If popular stereotypes about classical music held true, the genre should have had no social or political relevance in 2011, one of the darkest and angriest years in recent American history. Classical music is, we are given to understand, the playground of the one per cent, the province of the super-rich. When concerts are depicted in the movies, you see élites in evening wear gazing snootily through archaic eyewear at misbehaving interlopers. Anyone who has actually attended a classical performance in the past half-century knows that such images are largely make-believe. Yes, the most expensive seats at the Metropolitan Opera cost hundreds of dollars, but the highest-priced tickets for big-league pop-music and sports events generally cost far more, and the money in play behind the scenes of such mass-market spectacles makes the classical economy look puny. Bon Jovi have sold their most affluent fans V.I.P. packages costing in excess of eighteen hundred dollars. The net worth of Jay-Z, who owns a share of the New Jersey Nets in the company of the Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov, is considerably larger than the annual budget of the Met.
There’s no denying that classical music routinely serves as an ornament for extreme wealth, even if those occupying the cheap seats inhabit a completely different world. The British blogger Bob Shingleton has lately been scrutinizing the funding sources of major classical institutions, and has come up with a list of names that resembles a rogues’ gallery of international financial malfeasance. Yet, looking back on the year in music, I’m struck by how many memorable events I attended—or, in the case of Riccardo Muti’s anti-Berlusconi gesture at a Verdi performance in Rome, experienced remotely—took up a more enlightened stance. John Luther Adams’s percussion symphony “Inuksuit,” which made a glorious noise at the Park Avenue Armory, is the work of an Alaskan activist composer who has long campaigned against the despoliation of his home state. Britten’s “War Requiem,” the centerpiece of this year’s White Light Festival at Lincoln Center, is, from the first note to the last, an impassioned denunciation of the modern machinery of war. Spring for Music celebrates smaller-budget orchestras and sets a maximum ticket price of twenty-five dollars. The New World Center in Miami has tickets as low as $2.50, with technologically stunning outdoor broadcasts free to all.
Most notably, Philip Glass’s “Satyagraha,” a monumental minimalist opera evoking Gandhi’s campaign of civil disobedience in South Africa, had a transfixing revival at the Met, even as Occupy Wall Street unfolded downtown. The contradictions seemingly inherent in the presentation of a Gandhi opera at Lincoln Center led activists to stage a protest after the final performance, with Glass in attendance; the theatrical force of the action only added to the uncanny aura of the work. I was elated by this constructive confluence of music and politics, and yet I wondered whether the demonstrators had selected too predictable—and too small—a target. Pop stars and their parent corporations are the true élites of the cultural sphere, reaping vast rewards from a winner-takes-all system. I’m with Seth Colter Walls, who, in a generally positive commentary on the “Satyagraha” action, wrote, “This persistent fiction of ‘elitism,’ and contemporary classical music’s supposed inaccessibility, is one of the strongest propagandistic tools ever devised by the titans of corporate pop culture. They would prefer that you not cost-compare a Family Circle seat to ‘Satyagraha’ alongside a 3D screening of ‘Transformers 3.’”
I was haunted all year by a sentence that I read in Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves”: “One cannot live outside the machine for more perhaps than half an hour.” These days you can’t live outside the machine for more than a minute. Contradictions invade every square inch of our physical and mental space; even the purest-seeming creations are in some way tainted by the radical inequalities of early twenty-first-century society. The most potent artistic work, though, doesn’t conceal such contradictions; instead, it makes us agonizingly aware of them. Over the centuries, classical music has been allied with wealth and power, and it has also caused trouble for wealth and power. Its present marginal position gives it, at least in theory, critical distance from the materialist excess of pop culture—the ruthless equation of monetary and aesthetic value. Tellingly, classical music in America reached its maximum popularity in the nineteen-thirties and forties, when the country came closer to disavowing the capitalist faith than at any time in its history. One measure of the levelling spirit of the age was that millions across the land could tune in to NBC radio and listen to Beethoven symphonies. Are d.j.s blasting Beethoven in the V.I.P. lounges of the Second Gilded Age? Not that I’ve heard.
Here is a calendar of the past year’s most memorable classical performances:
Jan. 25-27: The New World Center, the home of the New World Symphony, opens in Miami.
Feb. 20: John Luther Adams’s “Inuksuit” unfolds at the Park Avenue Armory, as part of the first edition of the Tune-In Music Festival.
March 12: Riccardo Muti conducts Verdi’s “Nabucco” at the Rome Opera, denouncing Berlusconi’s arts policy after “Va, pensiero.”
May 12: Carlos Kalmar conducts the Oregon Symphony in a program entitled “Music for a Time of War,” as part of the first edition of Spring for Music at Carnegie.
Sept. 21: William Christie conducts Jean-Baptiste Lully’s “Atys” at BAM.
Oct. 9: Laurie Anderson performs at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts in Kansas City.
Oct. 14-22: Alex Temple’s “Liebeslied” and Alex Mincek’s Third Quartet are two highlights of the SONiC Festival.
Oct. 23: Gianandrea Noseda conducts the London Symphony and a host of singers in Britten’s “War Requiem” at Avery Fisher Hall, as part of the White Light Festival.
Nov. 28: Ian Bostridge and Thomas Adès perform music of Dowland, Schubert, Schumann, Liszt, Kurtág, and Adès at Carnegie.
Dec. 18: Stile Antico sings works of Tallis, Byrd, Sheppard, and White at Corpus Christi Church, as part of the Music Before 1800 series.
From the Agnus Dei of Thomas Tallis’s “Missa Puer natus est,” with Stile Antico performing (Harmonia Mundi). “Lamb of God, you who take away the sins of the world, grant us peace.”
Previously: My list of the best classical recordings of 2011.
Read more from The New Yorker’s 2011: The Year in Review, at News Desk and at Culture Desk.
