Sweetbags war breaks out at a Mahler concert
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norman lebrecht
October 16, 2018
From the Danish paper, Politiken (roughly translated):
Something unusual happened during a classical concert in Malmö on Thursday when a woman repeatedly crackled her sweets bag during the Adagietto of Mahler’s fifth symphony.
A man who had clashed with her before, took the bag from her hands and threw it on the floor. The woman stood up and squared up to him until they were separated.
More here.
UPDATE: It gets spicier.
The moment the music stopped, however, she took her revenge.
“When the applause broke out, the woman turned towards the man and said something,” Britt Aspenlind, who was sitting two rows behind the pair, told the newspaper. “The woman gave the younger man a slap right in his face. He became angry and started fighting back.”
Another witness said that the blow had been powerful enough to knock the man’s glasses from his face. The woman’s companion, an older man, then seized him by his shirt, and began to throw punches in his direction.
Olof Jönsson, who was sitting in the row behind, described the onslaught as “a violent attack”. “It was very unpleasant actually. I’ve never seen anything like it,” he told Sydsvenskan.
This almost makes Mahler exciting enough to sit through. Who won the scuffle?
Honestly, the crackling of a sweets bag would improve the listen-ability of most Mahler (with the exception of the first symphony).
You can bore faster, deeper, and more excitingly if you use a boring it and it a file.
Should say boring but
bit?
No class
A report in Swedish backed up by a paywall did it for me, I’m afraid. Nice to know that people get so emotional about quality music, though.
Many years ago when we did Mahler 9, apparently a man in the audience hit the woman in front of him with his rolled-up program book because she wouldn’t stop talking.
I’d say it’s the bum wrap(er).
Oh, and another one: I once sat down the row from a woman at a recital of Bach cello suites. She crinkled her cellophane candy wrappers non-stop throughout the entire G major suite… but paused between movements.
We live in a time when superficiality trumps entering into the deeper “meaning” of “the arts.” There is now an app that allows you to compose “classical music”. With 4 or 6 buttons attached to a computer. The only thing that makes something “great” is transcending technique, letting go. It’s easy to make fun of this—just as it is easy to make fun of quantum mechanics—but what we can’t explain, what draws us “in,” is what makes us bothered by the inappropriate sound. Would one object to an extraneous sound during a lecture by Trump. No. It is part of the total experience. Trump will never reach transcendence, but the crinkling sound is part of the transcendent musical experience. It is different from the one without it, but it is there—and musical. Cf. John Cage
Scuffle could have been fitting to accompany the 4th movement of the Mahler 1st.
Ironic, given Mahler’s prominent role in creating the current straitjacketed conventions of concert-going.