JOSEPH HOROWITZ is the director of Music Unwound. His many books include Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall and the recent novel The Marriage: The Mahlers in New York. His forthcoming book is The Propaganda of Freedom: JFK, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, and the Cultural Cold War. He served as executive director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra and PostClassical Ensemble. His More than Music documentaries, including “Shostakovich in South Dakota,” are regularly heard on National Public Radio.
A performance last March of Anton Bruckner's Eighth Symphony, by Christian Thielemann and the Vienna Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall, was very possibly the peak event of the New York season. And yet, when it ended, I discovered myself shouting my displeasure. Bruckner's Eighth lasts 80 minutes and is exhaled in a single breath. It invites—it demands—a pact with the audience. It is communal. It cannot be fairly experienced in a living room. On this occasion, Carnegie Hall had been sold out for weeks. The audience was a marvel—if not fully intergenerational (listeners under the age of 30 were scarce), at least strikingly international.
It took Thielemann barely a moment to secure perfect quiet: 2,790 souls in thrall. He navigated the great structure with monumental assurance. The last movement ends with a famous apocalyptic coda. Bruckner pauses for a long, capacious breath.
Then he restarts his engines quietly, gradually, and with the unmistakable promise of a culminating paragraph. In a compositional tour de force both ingenious and inevitable, he proceeds to pile all the symphony's themes atop one another. This achieved, he drives a refulgent final thrust. Thereafter, Thielemann and the musicians froze. And so did everybody else, save someone in the left balcony who broke the spell by bellowing “Bravo!” Thielemann reacted with visible consternation. But there was worse.
Not long after the performance began, the little lights had begun appearing, raised high. The hall's ushers dutifully raced hither and yon, up and down aisles, gesturing frantically. And the cellphones were put away. Some clever listeners, however, realized that they could film the symphony's iconic ending with impunity.
With the trembling onset of the coda, I had moved to the edge of my seat. I was in my preferred location—center balcony. As it happened, one of the offenders was seated directly in front of me. She held her phone high, blocking my field of vision with her bright miniature screen. The ovation was deafening, and that's when a shouting match between us began. Reflecting on this experience, I discover that her behavior was less discourteous than it was selfish. As far as she was concerned, she was the only listener who mattered. The world of cellphones is both cause and effect of what some call “hyper-individualism.” I cannot think of a purer example than the woman who filmed Bruckner's coda to take home as a memento.
When I posted my experience on my blog, the most interesting responses came from readers in London and Berlin. They said that an intrusion of this kind—not inadvertently failing to turn a cellphone off, but consciously flaunting it—was “unthinkable” in a British or German concert hall. And that is something to think about. It's the same strain of personal entitlement that said “no” to Covid mask mandates. Its American lineage is potent.
And yet, my New York cellphone debacle came directly after an exemplary shared experience of music in live performance: two weeks’ worth of Dmitri Shostakovich in South Dakota, including the Symphony in Sioux Falls and performances of the Eighth String Quartet at the University of South Dakota and South Dakota State. Perhaps all this manifested a benign Lutheran strain—a traditional receptivity to the arts that is respectful and communal. I'm certain it registered the sustained impact of Delta David Gier, the music director of the South Dakota Symphony, who in 2005