Most emphatically against:
1. Il bravo prematuro (or rather, l’ejacculatore dei bravi prematuri). Hasn’t anyone caught him yet? On recorded evidence, he’s been doing it ever since 1937, and in every auditorium in the globe.
2. Tepid applause. A few desultory handclaps from the only two listeners still nearly awake (possibly the only two remaining in the building). Cruel, very cruel. Much worse than the sound of a football stadium in full cry.
3. Applause as soon as the singers stop singing or the curtain starts to fall, in scenes where the orchestra still has things of central importance to say. (Acts 1 & 2 of Meistersinger tend to be particular casualties.)
On the other hand:
1. In the 1975 Glyndebourne video of The Rake’s Progress, the singers exploit the audience’s premature applause (just before the Epilogue) for superb dramatic effect. This works so well that I wonder if Stravinsky, that crafty old Klingsor, deliberately lured his hearers to clap at the wrong moment there. If we “know too much” to do so, maybe we’re spoiling the effect he wanted.
2. On a few occasions, Knappertsbusch starts a performance DURING the applause that greets his arrival. Not for worlds would I erase the applause from those recordings even if I had the technology to do so. Kna’s reaction is part of the nature of the beast; if one can’t accept it, one probably should be listening to a different beast. Moreover, it’s the beast’s way of serving notice that he won’t mess around with any sentimental nonsense tonight; he's going to get right down to business, and the sparks will really fly—which, on those occasions, they generally do.
3. A corollary of Ralph Moore’s point: in many opera recordings, you can hear good singers deliberately milking the audience for applause during the closing bars of arias. (They’re doing other things too, of course; but they ARE doing that.) If, however, no applause follows, it spoils a rendition that you might otherwise have fully enjoyed. You start dredging your memory for explanations. Why the stony silence? Was the B natural in bar 28 slightly sharp? Was there an extra breath in bar 42? And if you can audibly hear that some applause has been excised, that’s even worse. What catcalls, or scurrilities, or telling sarcasms about the singer’s waistline, necessitated its removal?
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