As a concert-going audience, we can do better

The French rule is that only a person embracing you should be able to smell your perfume.

No, I’m not French. And I don’t wear perfume. But I do read the concert programs handed out at the St. Lawrence Centre by Music Toronto.

And in a full page devoted to concert etiquette, you will find information on how to smell and sound when the lights go down and the music starts.

You may think such a guide unnecessary, even insulting. But it isn’t. Almost everyone comes to a concert hall toilet-trained. But how many these days arrive concert-trained?

It is my theory, for example, that people at concerts hear the noise others make while ignoring the noise they make.

“Please don’t crumple your programs or other papers, play with stiff rattling plastic bags, zip and unzip jackets or purses, play with Velcro fasteners,” Music Toronto pleads. “Please don’t chat with your neighbour, hum along, beat time to the music . . .”

I have witnessed all of the above. At a Toronto Symphony Orchestra concert I’ve not only heard cellphones ring, I once saw a woman take a call and start talking midway through a piece of music until those around her threatened reprisals.

Symphony audiences are becoming increasingly democratized, which is good, and increasingly noisy, which is bad. Poor maestro Donald Runnicles even tried — without much success — holding up his hands to stop his Toronto Symphony listeners from applauding between the movements of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony.

I know some people feel impelled to clap whenever the music stops, but it really does shatter the mood.

Granted, it is sometimes the composer’s own fault. Tchaikovsky built the first movement of his B-flat minor Piano Concerto toward such a rousing climax that the music virtually begs for applause and usually gets it.

On the other hand, Wagner’s music dramas abhor interruption. Years ago, before the curtain rose on a Seattle Opera production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, the company director actually stepped to the front of the stage to beg his paying customers to shut up.

Not that audiences are always willingly docile. At a controversial (read: awful) production of Verdi’s Nabucco in Berlin some years ago, I watched in amazement as the conductor put down his baton midperformance to allow audience members to engage in a shouting match.

The most famous such match took place on the night of May 29, 1913, when the premiere of Vaslav Nijinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring deteri- orated into a near-riot.

An actual riot took place in Brussels on Aug. 25, 1830, when the audience at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie, roused to a pitch of patriotic fervour, took to the streets and started a revolution.

Canadian audiences tend to be considerably less hot-blooded, although I do remember having to stand on my seat to review Michael Jackson because those around me were jumping up and down, screaming. Then again, rock-concert behaviour is a whole other story.

Canadian audiences tend to dress informally these days. I used to watch very old black and white films with the men wearing white tie and tails. Most men now wear no tie at all (except at the opera house in Cairo, where I arrived tieless and was politely handed one before being granted admission).

Dressing with a modicum of dignity is surely a sign of respect for the artists. I would suggest that the New York Times critic seen padding through the lobby of Carnegie Hall in his stocking feet failed to live up to his side of the bargain.

There are, of course, times when Canadian audiences are too polite. They tolerate mediocrity, whereas the story is told of a performance in Italy at which a tenor was loudly applauded, returned not once but twice to sing encores, each time to warmer applause, finally telling the audience he had no voice left. “You’ll sing it until you get it right,” shouted a patron from the balcony.

The late Toronto pianist Glenn Gould abhorred audiences. He thought of concerts as blood sports, at which listeners were waiting, presumably with saliva dropping from their lips, for the artist to make a mistake.

It was a dangerous thing to do in the Old West, where saloons habitually nailed up signs on the wall saying, “Please don’t shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.” Today? Pianists are still doing their best. It is audiences who can do better.