human behavior and relationships. These assumptions concern not only what takes place in the building but go deep into the nature of human relationships themselves.
CHAPTER 2
A Thoroughly Contemporary Affair
As we wait for the orchestra to assemble on the stage, it is worth taking a look behind the scenes in the hall. A concert hall is a very complex place, and just to contemplate the technology and the logistics of the events that take place here can tell us much about their nature.
Very little takes place here spontaneously. Every event needs a great deal of planning and organization, both inside the hall and outside it; and an extensive infrastructure, most of it invisible to the audience, has to be brought into action if the event is to take place at all. In the first place, programs have to be planned and artists engaged well in advance of the concert. These days artists who have drawing power are probably members of the international jet set and may have to be engaged as much as years ahead.
This is quite unlike the situation that prevailed in Europe up to well into the nineteenth century, when a musician might arrive in a town or city, contact some of the musically most influential people there, and arrange a series of concerts, all within a matter of days. There were even handbooks for traveling musicians, giving the names of such people; the composer Carl Maria von Weber compiled one in the 1820s for every town of any size in Germany. No musician would give a whole concert on his own; local performers, amateur and professional, would be called in to collaborate and possibly the local orchestra with whom he would play a concerto of his own composition, the orchestra playing generally at sight or with at most a single rehearsal. Among the first to give entire solo performances was Franz Liszt, in the 1840s, who at first called them “monoconcerts” before settling on the term more familiar to us, “recital.”
Artists with the kind of charisma that gives them real drawing power today would appear to be as scarce as diamonds and as hard to cultivate as orchids. The critic Norman Lebrecht (1991) notes that the shortage of star conductors is becoming a real problem for orchestras today, with a consequent inflation in fees. But orchids thrive in the rain forest without human assistance, and diamonds lie around in many places waiting to be picked up; in the same way one is led to wonder if the scarcity of stars is not created and maintained artificially. If the number of young aspirants emerging from music colleges and conservatories every year, possessing technical powers that would make Liszt or Paganini blench and trying to gain entry to the major concert circuits, is an indication, there would appear to be no shortage of musical talent across the concert and operatic world; indeed, the problem seems to be the opposite, that of finding gainful employment for this overabundance of talent and skill.
It is obvious that virtuosi and those who profit from their labors should have an interest in keeping their numbers low; as with diamonds and orchids, it is scarcity that creates their value. In this they are no different from the members of all professions, whose requirements in terms of entry qualifications are designed as much to protect the status of the profession and to maintain the price of their services by restricting numbers as they are to protect the public.
There are plenty of mechanisms for restricting entrance to the big-time concert circuit. Competitions are one; although they purport to function as devices for the discovery and nurture of talent, they in fact operate in the precisely opposite direction; no young artist these days can hope to gain entry to the big time without having been taken up by a major agency, and no major agency will touch a young artist who has not gained at least a second place in a major competition. As the number of competitions is limited, so also is the number of winners; and since competitions are a zero- sum game, for every winner there have to be losers. Those losers, unless they undergo some miraculous stroke of good fortune, are consigned to the minor circuits—although those today are rapidly shrinking because of the dominance of megabuck agencies that are interested only in stars—or to teaching, arts administration, criticism and other such fallback occupations. For every young artist who makes it to the big time there must be dozens at least who are just as good or who, since success breeds success, would be just as good if they were to receive the encouragement and experience that working in the big time brings.
As an aside, we note also that competitions by their nature favor those who are at their best in a highly competitive situation. The reticent pianistic genius Clifford Curzon once remarked in an interview that he would not have got to first base if he had been required to enter a competition; fortunately for us he belonged to the precompetition era. On the other hand, I remember hearing some years ago the winner of a BBC young conductors’ competition, when interviewed on TV in the first flush of his success, announcing, rather truculently I thought, “Up to now I’ve been competing with others. From now on I’m competing with myself.” It is in this way that the culture gets the artists it deserves.
There is plenty of evidence of manipulation by major agencies of the market in virtuosi. Over the past few years there has been a series of takeovers of of artists’ agencies by megabuck operators, resulting in a small number of superagents who virtually control the market. This has resulted in an outrageous inflation of fees for a few star conductors and soloists while the orchestras they conduct and with which they play frequently teeter on the edge of bankruptcy—a process in which the stars themselves have for the most part cheerfully colluded.
In addition, a conductor’s agency will often put pressure on him to employ as soloists artists who are on their books, to the point that those agencies have some of the world’s major orchestras and opera houses virtually sewn up, not only for live performance but also for recordings and videos. In view of the fact that these orchestras are generally subsidized by public money, the channeling of so much of that money into the pockets of these stars, and of course of their handlers, might seem morally questionable, but it is no more than normal business practice in the contemporary world of unregulated “market values.” It does emphasize the extent to which concert halls partake of the nature of that world and do not exist in isolation from it. Here, as elsewhere in the modern world, it is the passing of money that mediates relationships.
Putting together programs for a concert season is also subject to a number of constraints. The first is that most concert artists today, and to some extent conductors, have at the tips of their fingers, vocal cords or batons, ready to play or sing or even to conduct at any one time, only a relatively small repertory, and they are reluctant to spend time learning anything outside it, especially if it is to be for only one or a few performances. In addition, for many artists the choice of works is to a large extent dictated by their own management, which is naturally interested in having them please as large a public as possible.
The second is that the repertory of works that will today attract a sizable audience virtually froze around the time of the First World War, and little that has appeared since then carries the appeal for the average audience that earlier works do. There is thus only a finite number of pieces to be shared by a large number of virtuosi and orchestras, and the hall’s management naturally does not want a series of performers all playing the same works night after night. The number of performances of even, say, Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto or Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony that can be accommodated in a season is limited.
Third, there is the question of the availability of scores and sets of orchestral parts. With the great warhorses there is no problem; most orchestral managements either have their own or rent them on a permanent loan basis. But with less often played works, publishers are usually prepared to print only a limited number of copies for their hire library; and with symphony concerts an international business extending over every continent no orchestra can afford to program a work from a publisher’s hire library without checking well beforehand—and that may mean months or even years ahead—that the score and orchestral parts will be available for rehearsals
