The worst and the weirdest

Why don’t classical music magazines — the few that still publish — run features like “The 10 Worst High C’s Ever Sung”? Opera fans love making lists like that, and they’ll share them on Internet sites like Opera-L. Or why not “The Weirdest Chamber Music Performances on Records”? Or “The Five Worst American Orchestras”?

Somehow, in the stuffy old world of classical music, stories like these seem undignified. We’re supposed to boost the field, not laugh at it. Except that in the real world, people do laugh at things. Tenors really do sing bad high C’s. Some orchestras play really badly. And classical music professionals talk about all that, sometimes uproariously. Why can’t we share our talk with our audience, and, even more, with the people we wish were in our audience? Wouldn’t people like us more if they knew we lived in the same world they do? Or are we better off conning them, so they’ll believe that classical music lives in a special lofty world of its own? (If the answer is “yes,” then I’m in the wrong business.)