from the Melos Chorus, technical and scientific committee
Arturo Toscanini in Milan, 1953. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
This magazine admires Arturo Toscanini without reservation, and that is exactly why it can afford the sentence that follows: with him, musical theatre became a museum, and we still live inside that museum.
Before Toscanini the opera house was a living organism, and a rather rowdy one. People applauded mid-aria, demanded encores, cut, added, adapted the score to the evening and the singers. The repertoire was a flow: new works were devoured, titles aged and disappeared. Toscanini, with a moral determination nobody had had before, imposed the rules that now seem to us the eternal etiquette of classical music: you perform what is written, all of it, with no cuts and no encores; the house lights go down; the audience is silent from beginning to end; the masterpiece is not touched. They are right rules, one by one. Added together, they changed the nature of the place: the theatre stopped being a public square and began to be a display case.
We measure the result every night. The repertoire has closed: the ranking has frozen around the same fifty titles, and the youngest opera among those that fill the world’s houses has just turned a hundred. But the subtler damage is another, and it is psychological. In front of a display case we behave like visitors: we fear touching, we fear getting it wrong, above all we fear not being up to it. This is where the sentence that anyone working in music has heard repeated for decades is born: I don’t understand classical music. No one says that of a film or a novel. It is said of music because the museum, with its liturgy, has convinced three generations that you need to pass an exam to get in.
The position of Melos is known and we repeat it: there is no exam. The audience does not have to understand, it has to let itself be carried away; understanding, if it comes, is an additional pleasure, not an admission ticket. And the museum is not to be torn down, it is to be opened: display cases are perfectly fine for conserving, provided that beside them there is the workshop that produces the repertoire of the day after tomorrow. Toscanini handed the twentieth century scores finally respected: our task is to hand the century an audience finally at ease. The two loyalties do not exclude each other. Indeed, the second is the grown-up way of honouring the first.