Why is sex banned from the concert hall?

Conductor John Mauceri just wrote an excellent piece in the Huffington Post which explores some of the themes we’ve touched upon here in this column/blog. A few of those themes are sports versus classical music, sexuality and classical music, and the proven superior value of classical music in times of societal distress.

I think we can look at sexuality just a little more here. Why do we always have to bring sex into it? Because it’s already in the music and sex sells — way more than you might have imagined.

In the landmark book Sex at Dawn, authors Christopher Ryan, Ph.D. and Cacilda Jethá, M.D. mention a finding from U. S. New and World Report: “Americans spend more money at strip clubs than at Broadway, off-Broadway, regional and nonprofit theaters, the opera, the ballet and jazz and classical music performances — combined.”

Put that in your oboe and smoke it.

There are two very consistent features in marketing. One is comedy and the other is sexuality. Neither of these appear to be a part of the mainstream classical music scene in your standard American concert hall.

Opera is full of comedy and sexuality, but no one outside the afficianado class appears to realize that. Consider The Marriage of Figaro. The whole thing is a sexual comedy, two things which were important to Mozart if we go off the content of his letters.

However, opera has done an okay job at incorporating modern sexuality into productions. That is, when opera isn’t trying to force the issue with S&M productions of Don Giovanni and the like.

The Traviata from Salzburg, directed by Willy Decker (irony), does a great job of presenting Violetta as an object of desire without being sensational. Should you not know the story, in Traviata, Violetta is a famous courtesan.

That would be like a porn star in our culture. I exaggerate not.

The sexual element is not gratuitous but is part of the story. To dress it up in corsets, hoop skirts, and a powdered wig sterilizes the sexuality and removes part of the story.

Yet there is resistance. Last season, San Diego Opera’s Don Giovanni featured a comical sex scene on opening night which mysteriously disappeared for the remaining performances after the director had left.

There's no hiding the final scene of Salome in which the title character makes out with the severed head of John the Baptist.

"Couldn't we do that scene in a tasteful way?"

There's nothing tasteful about it. That's the point. The only tasteful part is when Salome tries to figure out what the dead lips of the corpse-head taste like.

The example that Mauceri brings up is sexuality in classical music marketing. Why does the thought of that feel in bad taste? It’s as if we don’t want to belittle the music with such a base topic as sex. A sexy ad for an orchestra would be in bad taste. Right?

I may be wrong about this but it does seem as though the concert hall culture is subject to the lingering effects of systemically repressive, Victorian-era sentiments on sex.

Here’s a thought that we’ll have to return to at a later date: If we weren’t such sexual creatures would composers know how to write a crescendo followed by a climax? Besides sex, where else do we consistently experience that “building, building, building to a release?” Where does the inspiration for a crescendo followed by a climax come from?

I’m thinking this is fertile ground.