Music and Opera

Glenn Gould considered audiences ‘a force of evil’. ‘Not in their individual segments but en masse, I detest audiences.’ He retired from public performance on 10 April 1964, at the age of 31, having given fewer than 200 public recitals. The Canadian classical pianist had longstanding philosophical objections to the ritual of performing live. He found applause automatic and insincere, and often asked spectators not to bother. He even wrote a (partly) tongue-in-cheek manifesto, the Gould Plan for the Abolition of Applause and Demonstrations of All Kinds, in which he called for clapping to be banned. Gould believed that the most useful and honest response to music came following a

In the autumn of 1632, a man called Kaspar Schisler returned home to the small Bavarian town of Oberammergau. He didn’t walk through the gates in daylight, but waited until night, sneaking in past the tower guards. A few days later he was dead from the plague that was swelling and blistering its way across Europe — a plague which, until that point, strict quarantine had kept out. Within a year it had killed a quarter of the town. The remaining residents gathered together and made a vow: if they were spared, they would stage a play of the life and death of Jesus, and would continue to do so

As Joseph Haydn was getting out of bed on the morning of 10 May 1809, a cannonball landed in his back garden. Napoleon’s armies were closing on Vienna, and Haydn’s suburban home was in the line of fire. His valet recorded that the bedroom door blew open and every window in the house rattled. Shaking violently, the 77-year-old composer’s first thought was for his household, which at that point comprised six servants and a talking parrot who addressed him as ‘Papa’. ‘Children, don’t be afraid, for where Haydn is, nothing can happen to you,’ he shouted. This was nothing particularly new. Over a long life Haydn survived smallpox, saw his

There’s a certain merit in bluntness. ‘Quarantine Soirées’ was what the Budapest Festival Orchestra called its response to the crisis, and if the name conveyed a certain bleak Magyar humour, the resourcefulness couldn’t be faulted. Elsewhere, orchestras were still talking optimistically about broadcasting concerts from empty halls, and (even more optimistically) about persuading online viewers to pay for them. Realising that any activity that brings 90 musicians into close proximity was probably running out of road, the BFO’s music director Ivan Fischer announced that ‘this is not the time for orchestral music’ and launched a programme of chamber recitals by the orchestra’s players, livestreamed from their rehearsal hall. Logging on

For a patriotic German in the decades before Bismarck, Britain’s power was an object of envy. But there was one thing, at least, that you could always hold over the Anglo-Saxons on their foggy little island. On 1 January 1837, Robert Schumann sat down in Leipzig to hear a new piano concerto by the 20-year-old William Sterndale Bennett. ‘An English composer; no composer,’ commented his neighbour, smugly, before the music started. Few 19th-century German music-lovers failed to point out that the land of Shakespeare had somehow failed to produce a single really significant composer since the late 17th century. We know how that story ended; and if you want to

Who was the most influential figure in 20th-century classical music? Stravinsky? Pierre Boulez? What about Bernstein or Britten? John Cage or Karlheinz Stockhausen? Powerful public figures all. But there’s a case to be made for a very different kind of character — less king than kingmaker, a musical éminence grise.With a Who’s Who of pupils that included Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter and Astor Piazzolla, Philip Glass, John Eliot Gardiner and Daniel Barenboim, Nadia Boulanger is the most powerful musician you’ve never heard of, ‘the most important teacher since Socrates’, as one composer only partly joked. Photographs show us a stern, spectacled, almost invariably elderly figure. Neatly coiffed

‘People may say I can’t sing,’ said the soprano Florence Foster Jenkins, ‘but no one can ever say I didn’t sing.’ There were groans of dismay as an official walked out before the start of the Royal Opera’s new Fidelio: Jonas Kaufmann was not feeling on top form, but he was going to perform the role of Florestan regardless, and begged our indulgence. The mind plays tricks and after an announcement like that it’s hard to be entirely sure whether you’re hearing a skilfully proportioned interpretation or a singer dialling it down. But let the record show that Kaufmann did sing, and if you’ve booked for this production on the

Verdi’s Luisa Miller is set in the Tyrol in the early 17th century, and for some opera directors that’s a problem. After all, they’re busy people. They probably never had time to read Wolf Hall, or to speak to any of the 100 million people worldwide who watched Game of Thrones. It’s self-evident to them that modern audiences will be unable to empathise with anything involving swords, castles or feudal hierarchies. Which is why they work hard to imagine new contexts that can make these hopelessly dated dramas address contemporary life as we live it, right here, right now. Counts, village maidens and men in ruffs? Baffling. But a clown

It’s a sweltering night in Manhattan, circa 1947, and on the doorstep of a brownstone tenement three women are waiting for their menfolk to return. There’s plenty to gossip about. The Hildebrands upstairs are being evicted tomorrow, and the Buchanans are expecting a baby. And what’s the deal with Mrs Maurrant and Steve the milkman? Old Mr Kaplan reads the newspaper and denounces the bourgeoisie. A kid cadges a dime and big, kind Lippo Fiorentino arrives home from work with ice creams for everyone. At which point it becomes fairly safe to conclude that the America of Kurt Weill’s Street Scene is not the America of his Mahagonny. Forget the

Calixto Bieito’s Carmen: three words to make an opera critic’s heart leap. Until quite recently, Bieito was the operatic provocateur of the century — the director who opened Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera with a row of men defecating on stage, and who presented Mozart with a side order of torture porn. Veterans of his Carmen told of fellatio and gratuitous nudity; it all sounded very promising. Add the malicious pleasure of seeing what unrevivable horrorshow ENO had lumbered itself with now — what steaming paella of body fluids it was about to dish up to an audience who’d paid for an evening of good tunes and sultry senoritas —

Beethoven wears a feather boa and pink shades. He wrangles an electric guitar. A red lightning flash streaks across that familiar, scowling face. ‘Genius before Elton. Radical before Prince. Iconic before Bowie’ proclaimed the posters for the Barbican’s Beethoven Weekender, and apparently there’ve been complaints about them, which probably means that they’ve got the tone about right. Two hundred and fifty years after his birth, Beethoven still has a way of driving all the right people round the bend. US campus musicologists have called for his music to be suppressed (you’d think that champions of inclusion would support a year-long celebration of a disabled composer, but it seems not. Wrong