Maestros Confront Coughing
【CORINNA DA FONSECAWOLLHEIM／聯合報／張佑生譯】
Trying to suppress a cough during a musical performance is an unpleasant experience. But so is being reprimanded by the performer on stage.
At a Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert in November, the guest conductor Michael Tilson Thomas dealt with a bronchial audience by tossing cough lozenges into the crowd in between movements of Mahler’s Ninth. After giving a marathon recital of Bach and Beethoven to a reverentially silent Boston crowd earlier that month, the pianist Andras Schiff stopped in the middle of his encore to address a cougher in the audience.
“I am giving you a gift,” he scolded the embarrassed offender. “Don’t spoil it!” That’s also the message the jazz pianist Keith Jarrett relays to his audiences, only his words are not printable here.
In this anything-goes age, it seems as if coughing in concerts is one of the last universally reviled forms of high-culture hooliganism. That vilification rests on the assumption that a person can control a cough, hold it in until a less exposed moment .
At the beginning of a recent performance of Handel’s “Messiah” at Carnegie Hall, coughs rippled through the audience like “bullfrogs calling to one another at night from different parts of the swamp,” to borrow the image coined by the pianist Susan Tomes.
Musicians feel all it takes is the threat of violence or humiliation to quell the coughing.
To what extent should performers acknowledge such disturbances in the audience? Is it not one of the hallmarks of a live performance that it feeds off the energy in the room ?
These questions are difficult to answer because the social contract at the heart of a musical performance is constantly being redefined.
An 18th-century performer was keenly attuned to the goings-on in the (brightly lit) auditorium and expected to acknowledge, for instance, the arrival of an august patron in one of the boxes. The ideal of a reverentially silent audience, plunged into darkness and wearing, as George Bernard Shaw once put it, its “churchiest expression” while the music plays, goes back only as far as the 19th century. Today, reverence toward anything — “churchiness” itself — is in limited supply . So is silence.
The conditions of the recording studio have accustomed both audiences and performers to an acoustic ideal. Nonetheless, living, breathing, rustling bodies that we are, the music is diminished without us there. The ideal silence is not one resulting from absence, but the silence created by a crowd of attentive listeners.
The conductor Simon Rattle expressed that nicely when he addressed another fit of coughing in 2007. “This piece starts with silence and returns to silence,” he told the crowd. “The audience can help to create the piece by remaining silent.”
When we in the audience start seeing silence as our own special assignment, we become more willing to suffer for it. But our silence is our own gift to the Keith Jarretts and Andras Schiffs of this world and may have been achieved at great cost. It’s not their entitlement.
在音樂會上忍住不咳嗽的經驗，很不舒服。因為咳嗽而被台上的表演者斥責，同樣令人不快。
去年11月芝加哥交響樂團的一場音樂會上，客座指揮麥可‧提森‧湯馬斯在馬勒第九號交響曲演奏的樂章之間，朝聽眾席投擲止咳錠，對付咳個不停的聽眾。當月稍早，鋼琴家安德拉斯‧席夫在波士頓演奏長篇的巴哈與貝多芬作品，滿懷敬畏的聽眾安靜聆聽。但是席夫彈奏安可曲時半途停了下來，向一個咳嗽的聽眾說話。
席夫責罵感到尷尬的冒犯者：「我在送各位一份禮物，別糟蹋了！」
這也是爵士鋼琴家奇斯‧傑瑞特傳達給聽眾的訊息，只不過他的用詞不宜刊出。
在這個百無禁忌的年代，在音樂會咳嗽彷彿是褻瀆高級文化、舉世唾棄的最後惡行之一。此一惡評假設人可以忍住不咳，撐到沒那麼明顯的時候再咳。
日前在卡內基音樂廳的一場韓德爾的「彌賽亞」音樂會開始時，聽眾席間此起彼落的咳嗽聲宛如「沼澤各處的牛蛙在夜間彼此呼喚」，這是鋼琴家蘇珊．湯姆斯創造的意象。
音樂家覺得，要壓制聽眾的咳嗽，只須祭出暴力或羞辱的威脅。來自觀眾席的干擾要到何種程度，演奏者才該理會？聽眾的干擾與演奏者的反制，並非現場演出的特點，而且耗盡演奏會場的活力。這些問題不容易回答，因為音樂表演中演奏者和聽眾的互動規範，不斷被重新定義。
18世紀的表演者熟知觀眾席（燈火通明）的動態，例如，應該要在某位威嚴的贊助者抵達包廂時，表達歡迎之意。蕭伯納說過，滿懷敬畏的觀眾保持安靜，隱身在黑暗中，音樂演奏時，臉上「最像在教堂作禮拜的表情」，但此一理想只能遠溯至19世紀。如今，對任何事物的敬意，像是「教堂作禮拜」，都很缺貨。安靜亦然。
錄音室的作品讓觀眾和表演者習慣高水準的音質。儘管如此，我們身體會動、呼吸、活躍，沒有聽眾，享受音樂的樂趣會降低。理想的安靜不是沒人出席，而是一群專注的聽眾營造的。
指揮家賽門‧拉圖2007年處理一陣狂咳時說得好：「這部作品始於安靜，歸於安靜。」他告訴聽眾：「藉由保持安靜，聽眾能協助創作這部作品。」
身在聽眾席的我們開始將安靜當作特別作業後，我們就更願意為此犧牲。但我們的安靜是我們給這個世界上的奇斯‧傑瑞特和安德拉斯‧席夫等音樂家的禮物，而且代價可能很高。這不是天上掉下來給音樂家的禮物。
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