A contemporary newspaper cartoon caricaturing the ‘Scandalkonzert’ April 1913 riot. Illustration: Wikimedia

Vienna, March 31st, 1913. Arnold Schoenberg conducted a programme of his own Chamber Symphony, music by his pupils Alban Berg and Anton Webern (Berg’s Altenberg Lieder and Webern’s Six Pieces for Orchestra) as well as Zemlinsky’s Four Orchestral Songs and Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder. Lovely stuff. Except they never got to the Mahler in the golden hall of the Musikverein: shouts during Berg’s piece that the composer should be committed to a lunatic asylum (Altenberg, the poet, already was) descended into physical altercations between Berg’s supporters and his opponents. The reason? The works of Schoenberg and his cohorts were heard as symptomatic of neurosis and hyper-emotional pathology rather than actual “music” in conservative Vienna. The concert’s organiser Erhard Buschbeck’s pugilistic contribution against one of the aesthetically offended patrons was called “the most harmonious sound of the evening” at a subsequent lawsuit by conservative composer Oscar Straus.

Another city, another lawsuit: Erik Satie’s - and Jean Cocteau’s, and Pablo Picasso’s, and Léonide Massine’s – multi-media spectacular, the ballet Parade in Paris in 1917 was a succès de scandale, which inspired the first printed use of the word “surrealism” in the poet Apollinaire’s description of the evening. The work scandalised the Parisian public because of its flagrant disregard for the “rules” of high culture, and especially the conventions of ballet and ballet music. Satie’s score includes parts for foghorn, typewriter and milk-bottles, and Picasso’s cardboard costumes gave the dancers hardly any room to physically move. At the premiere at the Châtelet theatre, the audience booed, hissed, threw oranges - and were shouted down by e.e.cummings, who was also in the audience - and one member of the public even slapped Satie. But what happened afterwards was even juicier. Satie sent a critic who’d slated the music a series of postcards telling him he was “an arse, an arse without music!” The critic took him to court for libel, and Satie was jailed for eight days. “Arse” indeed.

But the most famous riot of them all is Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, which happened just a month after that riot in Vienna, in May 1913. As well as the notorious events that accompanied the Ballets Russes’ performance at the Champs-Elysées Theatre - the sound that drowned out the orchestra, the insults thrown by supporter and opponents - recent thinking about the “riot” suggests that much of the violence of the claqueurs was probably premeditated than a spontaneous reaction to the music they were hearing and the dance, by Nijinsky, that they were watching. But there’s no doubt the Rite really was a major stushie, and the myth that it’s the daddy of all classical music protests in history continues. That’s partly, I think, because the physicality and mechanicity of Stravinsky’s music produces such animalistic passions in us all that you feel it is capable of catalysing raw, primeval, riotous emotions in any audience.



Infamous as the Rite is, that’s nothing compared to Daniel Auber’s opera La Muette de Portici. Here’s what Wagner wrote about this now-neglected work, considered the first “Grand Opera” in France at its premiere in 1828. The opera “whose very representation had brought [revolutions] about, was recognised as an obvious precursor of the July Revolution [in 1830 in France], and seldom has an artistic product stood in closer connection with a world-event”. There’s more: a performance of La Muette de Portici in Brussels in August 1830 actually inspired the fight for Belgian independence. The opera’s story of Neapolitan independence from Spanish rule was the spark that lit the Belgian bleu-touch-paper, as the audience stormed out of the La Monnaie opera house, fired up with patriotic, nationalistic fervour, and took over government buildings themselves.

More politics in the opera house, in Venice in April 1961. The scene at the opera house of La Fenice is the premiere of Luigi Nono’s music-theatrical cry of protest and sympathy for the oppressed peoples of the world, Intolleranza 1960. But the performance - with Bruno Maderna conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra - was disrupted by the Italian right wing, who put themselves on the side of the oppressors with shouts of “Viva la polizia” during the work’s torture scene. Nono’s music was then denounced by the country’s neo-fascists. Half a century on, Intolleranza has triumphed thanks to the power of Nono’s music, and its political and human message has never seemed more essential.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Géricault’s 1819 painting The Raft of the Medusa Photograph: Wikimedia

At least Intolleranza actually was performed, sort of. In December 1968 in Hamburg, Hans Werner Henze was preparing for the concert premiere of his oratorio The Raft of the Medusa, based on the story of the French frigate that ran aground in West Africa in 1816. Reflecting Henze’s left-wing sympathies - the piece was composed as a requiem for Che Guevara - students hung a poster of Che on the conductor’s podium, while others put up the Red Flag. Anarchists in turn put up the black flag, and with Henze and his soloists already on stage, the police were brought in to remove the students from the auditorium. Henze said that the police had made the performance impossible. Instead he led the audience in a chant of “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh!”, and left the stage.

British protests are liable to seem less dramatic in comparison with these dramatic interventions, but a year later at the 1969 Proms, Peter Maxwell Davies conducted the premiere of his Worldes Blis with the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall, and faced an audience who protested with their feet, loudly and grumpily leaving the performance, shocked at hearing a work of high modernist ambition, scale, and expressive intensity when they were presumably expecting a nice comforting wallow in familiar Proms favourites. The Times’s Stanley Sadie gave them a stern rebuke, saying they were people who were “revelling in their closed ears”. And to your open ears today, you might wonder what on earth the protest was about. Far from the dissonant iconoclasm you might expect, the offended several in the Royal Albert Hall missed out on a masterpiece: the lyrical epic sweep of Worldes Blis makes it one of Max’s finest orchestral pieces.



But arguably the Proms’ greatest new-music controversy - partly because it’s become a bit of a myth, too, like all the best stories - is the performance of Harrison Birtwistle’s Panic at the Last Night of the Proms in 1995. The niceties of stage moves and other such practicalities meant that the Proms’ Director John Drummond had to programme Panic in the second half, just before the tubs of Land of Hope and Glory, etc, etc, etc, were ceremonially thumped. While there were no real protests in the hall itself on the night, there certainly were the morning after from among the millions who had seen it on TV. “A disgrace and an insult to the British public”, was the general consensus. “Was somebody strangling a cat?” asked others. An ironic, green-ink-brigade vindication of both Birtwistle and Drummond, then.



New York’s operatic community has exercised its right to censor the obscenities and potential offensiveness of contemporary works at the start of both the 20th and 21st centuries: in 1907, it was Richard Strauss’s Salome that felt the ire and dudgeon of the Metropolitan Opera’s audiences and patrons. The era’s most controversial opera, with its necrophilia, sensuality and blood-curdled chromaticism, was cancelled after just one show. Edward Elgar, who was in town at the time, refused to side with the protesters, saying that Strauss was “the greatest genius of the age”.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Protesters engage people thought to be ticket holders as they demonstrate against the staging of John Adams’s Death of Klinghoffer at the Metropolitan Opera, New York. Photograph: Craig Ruttle/AP

Proving that protests continue in our own time, the Met was again the scene of discontent in October this year, when performances of John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer were picketed outside the theatre. The demonstrations were only the latest chapter in the polemical history of Adams’s opera about the murder of the disabled American Jewish tourist Leon Klinghoffer during the hijacking of the Achille Lauro in 1985. Whatever else the protests demonstrate, they show that classical music still has an inflammatory power in contemporary culture.

