Sex and Violins

Classical music faces a crisis in this country, and to see why, you need look no further than your own CD rack. Concert audiences are graying faster than snow on the side of University Boulevard, and when the current elderly concertgoers are gone, it's an open question whether there will be anyone younger coming to the concerts to replace them. Furthermore, classical CDs simply do not sell in this country, unless they have been recorded by the aging Three Tenors or the heartfelt but underpowered Blind Tenor, Andrea Bocelli. Earlier in the decade, an acclaimed beginning to a complete recording of Wagner's hyper-lengthy "Ring Cycle" under Christoph von Dohnanyi had to be halted because it sold fewer than 500 copies here. To give that some perspective, this new integral recording of a masterpiece of Western music was outsold by Hootie and the Blowfish's contemporaneous first album by more than four orders of magnitude.

Clearly, classical music needs to draw some sort of attention to itself, besides snide comments about Luciano Pavarotti's affair with his 22-year-old secretary (such as "together they look like an exclamation mark next to a capital O"). The marketers have banded together, thought about it for a long time, and given us sexy violinists, cheesecake cover art, and music that supposedly improves one's intelligence instantly with no work required. While these strategies may result in some slight, temporary upswing in classical CD interest, I maintain that in the long run there is nothing to be gained by them. If people are going to become truly interested in classical music, their interest will only be held by what's on the CD, not what's in the booklet.

As dumb as these strategies admittedly sound, they are real strategies, and it is instructive to examine their genesis. The trend towards hyping sexy violinists undoubtedly began in earnest with the emergence of Anne-Sophie Mutter. While this emergence was due in no small part to her technically precise, inward playing and stature as protégé of the very German conductor Herbert von Karajan, the fact that she was quite attractive and inclined to wear strapless dresses all the time undoubtedly played a role as well. Attempting to explain how a woman (and a young woman, at that) could play so well, some commentators at the time attributed the rich tone she commanded to some sort of nebulous resonance effect between the wood and the bare skin it habitually rested on. Of course, this was hogwash; she was (and is) a wonderful violinist on her own merits. (And it was fortunate for all of us that it was hogwash, as it would be a bad situation indeed were, for example, Isaac Stern to [have] attempt[ed] to take advantage of this new technique. [R.I.P., Mr. Stern.])

Now Mutter, tremendously successful and still very attractive, does photo shoots in fashionable togs - violin optional - that, as a writer in the New Yorker recently observed, would not be out of place in Vanity Fair. As a result, every female violinist who reasonably can wears very little clothing. Vanessa-Mae, a Vietnamese exponent of the "electric fiddle," has won rave reviews in recent years for what I consider indifferent playing of a gimmicky instrument. On the other hand, she dresses like Mariah Carey. However, the champion in this arena, by technical knockout, has to be Lara St. John, who on her impressive (artistically and otherwise) debut CD of Bach solo partitas and sonatas appears in a stylishly lit black and white photo in what appears to be someone's bedroom, holding a violin strategically over certain censorable areas and otherwise wearing nothing at all. She accomplishes the feat of looking even more exploited when wearing clothes on her second CD, which features her wearing a unfastened leather jacket and stretch pants and nothing else. The effect is not "acclaimed young artist" as much as it is "bus terminal crack whore."

Of course, without classical performers the classical CD industry would not exist, and so they must be paid some respect. If you just put random people on the covers, though, they can be as naked as you want them to be. This lesson learned, classical companies have in recent years been releasing CD compilations on subjects like "romance" and tossing as many naked people onto the cover as can fit, and often positioning them ingeniously to make sure they do. I thought I had seen this trend raised to its highest possible level with Teldec/Warner's "Out Classics" discs, which present music by gay composers, and which feature men kissing on the cover whom I can categorically state are more buffed than any of the composers featured on the CDs ever were. This was before I found a volume entitled "Erotica Classics," also from Teldec, whose cover features two very naked women who aren't trying to cover anything except with each other's mouths. It also bears a parental advisory not for the lyrics (or lack thereof) on the CD but for the photos in the booklet, which apparently are of such a "graphic" nature that they are "inappropriate for children under 18."

All this for Ravel's "Bolero"? Wow.

So what is appropriate for children under 18? Well, getting smarter. A few years ago, you may remember, some researchers found that college students who listened to Mozart before an IQ test scored 12 points higher than those who listened to nothing before the test. (The researchers used Murray Perahia and Radu Lupu's recording of the Sonata for Two Pianos, K. 448, on Sony, in case you are looking for a way to get out of studying for tests.) In addition, there has been some research in recent years which suggests that classical music can have similar, permanent effects on young children's impressionable brains, leading the governor of Georgia to call for Atlanta Symphony albums to be distributed to every expectant mother in his state (seriously). So now we have "Mozart Makes You Smarter" from Philips, as if the research had proved anything but transient effects on one's intelligence, and classical music for babies, as if neurologists are unanimous that, while they don't have clue 1 about most child neurological development issues, they sure do know that classical music helps.

I suppose that one could argue that sensation and semilegitimate science will somehow seduce people into buying the CDs, and then upon listening they will discover the joys that classical music can bring into one's life and has brung into many lives, including mine. But I doubt it. If someone buys a CD based on the woman on the cover and her lack of clothing, or to save the time and effort associated with studying for midterms, there is precious little chance that he or she is going to magically stray into the part of the classical music section that does not involve hot chicks or fast smarts.

Perhaps the marketing honchos who wish to stoke interest in classical music should take the novel step of not treating people who don't know anything about classical music like total idiots. For example, they could explain themselves once in a while when they talk about concepts that no novice can be expected to comprehend, like "the dotted semiquaver motto's recurring inversion," in program notes. Maybe, too, if classical music looked more like America, America would like more classical music; the remarkably large crowds (including me) that attend concerts of German piano music by the thrilling black pianist Awadagin Pratt give some indication that this might be true. But let's not have any more of this huckstering, even if it attempts a worthwhile goal. Classical music, if it rises again, will do so on the basis of a renewed, unpretentious appreciation of the grandeur, intimacy, wit and pathos of the music itself, and not these cheap attempts to create a style for it.

One of the many reasons I am forever indebted to Dan Piotrowski is that he actually put this in the college newspaper, where about three people cared about it. One of them, fortunately, posted it to an opera listserv, where an editor at the All Classical Guide saw it. He wrote the paper looking for me, I said, "Yes, I would like to get paid to write about classical music," and the rest of my professional writing career began there. All because of an article in which I made a joke about Lara St. John dressing like a bus terminal crack whore. I am a lucky man in many ways.

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