music manners

One of the fascinating details in Alex Ross' The Rest Is Noise - out now in paperback in the UK - is how Mahler established the manners of today's classical music audience. Ross writes that Mahler codified,

'the etiquette of the modern concert experience, with its worshipful, pseudo-religious character. Opera houses of the 19th century were rowdy places; Mahler, who hated all extraneous noise, threw out singers' fan clubs, cut short applause between numbers, glared icily at talkative concert-goers, and forced latecomers to wait in the lobby.'