hope that his musician friends would give a few additional performances of his latest piece before new styles and works superseded it. The ease of repetition that recording technology enabled puts an enormous strain on the excessively limited canon that emerged from the nineteenth century – one that could have proved fatal. Yet not only have Schubert’s piano sonatas and Chopin’s nocturnes, Beethoven’s string quartets and Brahms’s intermezzi, survived the move from the private salon to the public concert hall; they have triumphed over the potentially stupefying overfamiliarity inflicted on them by instant replay and the accumulating weight of hundreds of thousands of performances. The exquisiteness of this music is such that it continues to seduce, decades and centuries after its expected eclipse.

The radical transformation of how people consume classical music puts the current hand-wringing over an inattentive, shrinking audience in a different perspective. Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony premiered before an audience of 100 at most. These days, probably 10,000 people are listening to it during any given 24-hour period, either live or on record, estimates critic Harvey Sachs. Recordings have expanded the availability of music in astounding ways. The declinists – led by the industry’s most reliable Cassandra, the League of American Orchestras – do not account for how recordings have changed the concert culture beyond recognition.

Recordings have also, it is true, taken a toll on the communal, participatory aspect of music-making. But the explosion of classical music on the Internet has revived some of that communal element. The ever-expanding offerings of performances on YouTube, uploaded simply out of love, demonstrate the passion that unites classical-music listeners. A listener can compare 15 different interpretations of “Là ci darem la mano” at the click of a mouse, all – amazingly – for free. Organized websites, such as the live classical-concert site InstantEncore.com, are creating new ways of disseminating music that will undoubtedly reach new audiences. Even with recording technology’s impetus for passive, private listening, the percentage of amateur musicians studying classical music has risen 30 percent over the last six years, from an admittedly small 1.8 percent to 3 percent. Many of those nonprofessional musicians, as well as their children, are uploading their own performances onto the Web.

Contrary to the standard dirge, the classical recording industry is still shooting out more music than anyone can possibly take in over a lifetime. Has the pace of Beethoven symphony cycles slowed down? We’ll survive. In the course of one month arrive arias by Nicola Porpora, an opera by Federico Ricci, a symphony by Ildebrando Pizzetti – three composers previously known only to musicologists – Cherubini’s Chant sur la Mort de Joseph Haydn, and Haydn’s The Storm. This cornucopia of previously lost works is more than any of us has a right to hope for.

 

The much-publicized financial difficulties of many orchestras during the current recession also need to be put into historical perspective. More people are making a living playing an instrument than ever before, and doing so as respected and well-paid professionals, not lowly drones. There were no professional orchestras during Beethoven’s time; he had to cobble together an ensemble for the premiere of his Ninth Symphony. Even mid-twentieth-century America had no year-round, salaried orchestras. In 1962, most concert seasons were half a year long.

But under pressure from an increasingly militant musicians’ union and with an infusion of funding from the Ford Foundation in 1966, many orchestras started paying their players annual, or close to annual, salaries. In part to justify those higher salaries, orchestras expanded their concert seasons and the frequency of concerts within each season. Neither Beethoven nor Brahms envisioned that a single orchestra would perform three or four concerts a week, critic Joseph Horowitz notes in Classical Music in America, much less that its members would draw six-figure salaries. The low pay of a typical late-nineteenth-century musician made possible the huge orchestral forces that Bruckner and Mahler summoned as a matter of course. Today’s composers usually write for much smaller ensembles, having been priced out of the symphonic form by unionized wages.

Nevertheless, professional orchestras in the US today dwarf in number anything seen in the past. In 1937, there were 96 American orchestras; in 2010, there are more than 350. Where union restrictions don’t exist, the music scene is even more vibrant. Volunteer adult orchestras outnumber professional orchestras two to one. New youth ensembles launch every year; there are now nearly 500 in the United States. Though Los Angeles County alone has more than 40 youth orchestras, the leading state in student involvement is Texas, where more than 57,000 high school musicians auditioned last year for slots in prestigious all-state music ensembles.

Chamber-music groups have also proliferated in the last 50 years. Arnold Steinhardt recalls that back when he was studying the violin, you could count on one hand the number of string quartets and other ensembles: “Chamber music was not a profession then; it was for people who weren’t good enough to have a solo career.” Nowadays, new quartets form constantly, many associated with colleges and universities. It took nearly the entire nineteenth century for the string-quartet repertoire to broaden its appeal beyond a narrow band of connoisseurs; today, the audience for chamber music extends far beyond traditional urban centers of culture. Iowa City hosted a Haydn quartet “slam” last year in honor of the 200th anniversary of the composer’s death. String players from ages eight to 78 performed all 83 of Haydn’s quartets.

It is fair to ask whether the foundation-fueled postwar expansion of orchestras artificially and unsustainably pumped up the supply of musicians and ensembles. But there is ample evidence of a continuing unmet demand for classical music throughout the country – especially in places that can’t afford the salaries and long seasons that America’s unionized musicians expect. This March, the New York Times’s invaluable Daniel Wakin chronicled the travails of the Moscow State Radio Symphony Orchestra as it slogged through a poorly paid nine-week bus tour to smaller cities and towns around America – places like Ashland, Kentucky, and Zanesville, Ohio, which are “hungry for classical music programming.”

It’s even harder to spot a demand deficit at the other end of the glamour spectrum. Though Wagner fans incessantly lament the shortage of Heldentenors, the source of the problem is not a decrease in capable Siegfrieds and Tristans but the mushrooming of Ring cycles in China, Russia, and Japan, among other locales. Likewise, as Plácido Domingo explains in a collection of interviews called Living Opera, hand-wringing about singers who find themselves pushed too early into roles for which they are not yet ready reflects the worldwide increase in theaters and opera companies, which require a constant supply of singers.

 

However bounteous today’s classical-music culture is for those already inside it, the number of children who have the opportunity to be captivated by classical music is still much lower than it ought to be. “The arts fell out of US schools in the 1980s; all the music is gone,” James Conlon observes in Living Opera. “Now we have a generation of adults who make money, accomplish what they think is the fulfillment of life, but they’ve never had any contact with the classical arts – neither music nor literature. For me that’s a national disgrace.” Most leading music institutions have energetic outreach programs to try to compensate for the loss of public music education. But some school bureaucracies make no effort to accommodate these programs.

The public schools’ sclerosis has fueled the growth of community music schools that offer low-cost private lessons and ensemble work to children and their parents. The schools, heirs to the music program for immigrants at Chicago’s Hull House, are particularly important in urban areas, where arts education has withered far more than in suburban and rural school districts. Philadelphia’s buoyant network of schools trains thousands of students each year.

Such endeavors could reach far more children if they enjoyed better funding. That will require changing the priorities of America’s patron class, says Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College and conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra. “What is different today is that the nation’s elite, the very rich, don’t care about classical music,” he observes. “The patron class is philistine; instead of Andrew Carnegie, we have Donald Trump. Some rich guy with a hedge fund wants to be photographed with Angelina Jolie, not support the Cleveland Orchestra.” Bill Gates didn’t help matters when he proclaimed gratuitously: “I have no interest in giving to opera houses.” Younger philanthropists seem to be following Gates’s lead in spurning the arts, write Matthew Bishop and Michael Green in Philanthrocapitalism. The celebrity-bedecked Robin Hood Foundation enjoys extraordinary cachet on Wall Street; organizations that promote classical culture, far less so.

 

Two of the best hopes for building future American audiences may come from outside the country. Gustavo Dudamel, the 29-year-old Venezuelan conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, is the closest thing the classical-music world has to a Leonardo DiCaprio. His tousle-headed exuberance, thousand-watt smile, and undoubted conducting skills have thrilled the press and public and created huge interest in his future career.

But it is Dudamel’s past that may be his most important contribution to classical music. Dudamel is the most famous graduate of Venezuela’s initiative to teach slum children to play classical instruments, and in so doing to develop the self-discipline that will carry them out of the ghetto. More than a quarter-million poor children in Venezuela enroll in the nearly 200 youth orchestras that belong to El Sistema Nacional de las Orquestas Juveniles e Infantiles de Venezuela (“El Sistema,” for short). In 2002, another El Sistema graduate, the double bassist Edicson Ruiz, became at 17 the youngest musician ever to join the Berlin Philharmonic. The brainchild of José Antonio Abreu, a left-wing economist committed to “social justice,” El Sistema could not be a stronger rebuke to the multicultural dogma that currently governs American education and welfare programs. Its premise is that all children should be exposed to the West’s highest artistic accomplishments. “The huge spiritual world that music produces in itself ends up overcoming material poverty,” Abreu has said. “From the minute a child is taught how to play an instrument, he’s no longer poor.”

Dudamel’s charisma and hip Latino ethos could make it safe for Silicon Valley moguls to fund classical-music education without worrying about accusations of elitism. Perhaps the sight of Venezuela’s Simón Bolivar Youth Orchestra playing its heart out could persuade even the liberal Ford Foundation to return to its roots in classical arts funding. “We have lived our whole lives inside these pieces,” Dudamel says. “When we play Beethoven’s Fifth, it is the most important thing happening in the world.”

Thanks to the publicity around L.A.’s new conductor, an initiative headquartered at the New England Conservatory of Music now trains music postgraduates to start local El Sistema programs worldwide. But much more could be done. Why not a Play for America program, modeled on Teach for America, that would send music graduates into poor communities to teach and perform for two or three years?

The other source of future classical-music demand is China. “I’m very hopeful,” says Robert Sirota, head of the Manhattan School of Music. “If China graduates 100,000 pianists a year, it changes everything.” The best predictor of attendance at classical concerts is playing an instrument. Asia’s passionate pursuit of music training for its children will create not just tomorrow’s professional musicians, of whom there is no dearth, but tomorrow’s audiences as well. And like El Sistema, the phenomenon of countless poor young Asians practicing fanatically for the privilege of a career performing Scarlatti and Rachmaninoff torpedoes the image of classical music as the bastion of wealthy white elites. When the 12-year-old Lang Lang competed for the first time with Europeans, he worried that their heritage would give them an interpretive advantage. “It’s your native music as well,” his father reminded him. “It belongs to anyone who loves it.”

 

Music records the evolution of the human soul. To hear how the elegance of the baroque developed into the grandeur of the classical style, which in turn gave way to the languid sensuality and unbridled passion of Romanticism, is to trace how variously human beings have expressed longing, desire, triumph, and sorrow over the centuries.

Not everyone will hear that changing sensibility; some may find the soul’s echo elsewhere. But the present-day abundance of classical music – of newly rediscovered works, consummate performances, thousands of recordings, and legions of fans – is a testament to its deep roots in human feeling. And it is a cause for celebration that so many people still feel drawn into its web of lethal beauty, in a world so far from the one that gave it birth.

Appendix: The Early-Music Quarrel

 

By the mid-twentieth century, nearly all performers respected the letter of the score and dedicated themselves to realizing its spirit as well. But to the early-music advocates, the establishment musicians seriously misunderstood that spirit, at least regarding the pre-Classical repertoire.

Over the course of the twentieth century, the baroque composers – above all, Bach and Handel – had been taking on more and more weight and waddling ever more ponderously, as mainstream conductors assimilated them to late-Romantic performance styles. Early-eighteenth-century works sounded suspiciously Wagnerian – with long legato lines and a smooth, creamy sound, performed by ensembles many magnitudes larger than anything ever marshaled during the baroque or classical eras. Conductor Ivan Fischer recently recalled a Leopold Stokowski performance of Bach, after which musicians left the stage to pare down for Bruckner, the epitome of late-Romantic gigantism. While massive ensembles may have magnified the spiritual force of the music for some listeners, the orchestral inflation at the very least obscured the intricate contrapuntal writing for different instrumental voices. With a chorus of 200, no one is going to hear the flutes delicately doubling the sopranos’ line in a Bach oratorio.

In rejecting this supersized sound, the early-music acolytes (whose first modern wave included Gustav Leonhardt, Frans Brüggen, Nikolas Harnoncourt, Ton Koopman, and Christopher Hogwood) embraced a fallen historical consciousness, compared with the prelapsarian innocence of mainstream musicians. (The authenticity movement had late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century antecedents, but those early experiments never achieved critical mass.) Where the great titans of traditional twentieth-century performance – conductors such as Wilhelm Fürtwangler and Otto Klemperer – assumed a continuity between the past and the present that guaranteed the fidelity of their interpretations, the early-music advocates saw discontinuity. The essence of the music of the past was no longer intuitively available to us but required historical research to recover, they believed. A gulf separated Bach’s world from ours; we could no longer assume that modern performing traditions expressed his intentions.

 

The early-music movement quickly attained commercial success and just as quickly provoked a backlash, primarily from musicians who objected to the implication that their performances were inauthentic. Some objections were aesthetic: these old instruments sound weak and thin, critics said; stronger models have superseded them for good reason. We need a revival of period strings as much as we need a revival of period dentistry, one wag observed. In a 1990 interview, violinist Pinchas Zuckerman called historical performance “asinine STUFF… a complete and absolute farce. Nobody wants to hear that stuff.”

Other objections were normative. “Musical archaism may be a symptom of a disintegrating civilization,” musicologist Donald Grout wrote at the start of the modern period-instrument movement. A composer of early music, if he came back to life today, would be astonished by our interest in how music was performed in his own times, Grout asserted. “Have we no living tradition of music, that we must be seeking to revive a dead one?” the composer would ask.

The most interesting challenges to the historical-performance movement, however, have been philosophical. Historically accurate performance is unattainable, critics like Richard Taruskin of the University of California at Berkeley charged. There are too many stylistic unknowns, too many variables regarding tempo and phrasing, to think that treatises on technique or illustrations of musicians playing an instrument can lead to the movement’s Holy Grail: the way a piece sounded at its creation. Further, the very idea of an authentic performance is incoherent, the skeptics said: Which performance of a work should we view as authentic? Its premiere? But what if that performance – or every subsequent one during a composer’s lifetime – failed to realize the composer’s conception because of inadequate rehearsals or mediocre musicians, as Berlioz so frequently experienced?

The naysayers pointed out that the context of musical performance has changed so radically from the pre-Romantic era that we cannot hope to re-create its original meaning. For most of European history, music belonged to social ritual, whether it accompanied worship, paid homage to a king, or provided background for a feast. A large concert hall filled with silent listeners, focused intently on an ensemble of well-fed professionals still in possession of most of their teeth, has no counterpart in early-music history. Early-music proponents, the detractors added, are highly selective in their use of historical evidence. No one today conducts the operas of Jean-Baptiste Lully, for example, by pounding a staff on the floor, as conductors did in the court of Louis XIV to try to keep time in an ensemble of less-than-perfectly trained musicians.

Taruskin launched the intended coup de grâce. The predominant early-music style has nothing to do with historical evidence, he charged, and everything to do with the modernist aesthetic. The style’s fleet rhythms and transparent textures are a reaction against the excesses of subjectivity and expression characteristic of Romanticism; the shaky historical arguments on its behalf are just after-the-fact window dressing.

 

Several of the arguments against the period-instrument movement had bite. They reflect the skepticism regarding the possibility of knowing the past that dominates today’s universities and that gets used (improperly) to justify junking the study of history, philology, and literary tradition. The proponents of period performance heard and considered these sophisticated objections. Then something wonderful happened. They responded, in essence: “Yeah, whatever.” They tweaked their rhetoric, junked the term “authenticity” and anything else that sounded too authoritarian – and went right on doing what they had been doing all along. That is because their hunger for the past – for discovering how the musicians at the Esterházy palace interpreted crescendi or how much vibrato a cellist performing Bach’s cello suites in the 1720s would have used – was so great that no amount of hermeneutical skepticism could extinguish it.

The influential restorer of French baroque opera, conductor William Christie, exemplifying this attitude, lamented in 1997 how little we know about the hand gestures used in ballets and operas in pre-Revolutionary France. Gestural art is “a field that is painful for me right now,” he told Bernard Sherman in Inside Early Music. Christie’s pain is precious. It comes from an instinct in short supply in the rest of the culture: the belief that the past contains lost worlds of expression that would enrich us if we could just recover them. The desire to learn how a shepherdess in a Rameau opera may have inclined her hand to Cupid is an attribute of an enlightened humanity. (Unfortunately, Christie has since abandoned the project of re-creating baroque opera stagings and choreography, leaving the Boston Early Music Festival and Opera Lafayette as the sole ensembles committed to courtly theatrical sensibility as well as musical practice.)

An early informal truce between modern-instrument ensembles and the historicists has long since broken down. According to this unwritten understanding, the historicists would claim the pre-1800 repertoire, while leaving nineteenth-century works to the modern symphony orchestra. It was not long, however, before the proponents of historical “authenticity” marched all the way into the twentieth century, blithely piling one historical anachronism onto another, as if to confirm Taruskin’s skepticism regarding the evidentiary basis for their work. Period-instrument groups such as the Philharmonia Baroque and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique use the evocative Waldhorn in Brahms’s works, for example, even though Brahms himself could not persuade his contemporary brass players to give up their spiffy new valved horn for that difficult ancient instrument. In addition to adopting “historical” practices that didn’t exist, the historicists ignore widespread nineteenth-century performance traditions that did exist. There has been no movement to revive “preluding,” for example, in which a pianist improvised chords and arpeggios before breaking into the actual published score of a work, because such behavior would too forcefully violate contemporary concert norms. Nor has the habit of teleologically updating scores been adopted. This paradox points to the conceptual meltdown point of the authenticity movement, where it becomes clear that the most unhistorical practice in the history of music is the concern for authenticity.

Such conundrums do not subtract from the enormous contribution that the early-music movement has made to our experience of music. Traditional orchestras, especially in Europe, have subtly changed their sound and approach to the standard repertoire in response to the competition. Sadly, we will never know whether the period-instrument movement has come close to past performance style (though Taruskin is wrong that historical materials cannot provide meaningful guidance). But the effort to recover our musical past remains a noble one.

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