Hacker News Reader

Comment by TomVDB | Hacker News Reader

I once went to opening night of Il Trovatore at the NYC Met opera. I thought it was great. At the end of the performance, singers for the usual ovations but when the director appeared on stage, the audience started booing. They apparently didn’t like the modern decor. Neither did the NY Times. I obviously don’t have a good eye for these things.

View on HN

The people who boo at operas are detestable. Like they have a mental image that the work is preserved in amber and the staging must never change. It's crazy and short-sighted. Example, they booed Patrice Chereau at Bayreuth in 76 and that is now considered a classic that rebooted Wagner out of the endlessly stale swords and horns look.

Plus there is the absolute dickishness of booing a team that spent six months or more slogging their guts out so they could sing, in tune, for three hours straight, for their entertainment.

In short: it wasnt you.

Well, the other side of this is that many audience members will give every performance a standing ovation, even when it isn't merited. Some people give 'unearned' standing ovations because they want to believe that the bad show was actually good, while others succumb to social pressure.

I think the audience should be expected to react with their genuine feelings about the performance; if the team wants a positive reaction every single time, they're going to have to earn it.

I go to a lot of classical concerts here in the Twin Cities, MN, and the audience basically gives a standing ovation every time. I don't mind it. I'd much rather be part of an enthused, appreciative audience who celebrate the incredibly hard work it takes to get to the point of these performance (literal decades of practice).

One issue is that giving standing ovations for every performance ends up devaluing them. I am sure that the performers on stage know that undeserving performances receive disproportionate approbation, so they discount the reaction accordingly.

Many studies show that improvement requires operating at your limit, and sometimes failing. Never letting anyone fail is a disservice to them in the long term.

The external feedback is just the last step in the chain, though. What the audience does on that night hardly matters: you got them to buy tickets, and the rest is knowing that you execute well on that performance, which is something the cast and crew have to know for themselves, because so many mistakes go unnoticed and just result in the performance being a little bit less polished.

When the seats are empty, that's the real marker of failure. But you can't get that information directly - flops are always a case of "couldn't see it coming". You can aim to derisk by following convention, but that's treading water and makes you an undifferentiated performer. You have to set principled benchmarks for yourself to excel because the feedback is going to be too sparse otherwise. That's the real struggle throughout all the arts. It's not on other people to set them for you.

Judith Martin, who writes for The Washington Post, said that were she a singer in operas, instead of perfunctory standing ovations, she'd rather be hissed for an off night, and on a great night have the students unharness the horses from her carriage to tow her back to the hotel.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com