How often would a major orchestra or opera or whatever be expected to have a major screw-up in front of a live audience? I’m talking sour notes, cracking voices, flubbed lines, lighting disasters, that sort of thing. Once or twice per season? Once or twice per decade?
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Colibri
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Frequency would be difficult to determine. I only have anecdotes.
I saw a play at Stratford(the one in Canada). Very professional, top notch stuff. I would not call this a mistake, but during the play(Measure for Measure), one of the lead actors got frustrated enough with a moronic-teenager in the crowd that he stopped, held his hand up to the other actor, pointed and looked at the teenager until he looked back, and pointed at the exit until the teen got up as ushers were coming to make him leave.
We were stunned, but did not blame him.
Probably pretty rare?
I remember it was a news item (film at 11!) when Pavarotti’s voice cracked.
That would sound like a difficult question to answer. After a little bit of google-fu I came across this interesting thread. (some Pop in there as well)
Then again, there can be operatic hazards to avoid like this.
I doubt the Met or London Phil are any more immune than any other professional orchestra or body. I’m a decade long full season ticket subscriber to my local symphony orchestra and semi-regular opera goer. Proper screw ups are rare enough that you can talk to orchestra members and they all remember them well. SO in the last decade thee are some of the memorable events.
Conductor has just ascended the podium, seconds away from the start, and a mobile phone rings just off stage. (I later hear that a member of the strings had forgotten to turn their phone off, and it was in their bag) a member of the brass section rushed off to find it, rushes back, and proceeding start. Conductor remains solidly glaring at the orchestra during this time.
About a minute into the start of Mahler 5, the conductor simply stops. Turns to the audience and says “can your hear that?” to which there are a lot of affirmative answers from the audience - there is high pitched electronic squealing noise. (Turns out it is a lost hearing aid that has gone into find-me mode). So the conductor sits on the side of the stage whilst the ushers madly look for the offending device. A few minutes later it is found, and the concert restarts from the beginning. (This isn’t the last time this errant hearing aid has caused problems, but the only time it has actually stopped the performance dead. I’m pretty sure I know who’s hearing aid it is now.)
Broken strings are an occasional difficulty. There is a defined procedure when a front desk musician breaks a string, the person behind them will swap instruments at the earliest opportunity in the music, and usually will restring the instrument as the performance proceeds. Once done, at an appropriate moment, they may swap back. If you have a string concerto, and the soloist breaks a string, the section lead of the appropriate instrument (which is going to mean concert-master if violin, or principal viola or cello for other strings) This will set in motion a next level swap with the next row back. That is rare, but can happen. I have seen two principals - concertmaster and principal cello break strings at almost the same time, leading to a remarkable amount of on-stage faffing about - all whilst the performance continued with nary the slightest hiccup. Indeed many audience members were unaware it had happened. The conductor shared his bouquet of flowers at the end of the performance with the two string section members who had had to give up their instruments and manage the broken strings.
As to bad notes, the nature of brass is that you always have the risk of a bad note from time to time. But a professional orchestra is not going to see many. Maybe a couple of obvious ones in the last decade. However if you talk to the orchestra members, there are more issues in performance than you would know about. However unless you were immersed in the minutiae of the piece, you would usually miss them. Most are trivial things, but you do get missed entries, or things that go wrong but are covered up by the overall flow of the orchestra. A couple of weeks ago there was a bang on stage from the double basses. Talking to the guys afterwards it was a silly stuff-up. The conductor had made a change to the performance late in rehearsals - deciding to lighten up the double bass sound by reducing the number playing in one spot. One of the double bass players forgot, and went to enter along with his cohort, and one of the others gesturing to him not to play, he panicked slightly realising his mistake and and he pulled his bow away he hit something. I sit close to the stage so heard it. Most people didn’t. However he was mortified.
So - really clear problems, every few years. Minor stuff ups that usually only members of the orchestra realise have happened - a few a year. Things not going exactly perfectly, really every performance - it is surprising how hard on themselves the performers are. When you have 70 to 80 performers at a professional level, you will always find someone who isn’t happy with how they went on any given night.
Francis Vaughan, I enjoyed reading about your experiences. Learned some new things. I appreciate you taking the time to share them!
We had season tickets to the local major professional theatre for a couple of years, and I do remember one somewhat exciting incident at the end of a play.
The play had in fact finished, and the actors came bounding onto the stage enthusiastically to take the curtain call - one of them a bit **too **enthusiastically. He caught a 2 metre high perspex panel (part of the set) on the way through with his hand or elbow, which promptly detached from the rest of the set, bounced across the stage, and slid over the edge. Fortunately, not close enough to any actual audience member to actually have endangered one. But it was a pretty big panel. I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to end up under it.
Everyone just took a moment or two to be stunned, and then they just laughed, shrugged, and kept on taking the curtain call.
I don’t recall any news items subsequently about people being brained by flying set bits during the rest of the run, so I presume they managed to put it all back together securely enough to do the job.
I’ll add what is probably the biggest stuff up you might ever encounter, although it wasn’t an indoor concert event as such. As a very big deal, Ennio Morricone came here to conduct a concert of all his own works. The concert was set up outdoors, the orchestra on a large covered stage, and audience of some thousands seated on chairs on the grass all on the riverbank. It was not a cheap concert. Premium tickets were more than $100.
Sadly the concert - as part of our annual arts festival - is at a time of year we call Mad March - because everything you want to go and see is on that month (mostly because the weather is almost guaranteed perfect.) Sadly, a competing event is a major street circuit car race. I kid you not. The circuit is probably less than 1km from the concert stage. You would hope there would be no conflict - evening concert - daytime car race activities. But nobody thought to check the running schedules - and just as the concert began, the Porshe Cup practice started. The air was filled with the sound of race cars at full throttle screaming around the track. Ennio conducted a piece, which luckily the amplified orchestra was able to just about drive out over the sound of the cars, but as a soon as the music stopped, vroooommmmm - vroooommmmm. Ennio stalked off the stage. He returned a few minutes later and tried the next piece. Same thing. This went on for about 30 minutes - during which time apparently senior politicians were making frantic phone calls to try to get the cars stopped. To no avail. But after 30 minutes the practice period came to a stop anyway. So peace reigned - nearly. No sooner had the cars stopped, but the workers at the nearby theatre restaurant decided to start to put the rubbish for the day out into the bins. So the cars were replaced by repeated and ongoing sounds of breaking glass as someone decided that all the bottles for the day needed to be properly smashed as they were disposed off. Eventually silence did reign, after probably half of the concert was wrecked. I remember going home close to livid with the appalling ineptitude shown by the organisers. The entire debacle made headlines in the paper the next day and probably shortened the careers of a few people. I can imagine that Ennio never forgot it either. I imagine he was livid as well.
That’s the sort of story guaranteed to make anyone feel better about whatever your latest work cock up was.
Our Grand Prix is still quite audible 10k or more from the racetrack, so I can only imagine what it must be like to try to sing against a car race a kilometre away!
In arguably the greatest tennis match of all time, 2008 Wimbledon Championships – Men’s singles final there were 79 unforced errors. I don’t imagine a performance by a top class orchestra or opera company that contained 79 unforced errors would be viewed quite as favorably.
I had a ticket to see him in New York a few years ago, 6th row. He had to cancel for health reasons; and at his age I don’t know if he tours or conducts anymore. So, as fucked up as that concert was, I’m still envious.
I once heard that jugglers drop the ball on purpose once in a while, just to make the audience think juggling is harder than it is. A friend who worked as a circus performer confirmed that those acts are ridiculously easy. So I suspect that at that level of professionalism, mistakes would be exceedingly rare.
In truth it was more about being there and seeing the man. He sent an understudy to actually rehearse the orchestra, and only took the stage for the performance (maybe final rehearsal, but not sure). So, in truth, we weren’t seeing his conducting of his own work, but rather him waving the baton at an orchestra that had already been sorted out for him to perform his work*. But you did get a pretty good night’s music, and a very good appreciation of just how amazing a composer he was.
*one might argue that the understudy would have been well primed in exactly what the maestro expected in that preparation, so perhaps I’m being a bit mean. But the orchestra would have never got to the point of really gelling with him and you felt that. There is a point where you can tell when a conductor and an orchestra really understand one another and they they play at a quite different level. Not all conductors can manage that, not by any means. (We had the fabulous pleasure of having Jeffery Tate as principal guest conductor, and were looking forward to more concerts still when he very sadly passed. There is no doubt, when the conductor really has a vision, the ability, and mutual trust with the musicians, absolute magic happens.)
The performance I’m recalling was in the mid-80s, at the Metropolitan Opera. It was a performance of *Die Walküre, *and throughout the first act, the soprano was having obvious difficulty with her voice. At the end of the act, it was announced that the great Hildegarde Behrens was being dragged out of retirement, to take over the role. The intermission was endless, while she was being rushed in and prepped for the role. Nobody left, as we all anticipated a rare treat. The rest of the opera was spectacular, as the legendary Behrens proved why she was famous for this role.
Audience misbehavious of various sorts happen all the time. Richard Griffths once famously stopped a performance and berated an audience member whose phone had gone off, and I (and no doubt lots of others) could cheerfully have strangled the bloke who coughed so very loud in the opening melody of the Rite of Spring in one BBC Proms concert. But that’s the weather for professionals, not a failure of standards on their part.
The fact that real performance problems are memorable underlines their rarity, I think. I do remember at another Prom, Anne Schwanewilms had some problem in Strauss’s Four Last Songs, and suddenly dropped an octave at a crucial point where the line is soaring away into the high registers. But incidents like these are so remarkable because they happen once in a blue moon:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n89F9YKPNOg - but this one is an example of just how great a professional Pires is
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLb1irjBoKI - in that one, there were multiple errors - the conductor had allowed Kaufmann to reprise his great aria, which is not normally done, and for whatever reason Georghiu was late on stage thereafter to pick up the action. But that’s opera: I think there’s a fund of stories of bad behaviour on stage - upstaging, distractions and so on - when Caruso was singing “Your tiny hand is frozen” to Nellie Melba, he supposedly slipped a hot sausage into her hand.
I was going to mention this :).
I always find it amusing when “unforced errors” are quoted in such matches.
They are a subjective judgement anyway and when faced with either Roger Federer or Rafael Nadal at the other end of the court there is really no such thing.
I juggle, and the audience doesn’t know what is hard. Juggling three of anything is easy, including knives, garden sickles, machetes, flaming torches, etc. Eating an apple while you juggle it is easy. Juggling more than three objects is hard. Juggling five is supremely hard. Five beanbags is eons harder than the apple trick, but the apple trick looks much more impressive to an audience.
“Playing catch” with the audience is ridiculously easy. That’s where you toss one ball or beanbag out into the audience, and they toss one into you, and you catch it and keep juggling. But it looks really impressive, and is fun for audiences. Throwing a ball behind your back while juggling is harder, and not as impressive.
Anyway, main topic. I once say Giselle at the Bolshoi, and the lead dancer fell on her ass. She got up so fast, it was a tiny blip. Didn’t really mar the performance at all.
Also, I saw a play recently that I had done in high school. They made five or six line slips, but just kept going without breaking character. People who didn’t happen to know the script, like I did, would never have known a line was flubbed. It’d be harder to to with Shakespeare, but not impossible.
In an orchestral piece, if there are several violins, and just one comes in late, or hits a bad note, I’ll bet the audience doesn’t notice, as long as all the others get it right.
When I did theater in high school, our director always told us, if we made a mistake, look for all the world like it was exactly what we were supposed to do, and the audience wouldn’t know it was a mistake.
There’s a scene in the movie Bringing Up Baby where Katharine Hepburn’s shoe breaks, and she proceeds with a very funny routine about it. No one would ever guess that her shoe broke by accident, and the entire scene was improvised, but was so funny, the director decided to use it in the film. I had seen the movie three or four times, and enjoyed that scene, before I learned that this was improvised (from TCM’s intro). I watched it carefully that time, and you can’t tell. It’s seamless.
I think professionalism isn’t so much never making a mistake, but dealing with whatever happens so that the act is smooth and perfect, and the audience can’t tell what is rehearsed and what isn’t.
Depending on how broadly one cares to define the scope of the question, one could put air show disasters high on the list of performance fuck-ups.
Bad enough to have a plane crash at an air show with a whole audience watching. Wikipedia list of air show accidents.
Worse still when a plane crashes into the audience, killing and maiming large numbers of spectators. People subjected to this level of unscripted excitement should either get their money back or be charged double. This raises “audience participation” to a whole new level.
1988 Ramstein air show disaster.. 70 dead; over 300 seriously injured.