Music and Bad Manners

In the early 20th-century concert hall, anything could happen. Audiences heckled performers mid-aria. Composers openly mocked each other's work on stage. Singers threw tantrums and walked off in fury. Carl Van Vechten, the era's most sparkling cultural critic, documents it all with wicked precision. This collection of essays peels back the curtain on musical culture at a moment of transformation. Van Vechten chronicles the eccentricities of performers, their arrogance, their sensitivities, their spectacular meltdowns, alongside the unruly behavior of audiences who thought nothing of talking during pivotal arias or pelting the stage with vegetables. He also ventures into broader territory: the surprising lack of original music for early cinema, the seductive influence of Spanish sounds on Western composition, and the slippery question of what actually constitutes 'national' music. Written with the satirist's eye and the insider's knowledge, these essays capture an era when music was still figuring out what it wanted to become, and everyone had an opinion about it.