‘The inequality of audience experience is intrinsic to the performing arts’

From a republished New Yorker essay by the sorely-missed Janet Malcolm;

…Our seats were not in the Grand Tier—which was the third level of seats, above the orchestra and boxes—but on the fourth level, called the Dress Circle, above which rose two more tiers, the Balcony and the Family Circle. I once sat in the vertiginous top tier; the voices of the singers carried, though they were themselves barely visible, tiny doll-like figures ridiculously gesticulating. They came into better view on the Dress Circle level, but were still too far away to register as the characters they were representing. You could only make out their expressions with the aid of opera glasses…

The inequality of audience experience is intrinsic to the performing arts and unique to them. Literature and painting and sculpture are mediums of equal opportunity. A rich reader’s experience of “Anna Karenina” is no more intense than a poor one’s. The hedge-fund owner and the secretary see exactly the same “Raft of the Medusa.” But only the hedge-fund owner gets to see the expression on Azucena’s face when she relives throwing the wrong baby into the fire….

Read the full essay here.

Janet Malcolm died on June 16, 2021.