Please sir, may I have another?

Fidelio PM

I would just like to say that there can be nothing better for breakfast than an Italian espresso, and a couple of pieces of toasted potato bread with my homemade strawberry-blackberry jelly on top. Chris makes fun of me for it, but this is something that you will see me eating practically every morning, probably till death. When I’m not eating that, some Swiss müsli or a couple of fried eggs are good, too. Breakfast is just the most stupendous meal of the day, let’s face it. Everything just tastes so good after your body has been starving in its dream state for 8-9 hours.

The guy in the chorus about whom one the last blogs ranted has made another stupid statement. (Let’s call him Hick, just to make reference to him easier.) Last night was a performance of the Requiem--a work that would have been perfect to have given just one day before, in that it would have been a nice celebration of Mozart’s 250th birthday. Bad foresight, theater, bad. Anyway, our Requiem, a collaboration with the Ballet, actually begins with the playing of a Mozart Piano Sonata.

The overall piece represents the lifecycle of man, with birth and death being important milestones (a word which, because the word mile, in ancient times, was also used in German, has an excellent translation of ‘Meilenstein’, for those who are interested.) After the Requiem is over, a portion of the Sonata is played again, as we all, both ballet and chorus, walk into a huge light with smoke swirling around it. The curtain comes down, and ‘La comedia è finita.’ It looks really cool.



At ay rate, after the Requiem is over, the chorus walks to the center of the stage in silence and then the pianist begins the Sonata. At one of the end rehearsals, somehow asked the question that begged an answer: ‘what do we do when the audience begins to clap in the silence before the Sonata begins?’ A perfectly valid question. The Ballet Master simply replied that the audience would, by this point, be so entranced that they would not clap. I laughed at this, knowing that the audience would, most likely, see the end of the Requiem as being what it was, the end of a large choral work, and would begin clapping, thus ruining the effect of the ensuing Sonata fragment and smoke wormhole. Well, last night that’s exactly what happened.

Hick came down into the dressing room immediately afterward, yelling about how stupid the audience was and that they should know not to clap at the wrong spot, that this sort of thing would only happen in Pforzheim and what a stupid audience it was.

Uh...

How can an audience be an entity and how can we say that an audience is stupid? What’s more, they were clapping because they were excited and wanted to show their admiration. How can we say, then, that they are stupid to have praised us? Doesn’t that make one seem ungrateful? We had like 8 curtain calls last night. They absolutely loved it. It’s not like it’s an overly-zealous, Italian audience, after all. I mean, in Italy, they clap practically after every high note. Should Pavarotti, put his hand up, and tell his admirers to shut their pie holes? Saying an audience is stupid for having clapped at the wrong time is like going up to someone who is laughing at a good joke and slapping them across the face.