Applause is the kiss of death, Arthur said. They might as well be saying, I didn’t hear a note you played. You can feel it in your hands. Bring them together, bam-bam-bam, until they’re numb. Numb: key word. It’s a white noise that replaces the noise the performer makes, like they’re erasing what they’ve just heard. Numbing their ears, numbing their minds. God forbid they let the experience linger. It might — gasp! — actually have an effect on them. And they wouldn’t want that. This is supposed to be a nice, quote ‘evening out.’ Wouldn’t want to spoil things.
But who are you imagining, I said. I think you underestimate people’s desire to be moved. This audience of yours, they’re caricatures. What about me? I mean, I’m in the audience. Our composition teacher’s in the audience. We’re listening to your performance and are moved. And so we clap. It’s the only response available to us to show our appreciation.
My point is about politeness. It’s the death of art. You may be applauding out of genuine appreciation, but the guy next to you, maybe he didn’t particularly care for me, but he doesn’t want to appear rude, so he applauds, and by adding his applause to yours, he’s devalued it, canceled it out.
Then what would you have me do?
It’s not about what I’d have you do, it’s what I’d have your neighbor do. It wasn’t always like this. Think of Gluck, what the reception at the premiere of Iphigenia must have been like. These people were barbarians. I don’t even think they had seats back then. The guy behind you slopping his mead onto your shoulder, fist-fights, if you had to piss you did it in the corner. Do you think they clapped politely if they didn’t particularly like what they heard?
You’re thinking of Elizabethan theater. Gluck was Vienna, the Enlightenment. Your average Hans didn’t go to the opera. It was strictly the powdered-wig crowd.
Then Monteverdi, Orpheus, if you want Elizabethan times. Fine, or a more recent example, Le Sacre du Printemps.
May 1913. Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris. Stravinsky’s savage rhythms and Nijinsky’s flat-footed rendition of the pagan rites of rural Russia provoke catcalls from the audience. Fellow composer in attendance Camille Saint-Saëns storms out. Supporters shout for the catcallers to sit down, and the catcallers tell the supporters to shut the hell up, and soon enough a punch is thrown, followed by an aisle brawl. The scene, astonishingly, degenerates into a full-scale riot. Stravinsky slips out the back door just as the Paris police are arriving to restore order.
That’s real, Arthur said. That’s honest. A standing ovation from that crowd would be something to be proud of. But these days, a standing ovation is meaningless. It’s gotten so an ovation is expected of any performance that doesn’t go horribly awry. How absurd is that? Go see Sacre at the City Ballet today, and I guarantee you five out of five performances get a standing ovation. Why? Have the performances gotten that much better? Or the music itself? Has our intrepid composition teacher given a private ear stretching to each audience member so she can appreciate Stravinsky better? Hardly. They’re standing and clapping because it’s expected. You say it’s all one big dare game with modern music, that composers are alienating their audiences at a time when we should be cultivating them, but this code of manners, this politeness, is smothering art, and composers are just trying to fight for their survival. That’s why we’re pushing pianos off stages, why we prefer the riot to the ovation. The riot has become the ovation of the twentieth century. At least it’s honest.
You’re telling me that if you win this competition, when you get up there on that stage and perform, you don’t want people to clap?
I want people to be honest. Anyway, they’d be clapping for my performance, not for Mozart.
What about your cadenza, I ask. (That moment in a concerto where the orchestra stops playing, and the soloist, freed from the baton’s constraints — freed even from the composer’s constraints — is given space to let loose, to show his stuff. It’s an open hole in the score, to be filled by the performer. Way back when, it had been an improvised flourish less than a minute long, though throughout the ages this practice has devolved into lengthy, shameless displays of virtuosity. Rarely improvised anymore, these spots that composers once left blank have been filled in by transcriptions of legacy performances — Paganini, Heifetz, Kreisler — included in modern editions; and, although marked “optional” most often they were performed verbatim.)
I said, I assume you’re not planning on performing one of those store-bought cadenzas, are you?
I wasn’t planning to, he said. No.
So you’re telling me that when writing your own cadenza, you’re going to go for the riot and not the ovation?
Maybe I should, he said.
Mozart’s Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, K271a. Odd choice for someone counting on winning this competition. Of the dozen violinists on the roster, half are playing Mozart violin concertos. Arthur is one of three this year auditioning with the Seventh; and both of the others study in the same studio with Arthur. He isn’t exactly making himself heard with his choice of repertoire.
But the moment Arthur’s bow touches string, it is clear why he’s chosen the piece all the other violinists are playing: he’s encouraging comparison. The difference is so clear, so sharp, as to surprise one into a new awareness about the nature of greatness. Arthur’s control is astonishing. His pianissimi a throaty whisper, his fortissimos a roar. His sound is a personality all to itself, a presence that seems to hover somewhere between the top of his head and the grand, twinkling chandelier. Whereas with the previous player each gesture was a reminder of a technique perfectly mastered, Arthur’s playing is somehow beyond technique and manages that contradictory illusion of making the impossible seem effortless. It is as though Arthur is displaying some essential mystery of music’s unalterable truth, a truth the other player’s fastidious attention to technique all but obscured.
Holy moly, Pei-Yee whispers, crouched in her seat, this guy’s good!
By the end of the first movement, there isn’t a single person in that concert hall not held rapt by his sound. If I am any measure of what the rest of the contestants are feeling right then, Arthur won to a collective capitulation.
When he is done, there is a moment of awestruck silence. I’m thinking of the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, when the mother ship lands and everyone watches this perfect glowing being emerge, ending once and for all any doubts any of them still might have had. That is who we have in our midst. Or maybe it’s just the opposite. Maybe before us is the only real native of a land in which the rest of us — including the judges — are aliens. The only one among us who can speak the language fluently.
I tell Pei-Yee that I have to use the bathroom (Wait, I think you’re next!) and go to my practice room and gather my things. My mother is surprised to see me home so early but is glad for the extra hand and enlists me in helping her with dinner.
And dare I ask how the contest went?
The best man won, I say. Unfortunately, that man turned out not to be me.
The previous year mourned the fluke loss of the ASO’s entire cello section: six of its most advanced players to graduation, the principal to our more prestigious Midtown rival, and Mischa — who’d been doubling his shot at a college scholarship as his school’s star forward on the basketball court — to a broken forefinger, out for the season. This has meant a begrudging promotion of most of our rank from the intermediate orchestra, at least until the school could recruit some better cellists. I used to sit in the back row and fake my way through silently, timing my bow movements with the fellows in front of me. Here, in the advanced orchestra, this strategy has failed.