by the Melos Chorus, technical-scientific committee
Final applause at an opera performance, Savonlinna festival. Via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA).
There is a moment of social terror every new listener knows: the music stops, the hands itch, and half the hall shoots a glare at whoever dared to clap between one movement and the next. Here is what that glarer doesn’t know: for nearly the whole history of music, applause mid-piece was not only allowed, it was the sign that things were going well.
The sources are unambiguous. Mozart, describing to his father the premiere of the Paris Symphony in 1778, rejoices because the audience applauded in the middle of the first movement, in a passage he had written precisely to wring out that reaction, and he reports the custom of clapping during the performance as an obvious fact. At the premiere of Beethoven’s Seventh, the second movement was encored on the spot; at the opera before the Toscanini revolution people applauded the high note, the aria, the scene, and the encore mid-performance was the currency of success. Total silence between movements is a recent construction: it arises between the late nineteenth and the twentieth century, with the sanctification of the concert, and hardens after the war, when the record trains the ear to works with no audience inside them.
That said, the Melos Chorus is not here to preach a free-for-all. The silence between movements protects one good thing for real: certain architectures live on a passage without applause, and a burst of clapping after the third movement of the Pathétique, before the slow finale, kills exactly what Tchaikovsky built. The point is something else: the difference between a rule and an etiquette. The rule serves the music; etiquette serves to recognise who is in the know, and when the second takes the place of the first, the concert becomes the exam we have already abolished.
So the magazine’s official position is this: whoever applauds in the wrong place has erred out of enthusiasm, which is the only error a concert hall should welcome with gratitude. The conductor who turns around smiling and signals with a gesture to wait for the finale educates better than a hundred dirty looks. And if a movement was overwhelming, the spontaneous applause that breaks out is a living historical document: for an instant, the hall has gone back to 1778, when music was a conversation and not a Mass. Mozart, from wherever he listens, is clapping along with you.