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Do Rowdy Audiences Ruin Opera?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
We took the plunge and it worked as well as hoped. Thursday at 10 a.m., I took my daughter to her first opera, the hour-long matinee of Atlanta Opera’s “Hansel and Gretel.”
The main floor and lower balcony of the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre were packed with students (and their chaperons). I had the uncanny feeling that I’d been transported back a century or two, to before those “golden rules of audience etiquette” helped shackle people’s behavior of live performances.
The kids at the opera, mine included, fidgeted and gabbed during the uneventful parts, gasped at the startling turn of events — the Witch strutting out of her candy house — and let loose unfettered cheers for their favorites. All this is the historical norm for opera, except there were no food vendors hawking snacks up and down the aisles during the performance.
What’s clear at a children’s matinee is that the performers are working for the audience, whereas at too many typical concerts you get the feeling the audience is there to support the musicians on stage as much for purely hedonistic reasons. Me, I’m with the hedonists.
The show also got me to recall my own first opera — “Carmen” — and, a few months later, a mind-blowing school field trip to the concert hall, where “Ride of the Walkyries” was taken apart and reassembled. First the conductor had the strings gallop through their hoofs-in-the-mist figures, then the hefty brass bellowed the main tune, then they put it back together. It was an electrifying moment for me then, and remains a sort of touchstone for the indescribable power of classical music to grab one impressionable listener and never let go.
How many kids Thursday walked out of the theater at 11 a.m. with a glimpse of a different world? How many will be hooked?
What, and where, was your first concert? Was it a chore, a joy, an intriguing event?
Permalink | Comments (5) | Categories: Classical Music
Comments
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By JB
November 16, 2007 7:13 AM | Link to this
Don’t forget to take the air horn when you go.
By Jim
November 16, 2007 7:52 AM | Link to this
Couldn’t tell you……the only opera I’m familiar with is the one in that famous Bugs Bunny cartoon
By Tim
November 17, 2007 11:26 AM | Link to this
No audiences ruin opera!
By Tim
November 17, 2007 11:32 AM | Link to this
What is this? Is this the fifth or sixth AJC article about Hansel and Gretel? Aren’t there other things going on in town that need coverage? You can’t review all of the ASO performances, but you can spend time and resources publishing this many articles centered around such a lame show??!!! Damn.
By Tishia
November 19, 2007 3:19 PM | Link to this
I was also at the matinee. I spoke with some of the children’s chorus and one stated that he enjoyed the more rowdy audience because sometimes they wonder if the crowd really “gets” what’s happening if they don’t gasp or laugh or respond. That said, there was a very loud child/baby who cried through the entire finale. Enthusiasm cannot ruin the opera, but rudeness can.