.The program for today: more on bel canto opera, Mozart and his Paris symphony, and, most interesting of all, a discussion -- taking off from Mozart's youthful experience in Paris -- on how we'd feel if today's classical music audience applauded right in the middle of the music. My point about bel canto works was that they were written in highly commercial situations, and, most important,that the musical forms Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, and the early Verdi used served commercial purposes. Though this last point is pretty obvious, once you think about it, I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere in print. I'll begin here with two excerpts from the reading assignment for this class, passages from chapter 6 ("The Impresario and the Life of the Theater") of Stendahl's irresistible Life of Rossini, first published in 1824: Let me explain the inner workings of the theatrical system in Italy. A contractor -- usually the wealthiest burgher of some petty township, for this particular office carries with it considerable social prestige and not a few other advantages, although it frequently turns out to be financially ruinous -- undertakes to run the theatre in the town whose leading citiz3n he has thc honour to be; so to start with, he forms a company, which consists invariably of: a prima-donna, a tenore, a basso cantante, a basso buffo, a second (female) and a third (male) buffo singer. Next, the impresario engages a maestro (composer) to write an original opera for him, having always due regard, in the setting of his arias, to the particular characteristics of the voices of the singers who are to perform them. The impresario then purchases a text (thc libretto: always in verse), which may cost him anything from sixty to eighty francs, the author being usually some wretched abbé parasitically attached to one of the wealthier households in thc neighborhood; for in Lombardy, where the meanest of petty provincial towns invariably counts some half dozen landed estates bringing in a hundred thousand livres a year and upwards, the undignified profession of parasite, so brilliantly satirized by Terence, still flourishes in all its glory. Next, the impresario, himself thc owner of one of these estates, proceeds to hand over all the business management of the theatre to his agent, who is usually a lawyer, and in fact thc same arch-scoundrel who manages his personal business in private life; while he (the impresario) is more properly occupied in falling in love with the prima donna; at which point, the great question which arises to tickle the curiosity of the entire neighborhood, is whether or not he will offer her his arm in public. Thus "organized," the company eventually gives its first performance, but not without previously having survived a whole month of utterly burlesque intrigues, thus furnishing an inexhaustible supply of gossip to entertain the entire countryside. This prima recita is the greatest public happening in all thc long, dull existence of thc town concerned -- so momentous indeed, that I can think of nothing in Paris which could offer anything like an adequate comparison. For three weeks on end, eight or ten thousand persons will argue the merits and defects of thc opera with all the powers of sustained concentration with which heaven has seen fit to endow them, and above all, with the maximum force of which their lungs are capable. This premiere, unless blasted at the very outset by some scandal of positively catastrophic dimensions, would normally be followed by some thirty or forty others, at thc conclusion of which the company disbands. A run of this type is usually called a "season" (una stagione); and the best season is that which coincides with the Carnival. Any singers who have not been engaged (scritturati), usually hang about in Bologna or in Milan, where they have theatrical agents who make it their business to secure them contracts, and to rob them unashamedly in the process. […] The critical evening arrives at last. The maestro takes his seat at the piano; the auditorium is stuffed to bursting-point. The crowds have come pouring in from every town and village within twenty miles’ radius; enthusiasts bivouac in their open carriages in thc middle of the streets; the inns have been overflowing ever since the previous day, and the customary Italian courtesy of these establishments is showing a tendency to wear a bit thin. Everyone has downed tools long ago. As the hour of the performance draws near, the town seems like a deserted, hollow shell; the passions, the wavering hopes and fears, the entire life of a whole thriving population is focused upon the theatre. As the overture begins, you could hear a pin drop; as it bangs its way triumphantly to an end, thc din bursts with unbelievable violence. It is extolled to high heaven; or alternately, it is whistled, nay rather howled into eternity with merciless shrieks and ululations. There is no parallel in Paris, where cautious vanity anxiously eyes a neighboring vanity beside it; these are men possessed of seven devils, determined at all costs, by dint of shrieking, stamping and battering with their canes against the backs of the seats in front, to enforce the triumph of their opinion, and above all, to prove that, come what may, none but their opinion is correct; for, in all the world, there is no intolerance like that of a man of artistic sensibility. If ever you chance to meet, in artistic company, an individual who seems fair-minded and reasonable, change the subject quickly; talk to him about history, or about political economy, or about some related topic; for whereas there is every possibility that he may one day turn out to be a distinguished magistrate, a fine doctor, a good husband, an excellent academician, or indeed whatever you will, he can never become a true connoisseur of music or painting. Never. Each aria of the new opera, in its turn, is listened to in perfect silence; after which, the cataclysm is let loose once more; and the bellowing of a storm-tormented sea is nothing but the feeblest comparison. The audience makes its opinion of the singers on the one hand, and of the composer on the other, distinctly audible. There are cries of Bravo Davide! Bravo Pisaroni!, or on other occasions, the whole theatre will echo with daemonic shrieks of Bravo maestro! Rossini rises from his scat at the piano, his handsome face assuming an unwonted expression gravity. He bows thrice, submitting to storms of applause, and deafened by a most unlikely variety of acclamations, for whole sentences of adulation may be flung at his unresisting head; after which, the company proceeds to the next item. Why isn't all music history written like this? But then this isn't music history. It's a contemporary account by one of France's great novelists, who recreates -- doubtless with more than a little exaggeration, and with wonderful digressions -- what musical life had been like in Italy, when he lived there some 20 years earlier. For our purposes, here are the important points: Opera was a commercial proposition. The impresario might have loved the glamor of his position, but he expected to make money. In any case, he had to please his audience (aka his friends, neighbors, and fellow-citizens). Opera was wildly exciting, and was also the only entertainment in town. We might note that there weren't public performances of instrumental music, and that the advanced composers beginning to be recognized in the rest of Europe -- Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven -- were hardly known in Italy. If they were known, they were dismissed as Germanic bores who didn't know how to write a proper melody. Operas had to be written quickly. (In the first two years of his career, Rossini -- who had no other source of income apart from adventures of the kind Stendahl describes -- wrote 14 of them!) So how did composers deal with this? I doubt they planned anything consciously, but the musical forms we find in these operas are perfectly adapted to the situation Stendahl describes. First, there was something called the cabaletta. Every musical number -- every aria, every duet, every large ensemble -- ended with a relatively simple, usually snappy tune, which was repeated. In Rossini's time (as exemplified by the excerpts we listened to from Rossini's L'Italiana in Algeri) these cabalettas tended to be light and bouncy. The composers of the next generation, writing more intense melodramas, made them wildly dramatic, and separated them more from the music that went before. An aria, followed by a cabaletta, is for all practical purposes two arias. (To be technically correct, I should note that cabaletta was a term normally used only for arias and duets. For larger ensembles, the cabaletta was called a stretta. But the musical form was exactly the same.) The cabaletta, with its built-in repeat, helped everyone involved in the enterprise of creating opera. They made opera exciting -- each musical number and each dramatic scene ended with a bang. They made opera easier to write The musical forms didn't change, so composers didn't have to invent something new for each opera. They knew in advance more or less what they were going to write. And thanks to the many repeats, they had less music to create, always a help when you're composing as fast as you can. Cabalettas helped the singers. Thanks to the many repeats, they had less music to learn. And they could ornament the repeats, showing off their vocal ability and maybe also their dramatic skill. Finally, cabalettas helped the audience. They tended to be the catchiest, most easily memorable tunes in any opera. Since they were repeated, the audience had more than one chance to hear them, making the music easier to absorb and enjoy. There were other standard forms in these operas -- for instance, the climactic section of any slow ensemble was almost always repeated. Once again, that meant less music for the composer to write and the singers (plus, let's not forget, the orchestra) to learn. There were other repeated sections, too. I wouldn't be surprised to find that 10 to 15 percent of a typical bel canto opera was made up of repeats. (Though I've never counted measures to check.)   There was also a large-scale formal plan. Normally the prima donna -- the most important member of the opera company -- made her entrance with an aria and cabaletta in the second scene of an opera. Why should she appear right away, when the audience hadn't yet settled down? Better to delay her entrance, and arouse some anticipation. Midway through the opera, at the conclusion of the second act (these operas were usually in three acts) came the most intense dramatic confrontation, leading to an ensemble for all the leading characters. And at the very end of the opera came another grand scene for the prima donna, another aria followed by what was supposed to be the most spectacular cabaletta of all. These rules weren't always followed. The "typical bel canto opera" I so casually referred to a few sentences ago is hard to find. Normally the best composers varied the formula. Bellini's Norma, for instance, ends with the grand ensemble. And Donizetti's familiar Lucia di Lammermoor ends with a scene for the tenor. But it wasn't always easy for composers to break the rules. The singers might give them trouble. Donizetti wanted to end Lucrezia Borgia (once one of his most popular operas) with a duet, instead of a final aria. The original soprano went along with that (though she refused to make her first entrance masked, as the libretto directed). But a subsequent singer in the role wouldn't sing the duet, and Donizetti had to write a conventional final scene for her. In Lucia, the tenor's final aria was simply left out, allowing the opera to end with what conveniently came right before it: Lucia's mad scene, in the usual aria-cabaletta form. So commerce did take its toll. Popularity isn't always easy; you sometimes find yourself forced to do what the audience wants, whether you like it or not. It can't be an accident that the three leading "bel canto" composers all had short careers. Rossini retired at age 35, having made a fortune (he was by far the most popular composer in Europe during the early 19th century, though I doubt you'll read that in many music history books), and seeing no need to write another opera. Bellini fled to Paris, where Rossini also had gone. His early death was probably a coincidence, because he, of all these composers, learned to how work the system to his advantage. He demanded and got only the best singers, and managed to find enough financial support to free him from writing more than one opera a year. Donizetti, however, died relatively young, having written some absurd number of operas. And Verdi -- who outlived this system and helped to overthrow its formulas -- called the early part of his career his "years in the galleys." But then the point of this course is hardly to say that popular music is perfect. The bel canto period shows us a time when classical music really did function much like pop, and the results were, to put it mildly, not all bad. Among much else, there's a wonderful physical exhilaration in most of these works, a verve that sometimes seems to live an independent existence of its own, quite apart from the details of the drama. One sign of this is in orchestration. In excited passages, you'll often find the timpani, bass drums, and cymbals crashing down on every beat -- which, as played by excitable Italians, in orchestras that were smaller and made a thinner sound than the ones we're used to, must have made a wild, uncontrollable racket. I can't resist one musical example. This is the beginning of a cabaletta from Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia, sung on an RCA recording by Montserrat Caballé and Alfredo Kraus. They sound like they're lovers, but in fact they're mother and son (or rather their characters are), though Kraus, the tenor, doesn't know this. He also doesn't know that he's just been poisoned, which is what Caballé tells him as the cabaletta starts. Note the catchy melody, wonderfully sunny for any situation this intense.First she sings it ("Unhappy man! You just drank poison!"), than he does ("I should have known to expect death from the likes of you," or words to that effect).  Then, after she gives him the antidote -- and after some more or less meaningless noise from both orchestra and soloists -- they both sing it. Note also the upsurge of melodrama toward the end of the tune -- during a high note, there's a sudden explosion of scary boogieman chords, which 19th century audiences found almost unbearably exciting. (To locate this moment more precisely: As the melody proceeds, listen for a high note on which nothing special seems to happen. It's the next, very similar high note under which the fireworks start. They would have been much more obvious to a 19th century audience than they might be now.) Mozart and His Paris Symphony Here I'll refer you to a page I created for another website I once maintained. It's flashier than this one -- it's got pictures! More to the point, though, it gives you the full story of Mozart's Paris adventure, how he wrote a symphony, calculated that a certain passage would make the audience applaud, and was gratified to see that, indeed, they burst into cheers -- right in the middle of the music! We don't know which passage it was, so I created synthesizer versions of three possibilities, which you can hear with a single mouse click. If you find the spacing of the instruments odd, with the winds far to the left, welcome to Paris in 1778 -- I followed a diagram in Neal Zaslaw's book on Mozart's symphonies, and placed the instruments where they actually sat for that Paris performance. I asked the class to guess which passage it was, and there wasn't much agreement. I'll stick with my own choice, because it's the closest thing in the symphony to rock & roll -- or, in other words, to the kind of music we can watch arousing people enough so they jump up and yell. Maybe the audience was more sophisticated then, which must be what the conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt.and the musicologist Stanley Sadie must think, since they suggested two possibilities for the exciting passage, and picked relatively quiet music. Mozart, however, thought the Paris audience didn't have much taste -- more evidence, maybe, that my more rambunctious choice is the right one. One last word on Mozart. He had a strong but only partial success with his Paris symphony, as you'll read. The first and last movements worked, but the man who produced the concert thought the slow movement was over his audience's head. Mozart often found himself in that position, caught between the demands of popularity -- and career success -- and his own musical instincts. His father wanted him to be an unabashed popular composer; he himself thought he could finesse the question, by writing popular works with extra depth lying just beneath the surface, for connoisseurs to detect. But he was wrong. The depths were there, but the easy popular surface wasn't. Just as his father had feared, his career suffered. Does that mean that classical music isn't popular after all, or rather that the demands of popularity will always be at war with art? Maybe, but the important thing to understand is that people in pop music debate the question as well. In fact, Mozart strikes me as a perfect example of something Robert Christgau (a very famous rock critic (and my editor when I was a columnist for the Village Voice) used to talk about -- "semipopular music."  That, Bob likes to say, describes his own taste. He likes music created in popular styles, but with enough obvious depth to make it sometimes difficult for a mass audience. Doesn't that precisely describe Mozart's work -- written in a style that brought other composers great success, but with special qualities that made it too difficult for much of his potential audience? How Would We Feel? Having established that Mozart's audience applauded during the music, I had to ask: How would we feel today if that happened? The question was aimed particularly to the students, all of whom, after all, are performers. How would they feel if their audience didn't wait for the end of a piece to applaud? Opinions, to say the least, varied. "I think it would be great," one student said. "It gives you confidence to know they're listening," said another. "I hate it when they're just sitting there," said a third, "with everyone saying 'shh! shh!" "I love when the audience claps even before it's over," someone else offered, though maybe this isn't quite the same phenomenon. To cover the last few crashing chords with applause is one thing, not unknown in concert halls today; clapping literally in the middle because you've heard a tune you like is something most of us have never seen at a classical concert. One student, finally, summed up what seemed to be the longing behind all these "yes" votes: "I live for knowing that the audience cares." Clearly, for some students in this class the silence of the concert hall seems more like a ritual than an expression of genuine interest. On the other side, though, were some even stronger comments. Tell the audience to clap while the music is still playing? "That would be like saying sic 'em to a dog." Said someone else: "Then they'd boo if they didn't like it." (But would that be bad?) More sternly, someone said, "Classical music is meant to be listened to with attention and patience." Added someone else, "It's not appropriate for the audience to be involved." "It would be bad etiquette if this became part of tradition," offered yet another voice. More practically, someone noted that "applause after a virtuoso passage would cover what comes next." And that could well be a problem. In classical music -- as opposed, let's say, to most jazz or pop -- there are lots of changes of texture, mood, and dynamics. These are part of the logic of a work, or, if you prefer, of its narrative. Cover those changes with applause, and maybe you lose the thread of the music. Some of the "yes" voters, though, had counterarguments. "An audience afraid to applaud is just as bad," someone said. And as the discussion went on, people got less polarized, and started making more subtle points. One student, for instance, gave a highly personal reason for opposing mid-movement applause, describing something that's not a matter of tradition or etiquette, but which matters to him deeply as a performer, "I like to get in a zone when I play," he said, "and separate myself from the audience." "The reaction," someone else said, "changes with the age of the audience." A younger audience, in other words, might applaud more. (Certainly younger people at classical concerts -- including Juilliard students -- tend to whoop, just as they'd do if they were hearing rock.) "The audience wouldn't cheer at soft sections," one student said, very thoughtfully, if you ask me. "They'd cheer at fortissimos." Which led me to try to sum things up, or at least to give my own view. To me, it's not an either-or proposition. Some music in the classical repertory was written and premiered in an age when the audience was demonstrative, even rowdy. Isn't that part of the point I've been trying to make in these initial classes? Other music, though, was written with very different expectations -- Mahler symphonies, to give one obvious example. Maybe the role of the audience is, at least to some extent, hard-wired (so to speak) into various scores. Certainly Italian opera feels incomplete without applause, while, just as surely, applause in the middle of a Mahler symphony would make no sense. (When the Los Angeles Philharmonic played Mahler's 3d at Lincoln Center last season, they mismanaged the soloist's entrance. They paused the performance to let her walk on stage, glamorous in a shimmering blue gown, before she started to sing. The audience applauded her, and the spell of the music was broken.) Maybe, with a little training, audiences might learn that they can applaud during the music in a Handel opera, or a Mozart symphony. (At least in the earlier ones.) After all, we've all learned to rise during the "Hallelujah" chorus, and not to clap at all after the first and last acts of Parsifal. And maybe it's the job of performers to create the proper mood, a warm, lively, welcoming mood for music that invites audience participation, and to give compelling reasons for silence in music where applause wouldn't be appropriate. Next week: We begin the history of rock.