Column: Classical music can unite and console in troubling, angry times
You want anger?
Go to the opera. Go to the symphony.
Classical music has, of course, a hard-won reputation for civility. Concert decorum typically involves a certain courteousness. Being a member of a symphony orchestra requires a remarkable cooperation. We turn to age-old classical scores to console us and to bring us together in times of tragedy and to odes of joy when triumphant.
Musicians playing together offer a symbol of solidarity. The day after the Brexit referendum passed last month, young musicians from Europe spontaneously gathered in Trafalgar Square to play the “Ode to Joy†from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, reminding Londoners of the importance of foreign musicians, who may not be allowed to remain, to the city’s cultural riches.
Beethoven’s Ninth has often been employed as a symphony of anger management. On Christmas morning 1989, Leonard Bernstein celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall by assembling top orchestral musicians from East and West Germany, along with others from Britain, France, the U.S. and the then-Soviet Union (the World War II allies) for one of the most spiritually effusive and rousing performances ever of that symphony, its “Ode to Joy†changed to “Ode to Freedom.†The rapt audience at the Berlin Schauspielhaus became magnificently elated at the end.
As Bernstein well knew, 45 years earlier Berliners could have heard Wilhelm Furtwängler conduct an uncompromisingly spiritual Beethoven’s Ninth. As was the Bernstein concert, this was filmed, showing an audience equally rapt and elated.
In one case, the camera panned on a crowd of ordinary Berliners. In the other, the camera panned on a crowd of uniformed Nazis. The communal spirit is unmistakable at these concerts, and what holds the audience together seems to be the shared choice in what to do with a deep, underlying anger, be it the euphoria in overthrowing years of oppression or a terrible pleasure in justifying oppression.
We are a complex species. Like other species, we may act on impulse, anger turning us away from thought and into wild beasts. But we have the option of thought. Music’s unique function is to work all sides of the moral equation and give us space for reflection. It is an art that offers the most visceral expression of anger and also reveals the outcome of anger. It has the capacity to provide outlets for anger and for the resolution of conflict.
Opera, for which anger is stock in trade, is particularly useful here. An unfulfilling lifetime’s work could be trying to catalog every angry aria. Few operas over the past four decades lack something sung in anger. Countless plots are driven by anger.
In the most humane comedies, particularly Mozart’s, comeuppance can lead to self-knowledge and transformation. For that, you could revisit Peter Sellars’ 1990 video of “The Marriage of Figaro,†which the director sets in the Trump Tower. The lord of the manor discovers compassion. Opera shows us how it can be done.
More often, opera’s anger, when fulfilled, leads to tragedy. Sometimes, though, it leads to, and even inspires, triumph. The most famous example is “Va pensiero,†the chorus of Hebrew slaves in Verdi’s “Nabucco,†which became the rallying cry of 19th century Italians seeking unification of their country.
Opera is hardly the only art form for the proper expression of anger. All art has that capacity. But bluster sung is bluster amplified. This allows for a resolution of anger that also knows no equal. Isolde begins hating Tristan in Wagner’s opera, but she ends up in a state of transcendent love that can leave an opera lover permanently transformed. Yet, as always, we enter into morally dubious territory. Let us not forget, once more, Hitler’s love of Wagner or Wagner’s own racial intolerance.
So if you’re looking for a little anger, go to the opera. Not only will you get example after example of where violence leads, but you have the opportunity to let off a little steam yourself. Nowhere in public life outside of politics and sports is booing so respectable.
The blood sport these days is trashing the production team, if anything at all is provocative on stage. That mainly involves political and/or sexual overlays to the libretto. But highly provocative productions tend, by their very nature, to be the most dramatically committed. You may not agree, but you may also be profoundly moved, your anger involuntarily drained by the revelations of meaningful art in action.
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