How can we make the Brits love classical music? Have a bit of a laugh

When a cultural form is embattled the people who love and value it get defensive. They circle the wagons, take pot shots at anyone who seems hostile, and guard the thing they’re protecting like some sacred relic.

There’s a danger this could happen with classical music, and one can hardly blame the wagon-circlers. Government is indifferent, the school system sidelines it, ideologues who hate anything “male, pale and stale” attack it, and recent decisions from Arts Council England and the BBC (notably regarding the Britten Sinfonia and the BBC Singers) suggests open hostility. Not to mention the problem of ageing audiences, the lingering after-effects of Covid, and economic headwinds.

But proclaiming an art-form’s special value, as if from a pulpit, isn’t necessarily the best way to win it new friends.  Of course classical music can elevate the soul, but it can also soothe and entertain it—provided the art-form’s champions engage with mainstream taste, and with the wider culture.

To realise the necessity of this you only have to cast your mind back to the middle of the last century, when classical music had lots of friends, at all levels of society. The surest sign of that is that classical musicians were seen constantly in the media. The British matinée idol Malcolm Sargent was a household name, as was Leonard Bernstein. Before him Arturo Toscanini was regularly seen on prime-time TV, conducting the orchestra the broadcasting company actually set up for him, the NBC Symphony Orchestra. Conductors, composers and top instrumentalists and singers were regular guests on chat shows.

The last time I remember this happening with any regularity was on Terry Wogan’s chat shows in the mid-1980s, when spiky-haired violinist Nigel Kennedy, opera singer Montserrat Caballé and the aged and endearingly daft Sir Michael Tippett appeared, among others.

Look around now, and it’s hard to think of classical musicians who have that kind of name recognition. Sure, Simon Rattle is something of a culture hero within classical music because he’s always willing to stick his neck out when news emerges of the latest cuts. But for the rest of the year he's invisible. Could you imagine him as a guest on Michael McIntyre’s Big Show? Probably not.

I’d like to suggest one reason classical music is fading from our cultural life is that it’s treated with such suffocating respect (when it’s not being ignored or attacked). Nobody satirises it any more.  God knows there’s plenty to satirise in classical music, when you think of the weird formalities of concert-life and the self-importance of certain classical artists. András Schiff is a wonderful artist, bless him, but the combination of the self-consciously antiquated fob-watch and the rage against the philistinism of the world cries out for a leg-pull. As for opera, its absurdities are so patent it’s a wonder anyone ever takes it seriously.

The urge to parody the ridiculous aspects of classical music and opera emerged – as you would expect – precisely at the moment when those art forms started to take themselves very seriously indeed. Nobody would want to parody Mozart, because he was just too busy working towards the next deadline to give himself airs and graces. Come forward only half-a-century to the romantic era, and things are very different. Composers and performers now claimed to be seers in search of the “music of the future”, dwelling on a higher plane than ordinary mortals. Liszt made the ladies swoon with his virtuosity, Wagner summoned an entire mythic world of helmeted goddesses and vengeful dragons

All this provided wonderful material for caricaturists. They showed Wagner gleefully driving nails into his listeners’ ears, and Liszt playing a piano so violently it shivered into a thousand pieces. In the 20^th-century the urge to satirise classical music spread into the new genres of stand-up comedy, and into the new media.  The Marx Brothers sent up opera in their A Night at the Opera, and in cartoons classical music was incessantly mocked. Schoenberg’s “12-note system” was parodied in the Tom and Jerry cartoon The Cat who Hated People, and in Cat Concerto Tom and his little friend do battle through the medium of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody no. 2. In the Bugs Bunny cartoon Long-haired Hare Bugs impersonates the imperious star conductor Leopold Stokowski on the podium, switching the orchestra on and off with a mere flick of his baton.

Coming forward to more recent times, you find Dudley Moore’s spot-on impersonation of Peter Pears singing Little Miss Muffet, and the immortal Morecambe and Wise sketch where “Mr. Preview”, a.k.a. André Previn conducts the orchestra in Grieg’s Piano Concerto, while at the piano Eric Morecambe finds a dozen different ways of not starting the piece.

I was very young at the time, but I don’t recall anyone claiming that this sketch showed a disgraceful lack of respect for the noble art-form of classical music. People then had not been infected with the dread disease of “respect”, which places a cordon of artificial reverence around anything deemed to be valuable by some special-interest group. They understood that in cultural life nothing is sacred and that everything is up for grabs by the comedian—because satire and mockery are not the enemy, they are the other side of the coin of love and passion. One or two contemporary comedians understand this, notably Rainer Hersch, who combines huge love and knowledge of classical music with an unerring eye for its absurdities.

Having said that, one can’t blame the classical world for being so po-faced. It’s hard to crack a joke about the thing you love when it’s under attack, and our classical musicians have in front of them the example of continental Europe, where satire and classical music absolutely never mix. The respect for the art-form in Germany is positively reverential, but I wonder whether in the long run that might not prove to be self-defeating.

My feeling is that a profound engagement with an art-form isn’t best expressed through a stiff and stultifying respect. When Stravinsky took various bits of unknown Italian Baroque music as the basis for his great neo-classical ballet Pulcinella, subjecting them to wittily “cubist” stretchings and distortions, he was accused of a lack of respect for his sources. Serge Diaghilev, the impresario who commissioned the work, was actually one of the disapprovers; according to the composer he went round for months with an expression which suggested “The Offended Eighteenth-Century”. Stravinsky had a simple retort for the disapprovers: “You respect, I love”.

My New Year’s advice for the classical music world is—don’t be so hung up on winning respect for classical music. Remember that it can also make people laugh, and if you can get people to laugh at classical music, they’re already half-way towards loving it.

Rainer Hersch’s April Fool’s Day Gala Concert is at Cadogan Hall on 1 April 2023; cadoganhall.com; rainerhersch.com