List of classical music with an unruly audience response

There have been many notable instances of unruly behaviour at classical music concerts, often at the premiere of a new work or production:

• 1802 (December 18, London): William Reeve, Family Quarrels. Part of the Jewish audience catcalled because of perceived anti-Jewish slights.^[1]
• 1830 (August 25, Brussels): Daniel Auber, La muette de Portici. Audience members at a performance in Brussels left before the end of the opera to join pre-planned riots that were already taking place across the city, marking the beginning of the Belgian Revolution.^[2]
• 1838 (September 10, Paris): Hector Berlioz, Benvenuto Cellini. The audience hissed at most of the music after the first few numbers.^[3]
• 1868 (March 5, Milan): Arrigo Boito, Mefistofele. The audience came predisposed to drown out Boito's claquers and succeeded in making the music inaudible with their hisses and boos.^[4][5][6]
• 1913 (March 9, Rome): Francesco Balilla Pratella, Musica Futurista. At the second performance of the work, the audience booed, threw garbage at the orchestra, and some fighting occurred.^[7][8]
• 1913 (March 31, Vienna): Alban Berg, Altenberg Lieder. As part of a front in Vienna's ongoing style wars, the audience booed and catcalled loudly, and some punches were thrown. The event came to be known as the Skandalkonzert.^[9]
• 1913 (May 29, Paris): Igor Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring. Dueling factions tried to drown each other out during the ballet's premiere, unwittingly launching generations of exaggerations of what actually happened in the hall that night.^[10][11]
• 1913 (September 5, Pavlovsk): Sergei Prokofiev, Piano Concerto No. 2. The work was met with hisses and catcalls.^[12]
• 1914 (April 21, Milan): Luigi Russolo, three works for intonarumori (The Awakening of a City, The Meeting of Automobiles and Aeroplanes and Dining on the Hotel Terrace). A concert organized by the Futurists to provide the first public demonstration of their experimental "noise-making" instruments called intonarumori resulted in an expected fracas,^[13] with Futurists led by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti fighting members of the audience in the stalls.^[14]
• 1917 (May 18, Paris): Erik Satie, Parade. One faction of the audience booed, hissed, and was generally unruly, but they were eventually silenced by an enthusiastic ovation.^[15][16]
• 1923 (March 4, New York): Edgard Varèse, Hyperprism. The audience laughed throughout and hissed at the conclusion, which prompted Varèse to repeat the work in hopes of a more serious response.^[17]
• 1924 (June 15, Paris): Erik Satie, Mercure. The police were called to the premiere due to unruly behavior that sprung from the Parisian cultural infighting of the time.^[18]
• 1926 (June 19, Paris): George Antheil, Ballet Mécanique. The premiere performance received a large ovation despite some unruly behavior in the audience, including an outburst by Ezra Pound, but there were some fistfights in the street after the concert.^[19]
• 1926 (November 27, Cologne): Béla Bartók, The Miraculous Mandarin. The plot caused a commotion in the audience, which began leaving during the performance.^[20]
• 1954 (December 2, Paris): Edgard Varèse, Déserts. The audience loudly jeered the piece.^[21]
• 1961 (April 13, Venice): Luigi Nono, Intolleranza 1960. The opera's premiere was disrupted by shouts from a neo-fascist faction in the audience.^[22][23]
• 1968 (December 9, Hamburg): Hans Werner Henze, Das Floß der Medusa. Students hung a Che Guevera banner, the Red, and Black flags causing the chorus to protest, and the police to make arrests, which prompted Henze to cancel the concert.^[24]
• 1973 (January 18, New York): Steve Reich, Four Organs. At a Carnegie Hall performance of the work, the conservative audience tried yelling and sarcastically applauding to hasten the end of the piece, which received both boos and cheers during the ovation.^[25]
• 2006 (December 10, Milan}: Giuseppe Verdi, Aida: When tenor Roberto Alagna's opening aria as Radames was booed by the loggionisti in the opera house's less expensive seats, he walked off stage while the music was still playing. Understudy Antonello Palombi, in a T-shirt and jeans, came on a few seconds later to replace him. Alagna did not return to the production.^[26]
• 2016 (February 29, Cologne): Steve Reich, Piano Phase. During a performance of the piece by Iranian harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani in the Kölner Philharmonie, Germany, parts of the crowd started booing, clapping and whistling a few minutes after the concert began. In response to the pandemonium when different factions in the audience yelled each other down, Esfahani stopped his performance and started playing with the ensemble Concerto Köln a concerto by C. P. E. Bach instead. Several members of the remaining audience apologised for the incident after the concert.^[27]

See also

• Succès de scandale
• Claque – Claqueurs are hired to initiate applause, or sometimes booing.

References