Sounds outrageous!
Scandalous works in music history

Many of the works that now have a firm place in the international concert repertoire have struggled to get there. They sparked riots, provoked censorship and divided audiences. The Berliner Philharmoniker’s season theme “Controversial!” explores some of these social and aesthetic areas of dissent. Three of these works form an impressive demonstration of how a scandal often prepares the way for the emergence of a novel musical language.

Igor Stravinsky: “The Rite of Spring”

When Parisian high society gathered at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in the spring of 1913, expectations were high. Under the direction of choreographer Vaclav Nijinsky, the Ballets Russes was seen as the very epitome of aesthetic refinement. They were known for exotic subjects, brilliant dancers and sumptuous stage sets. But the very first note of The Rite of Spring – a piece announced as a pagan celebration of spring – outraged the audience feeling .

The performance began with a bassoon playing in a register far removed from the one with which it is normally associated, after which the music acquired an archaic weight that, thanks in part to its use of complex polyrhythms, resulted in orchestral sounds which had absolutely nothing to do with traditional aesthetic thinking. To the strains of this explosive cacophony, the dancers performed steps that likewise had little in common with the classical ballet: the action was conveyed by means of angular gestures, by the stamping of feet and by bodies both bent and contorted.

Stravinsky’s score has gone down in music history as a truly seismic shock to the world of musical conventions. The composer based the work on a dream in which he saw a vision of a mythical sacrificial cult on the part of a young woman who conjures up spring by dancing. She dances herself into a frenzy, continuing until she dies. This primitive subject matter, far removed from all courtly charm and coupled with such seemingly-chaotic music,  left the audience so disorientated that the premiere degenerated into a riot punctuated by mocking laughter, indignant shouting and whistling. According to one retelling of the event, people may have even came to blows, though more recent scholarship has questioned this; in any case, it was certainly rowdy.

Stravinsky himself fled backstage during the performance and spent the following weeks living in a state of complete withdrawal. And yet the controversy triggered by his ballet brought his name to the world’s attention and The Rite of Spring became one of the cornerstones of the musical avant-garde, with Stravinsky himself as an icon of modernism.

Béla Bartók: “The Miraculous Mandarin”

Thirteen years after the infamous fiasco of The Rite of Spring in Paris, another piece of music theatre found itself in the cross-hairs of bourgeois indignation. This time it was Béla Bartók whose “pantomime ballet” pushed the limits of what was presentable onstage, and in doing so, upset society’s moral compass.

The basic scenario was provided by the Hungarian writer and dramatist Menyhért Lengyel: three gangsters force a young woman to lure her clients into a rundown room, where they are robbed. Twice their plan succeeds, but their third victim, a wealthy Chinese mandarin, is immune to their violence and they are unable to kill him despite attempts to strangle, stab and hang him. Only when the woman voluntarily approaches him does he bleed to death in her arms.

Bartók was fascinated by this sombre parable of city life and wrote music for it that was the complete opposite of anything that a bourgeois concert audience of the time might have expected to encounter in the theatre. Strident dissonances, deafening brass and explosive climaxes create an acoustic portrait of a noisy, alienating metropolis. The percussion instruments pulsate like a beating heart in an engine room, while jazz-like interludes flash like dazzling strip lights. The grotesque exaggeration, the consistent flouting of harmonic and metrical expectations all reveal parallels with Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring.

When The Miraculous Mandarin received its first performance in Cologne on 27 November 1926, the audience reacted with corresponding ferocity. The theatre was filled with whistles and boos, and the audience fled from the hall in droves, slamming doors as they left. Critics lambasted the work as a “piece for pimps and prostitutes with all the attendant orchestral ballyhoo” and as “music for a dive of the lowest possible kind”. Long before it opened, the work had become the subject of a political debate in the Catholic archbishopric of Cologne, where the municipal authorities under the city’s mayor, Konrad Adenauer, quickly banned the ballet on account of its “immoral action”.

But Bartók stuck unwaveringly to his work, convinced that it was one of his most important orchestral scores. In 1928 he prepared a concert suite on the basis of the ballet. It remains one of the principal examples of Expressionism in music.

Richard Wagner: “Tannhäuser”

Richard Wagner, too, triggered a scandal. In 1861, he hoped that he might finally to be able to make his longed-for international breakthrough with a production of his opera Tannhäuser at the Grand Opéra in Paris. But although Paris held out the promise of international glory, its main opera house had its own well-established rules, including the requirement that there should be a ballet in the second act. Wagner resisted. Instead of integrating the usual ballet into Act Two, he placed a sensual bacchanal at the start of the opera, consciously breaking with the expectations of his Parisian audience.

Wagner’s artistic intervention had far-reaching consequences. Members of the influential Jockey Club – a bastion of the upper echelons of Parisian society – were used to turning up only in time to see the ballet, which, in keeping with tradition, they expected to find in Act Two. Their furious reaction was all too predictable, and the whole performance was disrupted by dog whistles, booing and stamping.

As the city of love, Paris should have been receptive to the opera’s plot, central to which is the medieval bard Tannhäuser, who was once a guest of Venus, the goddess of love, but who is drawn back to the human world by his longing for redemption. At the Castle of the Wartburg, he meets Elisabeth, who loves him and who champions his cause. But in the course of a song contest, he praises Venus’s sensuality. This breach of etiquette forces him to leave the court. As a penitent pilgrim, he makes his way to Rome in order to seek absolution from the pope, who refuses to forgive him. By the time Tannhäuser returns to the Wartburg, Elisabeth is dead, but her sacrifice brings with it a spiritual transformation. Tannhäuser dies, and in death he finds the redemption for which he has  longed.

The inner tension between heavenly reverence and earthly desire is reflected in Wagner’s music. While the Venusberg Scene is dominated by beguilingly sensual tone colours, the Wartburg is characterized musically by order and by sacred dignity. Leitmotifs permeate the work and lend the protagonist’s psychological struggle urgency. This is music that is constantly shifting, music expressive of quest and of contrast.

In the wake of the Tannhäuser scandal, Wagner left Paris disillusioned, mortified and furious. He was later to describe his time in the city as one of the most bitter disappointments of his life.