Theatres without people are meaningless places. The empty seating in our opera house is a bald testimony to what is missing – people rustling softly, listening with bated breath, coughing discreetly, clapping enthusiastically, voicing displeasure. The audience, our sounding board, the vibrant part of the »evening«, is missing. And anyone who has trodden the boards of a drama stage knows how that breathing, feeling and responding crowd of people affects the course and quality of any given evening. The audience is the power that wells up at the end of a performance, when the applause makes a fellow actor out of the audience.

Datenstrudel, a Berlin film crew, has captured an exciting experiment on camera. The audience at a performance given at the Staatsschauspiel in Hanover was asked to resist all temptation to show their response to the work. The actors, who had been notified beforehand of what was going on, took their customary bow to a wall of silence – a disconcerting experience for audience and performers alike. According to one spectator, he had had the distinctly unpleasant feeling that he was refusing to pay the artists for their work.

Applause as wages. And it applies even more in the opera house than it does in a standard theatre, because the trajectory of the music, by its very nature, enhances the audience’s emotional involvement. Most works of opera all but factor this involvement into the composition. The spectacular, high-pitched notes on which the great arias tend to end are not simply vocal renditions of elation, uproar or desperation; they are also calculated to trigger applause. Nothing could be more awful for a soprano in Donizetti’s LUCIA DI LAMMERMOOR than for her madness scene to be greeted with silence.

And in no performances is the response of the audience more part and parcel of – indeed the climax of – the evening than at a premiere. Only at premieres are spectators in a position to convey to the creative team, through their applause or lack of applause, what they think of a brand new production – and the premiere audience is prepared to pay a not-inconsiderable surcharge just for this opportunity to be first in the queue to register their opinion. And for decades the applause at premieres has come to focus on the directors. While the interest for singers and conductors has been reduced to who gets the biggest applause, and they shrug off the odd boo as the eccentric statement of a zealous opera nerd, the applause accorded to the director is what everyone’s waiting for. Because the reception here is not a comment on the acting but a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, as it was with the gladiatorial combat in the Roman arena, where the audience is having their say, not today over life or death but over the fate of a production.

So whether they want to or not, the audience at a premiere is turning the spotlight on the directors, whose appearance onstage is awaited with feverish anticipation. And each director seems to savour his moment in the limelight, ranging from the maestro Hans Neuenfels, with his accentuated grand-seigneur-esque noblesse, to Frank Castorf, with his provocative, ear-cupping gesture in response to the wild responses to his FORZA DEL DESTINO. Directors stage their own appearances – right down to Rolando Villazón’s wearing of a clown’s nose at the premiere of his FLEDERMAUS in Berlin.

Small wonder, then, that the biggest talking point at the premiere of Mozart’s THE ABDUCTION FROM THE SERAGLIO was not the production itself – although the work did not want for radicalism – but the fact that the Argentinian director, Rodrigo Garcia, spurned the verdict of the audience and did not appear onstage. Yet every director is generally aware that their appearance in person will be the talk of the town and they will be remembered longest by precisely the people who booed the loudest. Just as the most controversial productions often end up attracting a cult following. Götz Friedrich’s version of THE RING OF THE NIBELUNG at the Deutsche Oper Berlin and Patrice Chéreau’s rendition of the same work in Bayreuth are the most celebrated examples of this.

The vehemence of an audience reaction to a premiere is the best indication that there is something at stake here: the public is defending a much-loved classic against disfigurement, rejecting the questions posed by an artist – or lauding the production to the skies. It is this kind of interaction that we hope will soon be taking place again – as loudly and passionately as possible.