Focus on Teaching
First Nights
by Janet Tassel
Cat-calls and hisses succeeded the playing of the first few bars,
and then ensued a battery of screams, countered by a foil of applause.
We warred over art (some of us thought it was and some thought
it wasn't)....Some forty of the protestants were forced out of
the theater but that did not quell the disturbance. The lights
in the auditorium were fully turned on but the noise continued,
and I remember Mlle. Piltz executing her strange dance of religious
hysteria on a stage dimmed by the blazing light in the auditorium,
seemingly to the accompaniment of the disjointed ravings of a
mob of angry men and women.
So wrote carl van vechten of the pandemoniac premiere of Stravinsky's
Le sacre du printemps in Paris in May 1913. Today, a performance
of this work will scarcely elicit anything more violent than a
lusty ovation--maybe. What made that first audience so furious
and unruly? Or, as G. de Pawlowski wrote shortly after the premiere,
"Where were those slobs brought up?"
Complex questions, these. But as professor of music Thomas
Forrest Kelly tells the 450 students gathered in Sanders Theatre
for Literature and Arts B-51--his Core course on "First Nights:
Five Performance Premieres"--a premiere takes place "as
part of a large matrix of cultural experiences; it is best understood
as part of its own culture. Not only was it brand new, but it
sounded different in those days; the people who came to it came
with different ears, so to speak." That first audience, says
Kelly, Ph.D '73, "hated the music, they hated the dancing.
The dancers stood on stage in impossible positions"--and
here Kelly, to a blaring CD, proceeds to imitate the bowlegged,
pigeontoed positions of the dancers, followed by a pantomime of
the sacrificial maiden, trembling in fear. The students applaud.
Kelly, the new chairman of the music department, is clearly
a performer. Indeed, his specialty is early music and historical
performance, and he illustrates his energetic lectures with passages
on piano or harpsichord; thus far he has also mimed the organ,
with furious pedaling, as well as many other instruments and solo
voices. As one freshman says, "He sure does put on a show!"
The goal of the show, says Kelly, is to lure these students
into sharing his own profound love of European classical music,
and particularly the five seminal works offered this semester:
Monteverdi's opera L'Orfeo, Handel's Messiah, Beethoven's Ninth
Symphony, Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, and Stravinsky's Le
sacre du printemps. His idea is to engage the undergraduates'
interest by exploring with them how it might have felt to attend
the premieres of these works. Not every first performance, not
even of a revolutionary piece like Stravinsky's, is received with
a near-total breakdown of civility more appropriate, one would
think, to Fenway Park than to the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées.
But some first nights have accumulated their own store of legends.
One of the best-known is the poignant description (which has many
variants) of Beethoven at the first performance of his Ninth Symphony,
in May 1824. This one is from violinist Joseph Böhm, who
played at that performance:
An illustrious, extremely large audience listened with rapt
attention and did not stint with enthusiastic, thundering applause.
Beethoven himself conducted, that is, he stood in front of a conductor's
stand and threw himself back and forth like a madman. At one moment
he stretched to his full height, at the next he crouched down
to the floor, he flailed about with his hands and feet as though
he wanted to play all the instruments and sing all the chorus
parts.... Beethoven was so excited that he saw nothing that was
going on about him, he paid no heed whatever to the bursts of
applause, which his deafness prevented him from hearing in any
case. He had always to be told when it was time to acknowledge
the applause, which he did in the most ungracious manner imaginable.
These are the sorts of "vivid, telling details" that
Kelly savors and wants to coax out of his students in their own
writing. He also requires that they listen diligently on their
own and in their sections, where the teaching fellows reinforce
techniques and terminologies discussed in Kelly's lectures. The
students are further abetted by a fat sourcebook packed with examples
of the sorts of anecdotes and observations Kelly wants to see
in their papers; by an excellent text, Writing About Music; and
above all, by a website bursting with visuals and data, including
an encyclopedic glossary rich in sound bites, a treasure for even
an experienced music lover.
In the first of their two papers, Kelly asks students to compare
their own reaction to the music of Monteverdi's L'Orfeo with that
of a listener at the first performance, giving "careful analytical
attention to the music," and concentrating on "one or
more passages important to [their] argument." The students
are daunted, and why wouldn't they be? Kelly has emphasized from
the first class that the course "is designed for people with
absolutely no previous experience of classical music; all that
is needed is ears, rational faculties, and memory."
Now L'Orfeo, composed for the Mantuan court in 1607, may be
gorgeous (indeed, Kelly forewarns them that it is probably his
favorite of the five works), but to lead off a course for neophytes
with a rarely heard opera for connoisseurs and then ask for an
analytical paper seems, well, risky. Moreover, the few surviving
documents relating to the premiere of L'Orfeo contain a paucity
of even important information--like who sang what and how many
instrumentalists there were--so any piquant details must be speculative.
And scant comfort it is to the students to be told to examine
the original score, with its exotic early notation, and to study
the libretto, archaic even in translation. Yet by the third week
the class seems quite at home with terms like ritornello, recitativo
secco, and toccata. And the music has apparently become familiar
enough that an observer hears a bit of humming along.
With L'Orfeo behind them, perhaps the class welcomes the relative
familiarity of the Handel and the Beethoven? As Kelly says later
in his office, "Sure, everyone's heard the 'Ode to Joy' at
the end of Beethoven's Ninth--on synthesizers, on kazoos, in commercials--but
they probably haven't heard the whole Ninth Symphony. They may
know the 'Hallelujah Chorus,' but they still may not know Handel's
Messiah."
But gradually they come to appreciate the breadth of these
works and--in keeping with the course's theme--they learn to be
a discerning audience as well, getting up close and personal with
details of performance. For Kelly liberally intersperses live
performances, including some by musicians from Boston's Handel
and Haydn Society. And because, as Kelly says, a prime objective
of the course is "listening to pieces in their original context,"
the climax of the semester, on the last day of class, is a premiere
commissioned specifically for this course.
From the beginning, Kelly makes it clear that those who cannot
be present on December 21 should not take the course. The students
are required to write their second paper on this premiere, a review,
as instructed in the syllabus, "designed to entertain and
inform, and that will also be useful to students in a course called
'First Nights' taught at Harvard in 2050."
"I want them to participate in a first performance just
like the ones they've been studying," he explains. "Then
they have to think, 'How does this piece of music fit into my
world, and what is the cultural context in which it is happening?'
I hope they will have discovered the important place of classical
music in our world, but what is this piece of music all about
now, today, at Harvard?"
This year's premiere, subsidized by the Fromm Foundation, is
a work composed by David Horne, Ph.D '99, a visiting lecturer.
He has written a mini song-cycle entitled "You," based
on poems by Emily Dickinson, that features a soprano with flute,
piano, and cello.
"I want the class," continues Kelly, "to talk
about the performance itself. Was it an effective performance?
Moving? Did it need more rehearsal? It will be rehearsed in class,
too. But also they should write about who was there, and what
kinds of clothes they wore. It's the little, colorful details
that make something historical come alive."
A riot, however, will presumably not be necessary.
Janet Tassel, a contributing editor of this
magazine, wrote "The 30 Years' War" in the September-October
1999 issue.
