'Artistic terrorism' in Orkney and Paris

An excellent intervention from the Master of the Queen's Music concerning the 'artistic terrorists' who ruin performances by having their infernal mobile telephones ring out: click here. It would take a greater optimist than I to think that Sir Peter Maxwell Davies's plan to write to telephone companies to collect the fines will succeed, but at least he is doing something. Saturday's performance of Götterdämmerung at the Bastille unleashed one of the most extraordinary audience reactions I have yet experienced. Amidst a barrage of coughing and chattering, two particular instances stood out. The heavy-breather seated next to me, who clearly fancied himself some sort of 'expert', not only 'conducted' (mostly out of time) and imitated (entirely incorrectly) woodwind fingering patterns, but actually sang along from time to time. I had never thought of Wagner dramas as obvious candidates for 'community singing', but clearly I am a bear of very little imagination. In another apparently unprecedented move, a woman initaited loud applase roughly three-quarters of the way through Siegfried's Funeral March. Unless she were both deaf and blind, in which case Götterdämmerung might be thought an eccentric choice of six-hour pursuit, she surely could not have thought the work was over. Perhaps her act was intended ironically, though irony and motivation were difficult to discern. Oh for the days when the Jockey Club disrupted Tannhäuser with a relative modicum of style...