Popular classical music

In the wake of my posts about MUSO magazine (

href="http://www.artsjournal.com/sandow/2006/06/lively_magazine.html">here

and here),

a small discussion has swirled in the comments to both posts, essentially about

whether classical music should or shouldn’t have some of the trappings of

popular culture, such as stars famous not just for their music, but also for

their good looks. Some people–understandably–wish this wouldn’t happen, and

that classical music could be (or remain, or become) mostly very serious. Like

class=SpellE>Bjork, someone said, not like Britney Spears.

My view is that this isn’t possible, at least not if we want

classical music to be healthy financially. (For those who’ve read me, on the

comments pages, saying this before, I promise: I won’t repeat it for a while.)

The serious wing of any branch of art or entertainment needs the popular wing.

The book industry, publishers and bookstores, doesn’t stay alive by selling

class=SpellE>Proust. But by selling Tom Clancy, Dan Brown, Danielle

Steele, whoever, the industry creates channels large enough to distribute–easily–copies

of Proust to the relatively few people who want to

read him.

For a musical example, I suggested that we imagine that

Britney Spears was a classical music star. How big would the classical music

business be, if that were true? But this might not have been helpful. Simply to

imagine this seemed, at least to a few people, to trivialize classical music.

So here are some better examples from real life. Last fall,

class=SpellE>Reneé Fleming spoke at a forum at Juilliard. She and

Stephen Sondheim were asked about the difference between art and entertainment,

and, very strikingly, neither would draw any firm distinction. (See my

href="http://www.artsjournal.com/sandow/2006/01/art_and_entertainment.html">post

on this.) In the course of the discussion, both Fleming and Sondheim were asked

if they’d ever had to compromise on anything artistic, to do anything simply to

sell their work to the public. Sondheim said he never had. Fleming said it

happened to her regularly. Here’s one example she gave: She wanted to record

Richard Strauss’s Daphne, her record

company want her to record a CD of sacred songs. The

compromise? She did both. Quid pro quo.

So how many copies did the

href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000AM6OXK/104-2378990-0239966?v=glance&n=5174">sacred

songs album sell? It featured chestnuts like “Ave Maria,” “

class=SpellE>Panis angelicus,” and “Amazing

Grace.” I don’t have any information, but maybe I’ll guess that it sold 20,000

copies. That would be a lot–a triumphant, gigantic success–for a classical

release. How many copies did Daphne sell?

Maybe 3,000, which for a complete opera would be quite

respectable.

But now suppose classical music was widely popular. Then

maybe Sacred Songs would have sold

200,000 copies, or 2 million. And Daphne,

if the ratio still held, would sell 30,000, or 300,000, the kind of numbers

that serious and successful indie rock albums rack

up. That would be good for classical music, wouldn’t it? I can’t see how anyone

could say otherwise.

Here’s another example, from the past. Between 1906 and

1922, the leading soprano at the Metropolitan Opera was

href="http://www.marstonrecords.com/farrar/farrar_liner.htm">Geraldine Farrar,

a striking, beautiful woman who said she was mainly an actor, not a singer, and

who also made silent films. When she appeared onstage with the

class=SpellE>Met’s leading tenor, Enrico

Caruso, sparks would fly, and tickets would sell.

And–as those silent films might suggest–both singers had

fans outside the strict boundaries of the classical music world. Caruso was one

of the first top-selling recording artists. He sold a million records, I’ve

read, an astonishing number for anyone in the very early days of recording,

when both records and equipment to play them on were expensive (and the

population was much smaller).

Farrar had teenaged girl fans who came to be called “

class=SpellE>Gerryflappers,” and who’d flock to the Met to see her

perform. When she retired from the Met, these

fans unfurled banners, cheered, wept, and followed Farrar’s “flower-laden, open

limousine” up Broadway. (I’m quoting from the site I linked to, which offers liner

notes by Robert Baxter for a Farrar CD on Marston Records.)

Was this good for classical music? Absolutely.

Intellectuals–or, more simply, people listening to Stravinsky and Schoenberg–probably

didn’t care for Farrar and her Gerryflappers. But the

existence of such things meant, once more, that classical music was important to

our culture, and that intellectuals were listening to its intellectual

repertoire, instead of mostly ignoring it, as they do now.