Elitist? Moi?
Last night I went to my former place of employment to see a stunning performance of Shostakovich 7 by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra under Mariss Jansons. While there I met one of my former colleagues who told me about an amusing incident she had witnessed a few weeks before, when the Vienna Phil were in town playing Mozart:
Patron comes storming out of hall at interval and approaches Jan (my friend) looking purposeful.
PATRON - I paid a lot of money for these tickets you know.
JAN - I’m sorry madam, what seems to be the problem?
P - Well I didn’t pay all that money to see a REDUCED orchestra! (storms off in a huff)
J - (speechless)
When people accuse classical music of being “elitist”, what kind of elite are they talking about exactly? The intellectual elite? Not on the evidence of the person described above. The financial elite? No - my ticket last night, for one of the greatest orchestras in the world, cost me £12. I’d be lucky to get in to see Arsenal or Chelsea for three times that, and yet the “elitist” accusations are never levelled at Premiership football. “Too expensive”, maybe, but that’s a separate argument entirely.
If they’re talking about a social elite, then I fail to understand this argument either. In our society, such a barrier only exists if it is artificially created by the same people it is presumed to exclude. Music, in whatever form, has always been primarily for popular entertainment and edification - Shostakovich certainly wasn’t writing for any kind of social elite.
I’ve never had any problem appreciating classical music, so maybe I’m missing something. But it seems clear to me that if one of the “elite” fails to appreciate that the orchestra for the “Jupiter” Symphony is necessarily smaller than for the “Leningrad” Symphony, then there might be something in there for us all to learn. I’ll let you know when I figure out what it is.
Another one of Jan’s fantastic patron stories - a few years ago at an ENO performance of Carmen, a venerable gentleman behind was heard to say “It’s translated from the Italian, you know”.
