Americans' aristocratic fantasies

PR2 reports that the New Yorker reviews that someone in America writes a book about the change in attitude to concert conduct in Europe (once audiences behaved badly; then the concert hall became like the church); and that he attributes it to the rise of the middle class. It is yet another one of those fanciful American interpretations of Europe -- one more instance of how illusory is the cultural unity of the West: by and large we really do not understand each other.

The book's argument, apparently, goes that aristocrats behave badly because they can, their status being assured by birth, while the middle class is not certain of the day or the hour and must earn/prove their middle classness constantly and do so through decent behaviour. (For instance, presumably, sitting mum in concerts). (As if sitting mum in concerts were a universal given of polite behavior).

The way to parse this argument is of course this: ‘middle class’ means ‘America’ (‘us’); 'we' (Americans) live in constant anxiety about our status and worth; and since 'we' have created the world we live in, and it is unlike anything that was before, the past must have been very different and there certainly must have been an age in which some people at least didn’t feel anxious about their status. The aristocrats, of course.

PR2, being a European radio station does not know how to parse American self doubt. And, as all Europeans, it accepts American analysis of European realities come scritto. (Like everything American, it must be good). But PR2, being European, ought to know better. All that renaissance drama, baroque opera, medieval chivalric tales: Europeans fed this stuff in school ought to know something about aristocracy. Such as that noblesse oblige; that is, that aristocrats lived under constant pressure to live up to a complex and demanding code of conduct; a fact emphasized by all literary and dramatic production right up to the age of enlightenment. In truth, dear PR2, the true difference between aristocrats and the middle class was that aristocrats were required to be a certain kind of person (to justify their preferential access to worldly goods), while the middle class only needed to acquire and hold the goods to be middle.

As for the concert hall conduct, the reason why people began to behave religiously there has nothing to do with the middle class, and everything to do with the romantic vision of art as the new religion: valuable by definition, elevated, life giving, true, etc. Liszt improvising is like the Transfiguration: one falls upon his knees and beats his chest.

(One could argue, I suppose, that this elevation of art grew out of artists' typically middle-class status anxiety which drove them to demand heretofore unheard of respect for their productions. Liszt said (in effect): I am a priest. And in time he actually became one).

It was not always so. There was a time when what we call art today was just pleasure, when opera was no different from the hunt or the corrida or a hand of whist. Then the nineteenth century came and breathed the excruciating, stultifying, mind-numbing religious seriousness into art. Suddenly, it meant something.

Art with capital A.

Oh.