A day after posting my short essay on booing, I began to have doubts. I didn't regret what I'd written—I continue to think more serious, opinionated, and occasionally vicious critique would be a great service to jazz—but I realized that the booing Met audience weren't what I was looking for at all.
That's not because the audience booed, which strikes me as a ribald throwback, but because of what it booed. As Alex Ross noted the next week in the New Yorker, there was plenty not to like about this production of Tosca: the casting was poor, the singing weak, the conducting grim. Yet the Met fans reserved their boos solely for the director, Luc Bondy, who took major risks with the production, and, according to Ross and legions of angry fans, fell short most of the time.
The booing opera fans were deeply invested in Tosca—I imagine many of them knew the score and libretto almost by heart—but they were also deeply invested in a nostalgic, conservative approach to art. As Ross notes, the Met booers had grown accustomed to the lush, baroque Franco Zeffirelli Tosca, which the Met staged throughout the 80s and 90s. Given Bondy's reputation for tipping opera's sacred cows, I wouldn't be surprised if many of the Met's knowledgeable booers arrived at that night already planning their audacious reaction. They'd probably circled this date in red pen the day the Opera released its 2009-2010 schedule. The crowd's booing showed passion, but also that many of members of the audience resented attempts to experiment with their beloved art. That's something they, unfortunately, share with certain segments of the jazz public, and its a mind set that seems like the surest way to doom both arts to niche obscurity.
My good friend and fellow blogger Will C. White (who comments here as "il maestro") brought another recent Met episode to my attention that seems to support my anticipatory booing hypothesis. Here, the Met audience booed conductor Daniele Gatti after a production of Aida. According to the Times critic James R. Oestreich, Gatti had a reputation for "overrestraint" in his approach to the Tosca score, which got him hooted down in Munich this past spring. Oestreich characterized Gatti's conducting in New York as "drawing engaged and expressive playing from the orchestra," but the boos followed him. Maybe Oestreich just didn't hear what was going on, but if one gives any weight to his account, then it seems like the booing audience members just didn't listen to the music, coming to the performance to air their petty grievances or to try to appear as modish as their European peers.
Who knows exactly what was going on in the minds of the booing Met fans at Tosca and Aida, but I think it's extremely unlikely that their reactions were spontaneous reactions to open-minded listening. As an antidote to what seems most likely to be a species of well-informed, but narrow-minded, opera hooliganism, I leave you with this quote from jazz pianist Vijay Iyer from a 2007 essay he wrote for All About Jazz (via NPR's Patrick Jarenwattananon):
When I hear mastery without risk, I feel ripped off.
