2023-08-25 12:26:30
Classical Music and Violence
When the Maestro hands out slaps
Status: 12:26 p.m. | Reading time: 2 minutes
The boss is serious: Sir John Eliot Gardiner, still at work
Source: picture alliance/dpa/Bea Kallos
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After a performance of the opera Les Troyens, 80-year-old star conductor John Eliot Gardiner punched singer Will Thomas in the face. This also ended Sir John’s eventful career: London, Salzburg, Berlin – all dates have been cancelled. The reason for the slap was less than a trifle.
“It’s over.” It can go that fast. Whether John Eliot Gardiner, who is certainly not a Straussian, is familiar with the life-wise and razor-sharp short sentence of the “Rosenkavalier”-Marschallin? Now he will probably be sitting on his organic farm in West Dorset wondering what has become of the reputable Sir, just turned 80, who recently, in front of a TV audience of billions, coronation celebrations his old friend Charles III. allowed to ring in musically.
Actually, the Bach and Berlioz specialist should have been in the middle of a presumably triumphant tour with the semi-staged opera colossus “Les Troyens”. He would have been assured of eulogies at the BBC Proms, the Salzburg Festival, the Opéra de Versailles and the Musikfest Berlin. It’s all waste. Because once again temperament has run away with an old, white conductor.
Sir John’s personal Troy
The reason? A trifle. At the start of the tour during the Berlioz Festival at his birthplace La Côte-Saint-André, Will Thomas, singing the small bass-baritone role of the Trojan king Priam, went off to the wrong side of the stage. This prompted the conductor, known for his notoriously short-tempered and arrogant nature, to humiliate the singer in front of all his colleagues and give him a resounding slap in the face. So it immediately became that Klassikklatschportal „Slipped Disc“ pierced.
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Even if a Jochen Kowalski reported 35 years ago that he had never been deliberately and meanly humiliated as he was by Gardiner, a red line has been crossed here. Even Sir John noticed that. He left immediately afterwards, officially they wanted to blame the incident on age, heat and wrong medication. But it was too late for that. Gardiner’s assistant Dinis Sousa takes over all Berlioz appointments.
The sir was quoted as saying: “I deeply regret what has happened and I apologize unreservedly for losing my temper. There is no justification for my behavior and I have personally apologized to Will Thomas, for whom I have the greatest respect.” It’s over. Sometimes the fall of a personal Troy lasts less than ten years.
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