There have been many notable instances of unruly behaviour at classical music concerts, often at the premiere of a new work or production. Audience members displayed unruly behavior for a variety of reasons.
At the revival of Thomas Arne's opera Artaxerxes, a mob protesting the abolition of half-price admissions stormed the theatre in the middle of the performance.[1]
Part of the Jewish audience catcalled because of perceived anti-Jewish slights. The melody of one of the songs in this opera greatly resembled the sacred Jewish Kaddish prayer.[2]
Many audience members were supporters of the elder composer Giovanni Paisiello who had written a Barber of Seville of his own. They shouted, heckled, hissed, and jeered at Rossini's new version of the piece.[3]
Audience members at a performance in Brussels left before the end of the opera to join planned riots that were already taking place across the city, marking the beginning of the Belgian Revolution.[4]
The audience was unruly for several reasons. Whistling and cat-calls occurred the night before, during the premiere of the "Paris version," in response to the music, like the shepherd's piping in Act I. Wagner also did not pay the claque's fee in order to prevent disruptions. The interruptions increased during the second performance, when the Jockey-Club de Paris organized a disruption in response to the opera's ballet being placed in the first act instead of the second, which was customary. The jockey members usually arrived in time for the second act in order to see the ballet, and did not take kindly to Wagner's dissent.[6]
As part of a front in Vienna's ongoing style wars, the audience booed and catcalled loudly, and some punches were thrown. Composer Alban Berg's piece was highly expressionistic, which prompted the uproar after growing tension in the crowd.[13] The event came to be known as the Skandalkonzert.[14]
Dueling factions tried to drown each other out during the ballet's premiere, unwittingly launching generations of exaggerations of what actually happened in the hall that night.[15][16][17]
The Awakening of a City, The Meeting of Automobiles and Aeroplanes
April 21, 1914
Milan
A concert organized by the Futurists to provide the first public demonstration of their experimental "noise-making" instruments called intonarumori resulted in an expected fracas,[19] with Futurists led by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti fighting members of the audience in the stalls.[20]
Webern attended, interrupting his summer with Schoenberg, who remained in Traunkirchen. Webern praised the Amar Quartet's performance to Berg, but what unfolded left him "out of sorts" and disturbed his plans to continue composing that summer. The Moldenhauers described the "Salzburg affair" as "a riot ... subdued only by police intervention". Wilhelm Grosz constantly laughed, crying "'furchtbar!' [terrible]" during the fourth movement. Adolf Loos and Rudolf Ganz defended Webern. A London Daily Telegraph reporter wrote, "I never saw an angrier man" of Webern's taking the stage amid the fray, "as if he were going to kill". The Quartet was able to play the music in full to an invitation-only audience the next day. Arthur Bliss, Arthur Honegger, Francis Poulenc, and Jean Wiéner reassured Webern.[23]
Very raucous physical altercations and verbal fights broke out within three minutes of Antheil playing, with many distinguished guests in attendance. Artist Man Ray reportedly punched a man in the nose, Marcel Duchamp began hurling obscenities at a fellow audience member, and Erik Satie was heard shouting, "What precision! What precision!"[25]
The audience threw program notes at Cowell and clambered onto the stage, leading to a large physical altercation and the arrest of over 20 audience members.[26]
An audience member began screaming at Cowell, "Stop! Stop!" and would not be quiet when shushed by audience members, leading to an attempt to drown one other out with continuous catcalling.[27]
The premiere performance received a large ovation despite some unruly behavior in the audience, including an outburst by Ezra Pound, but there were some fistfights in the street after the concert.[29]
Musicologist Brian S. Locke called the "Wozzeck Affair" the "most important event at the Czechs' National Theater in the interwar period". There Otakar Ostrčil gave Wozzeck its second premiere (after Erich Kleiber's in Berlin). The third evening's (Tuesday) performance was interrupted by a planned demonstration in the second act before the chorus of the sleeping soldiers. This eventually culminated in its cancellation amid dueling whistling and applause. Police ordered the audience, among them Berg, his wife Helene, and Alma Mahler, to exit. Tuesday evening performances were attended by wealthy or upper-middle-class subscribers. The political dimension of Berg's opera in this milieu and, moreover, in the context of burgeoning Czech fascism and anti-German sentiment has often been emphasized. Indeed, critics warred along political lines in the press. Authorities forbade more performances.[30]
Organized bands of right-wing agitators planted themselves in the audience and created a large commotion, directed towards the opera's supposed anti-German sentiment. It was subsequently banned by the Nazis in 1933.[33][34]
Musicologist Antoine Goléa, who attended the concert, recalled: "Those who experienced this Donaueschingen première will remember the scandal as long as they live. Shouts, caterwauling, and other animal noises were unleashed from one half of the hall in response to applause, foot-stamping and enthusiastic bravos from the other".[36] Boulez was unable to attend, but, after hearing a tape of the concert, decided to withdraw the piece.[36]
During the premiere of this piece, the audience grew agitated due to the complete silence. It consisted of three movements, and during the third movement audience members began to walk out of the performance.[37]
A new interpretation of Die Meistersinger by Wagner's grandson Wieland Wagner removed elements associated with German nationalism and introduced a minimalist, modernist staging. Particularly controversial was the removal of scenery depicting the city of Nuremberg – setting of the play, but also a central city to Nazi propaganda. The production was booed by the audience throughout the summer of 1956, beginning a tradition of booing at future Bayreuth Festivals.[39]
Part of an avant-garde season of music featuring the New York Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Bernstein, most performances had received lukewarm responses. This one, with Cage as performer, was met with boos and hisses. Allegedly, the orchestra failed to take the music seriously, and in so doing, effectively sabotaged it. The event was recorded, and released as part of a Bernstein retrospective set.[42][43]
Students hung a Che Guevara banner, the Red, and Black flags, and after the chorus responded in protest, the police began making arrests, prompting Henze to cancel the concert.[44]
At a Carnegie Hall performance of the work, the conservative audience tried yelling and sarcastically applauding to hasten the end of the piece, which received both boos and cheers during the ovation.[45] One of the performers, Michael Tilson Thomas, recalls: "One woman walked down the aisle and repeatedly banged her head on the front of the stage, wailing 'Stop, stop, I confess.'"[46][47]
When tenor Roberto Alagna's opening aria "Celeste Aida" was booed by the loggionisti in the opera house's less expensive seats, he walked off stage while the music was still playing. UnderstudyAntonello Palombi, in a black dress shirt and slacks, came on a few seconds later to replace him. Alagna did not return to the production.[50]
During a performance of the piece by Iranian harpsichordistMahan Esfahani in the Kölner Philharmonie, parts of the crowd clapped, whistled, and walked out. Esfahani, as he introduced the piece in English, had been ordered by a heckler to speak in German. Loud arguments between numerous members of the crowd persisted for several minutes; Esfahani stopped his performance and started playing a concerto by C. P. E. Bach instead. He attributed the 'pandemonium' to the choice of a modern composition, while the German media inferred a xenophobic motive.[51]
The controversy primarily stemmed from the unconventional staging of the opera at the Gran Teatre del Liceu. The production featured Mario Cavaradossi as an alter ego of Italian film director Pier Paolo Pasolini, who was murdered in 1975, trying to draw parallels between them as artists seen inconvenient to religious and political powers. Controversial scenes included many references to sexual violence and an invented scene of homosexual prostitution between Pasolini and his alleged killer while the song "Love in Portofino" played in the background. All this was met with substantial booing from the audience.[52][53]
^Osborne, Richard (2007). Rossini: His Life and Works. Oxford University Press. pp. 38–41. ISBN978-0-19-518129-6.
^Slatin, Sonia (1979). "Opera and revolution: La Muette de Portici and the Belgian revolution of 1830 revisited". Journal of Musicological Research. 3 (1–2): 45–62 [53–54]. doi:10.1080/01411897908574506.
^Bullard, Truman (1971). The first performance of Igor Stravinsky's Sacre du printemps. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Ann Arbor University (microfilm copy). OCLC937514.
^"Taxi Toots Sound Sweet After Music By Composers Guild: Many Hisses Greet Conclusion of 'Hyperprism'; Dissenters Told to Leave and Piece Is Played Over Again", New-York Tribune, March 5, 1923.
^Key, Susan, Larry Rothe, and Thomas M. Tilson. American Mavericks. San Francisco, California: San Francisco Symphony, 2001.
^Locke, Brian S. (2008). "The "Wozzeck Affair": Modernism and the Crisis of Audience in Prague". The Journal of Musicological Research. 27: 63–98. doi:10.1080/01411890701804788.
^Ernst Schnabel, "Zum Untergang einer Uraufführung" and "Postscriptum nach dreiunddreissig Tagen", in Hans Werner Henze and Ernst Schnabel, Das Floss der Medusa: Text zum Oratorium, 47–61 & 65–79 (Munich: Piper-Verlag, 1969); Andrew Porter, "Henze: The Raft of the Frigate 'Medusa' – Oratorio" [record review of DGG 139428-9], Gramophone 47, no. 563 (April 1970): 1625; Anon. "Affären/Henze: Sie bleibt", Der Spiegel 22, no. 51 (16 December 1968): 152. (in German)
