Pieces that encourages premature audience applause

[PerfectWagnerite]

What are your favorite pieces where the audience thinks it's over and starts clapping but the piece is actually not over yet? Two well-known ones are Tchaikovsky's 5th Symphony and Weber's Invitation to the Dance.

[not edward]

Sibelius 5.

Less well known, but Scriabin 3.

[Archaic Torso of Apollo]

Haydn Symphony #90 (two false endings).

[Jo498]

With the Weber this actually happened when Harnoncourt conducted it at the Vienna New Year's Day concert. Shows that this audience is mostly rich rabble...

Maybe depending on a repeat, it can also happen with the finale of Schubert's "Trout" quintet. It does not really have a false ending but a few bars of rest before it starts again

With Tchaikovsky's 6th the audience often applauds after the brilliant 3rd movement...

[EigenUser]

What are your favorite pieces where the audience thinks it's over and starts clapping but the piece is actually not over yet? Two well-known ones are Tchaikovsky's 5th Symphony and Weber's Invitation to the Dance.

I saw Tchaikovsky's 5th performed live in November and I don't remember a problem with the finale, but someone (a child, I think), clapped wildly during the silence just after the first climax in the slow movement.

Though it probably isn't what this thread was asking, one of the times I saw Bartok's 2nd PC performed (Philly/Bronfman) the audience was so riled up by the thrilling ending (which is one of the most brilliant endings ever, I think), that the applause and standing ovations seemed to come just a split-second before the orchestra/soloist arrived on the last note.

When I saw Messiaen's Oiseaux Exotiques performed, the audience seemed confused after the chord repeated 31 times.

I bet people clap at the end of the fifth movement of Turangalila-Symphonie. It really does seem like the ending.

[PerfectWagnerite]

With the Weber this actually happened when Harnoncourt conducted it at the Vienna New Year's Day concert. Shows that this audience is mostly rich rabble...

I heard that performance on WQXR in NYC awhile back. It was actually pretty comical. When the piece actually did ended the applause came rather hesitantly, as if they are not sure whether this time it is REALLY the ending of the piece. For a piece that get performed in Vienna probably as often as the Star Spangled Banner in the US it makes you wonder.

There is another performance of the piece where the conductor puts out a hand to the audience as if to say "DO NOT CLAP" at the "false" ending part, and that seems to have worked.

The Tchaikovsky seems to get people every time, because the piece actually goes on for another 2-3 minutes AFTER that cadence in the final movement. I heard it performed twice live and both times it was so funny I almost laughed out loud.

[Mirror Image]

I bet people clap at the end of the fifth movement of Turangalila-Symphonie. It really does seem like the ending.

Some wish it was!

[Ken B]

I saw Tchaikovsky's 5th performed live in November and I don't remember a problem with the finale, but someone (a child, I think), clapped wildly during the silence just after the first climax in the slow movement.

Though it probably isn't what this thread was asking, one of the times I saw Bartok's 2nd PC performed (Philly/Bronfman) the audience was so riled up by the thrilling ending (which is one of the most brilliant endings ever, I think), that the applause and standing ovations seemed to come just a split-second before the orchestra/soloist arrived on the last note.

When I saw Messiaen's Oiseaux Exotiques performed, the audience seemed confused after the chord repeated 31 times.

I bet people clap at the end of the fifth movement of Turangalila-Symphonie. It really does seem like the ending.

That's just wishful thinking.

[Ken B]

Some wish it was!

Ha! Great minds!

[Mirror Image]

Ha! Great minds!

[springrite]

In the mid-80's, Salonen conducted LA Phil for the first time and it was Sibelius 5. THere was a note on every seat that told the audience NOT TO APPLAUD until the conductor had turned around at the end of the Sibelius because of the false ending. This is a probably a good idea anywhere, but especially in LA back then.
It worked.

[Jo498]

I heard that performance on WQXR in NYC awhile back. It was actually pretty comical. When the piece actually did ended the applause came rather hesitantly, as if they are not sure whether this time it is REALLY the ending of the piece. For a piece that get performed in Vienna probably as often as the Star Spangled Banner in the US it makes you wonder.

There is another performance of the piece where the conductor puts out a hand to the audience as if to say "DO NOT CLAP" at the "false" ending part, and that seems to have worked.

It has been fixed somehow on the disc of the concert (as the NYD concert is actually played two or three times there was probably enough material without applause).
I do not think the "Invitation" is as popular as it used to be and despite a waltz it is certainly not one of the Viennese staples. (They might deny it, but the Viennese are surprisingly parochial, I believe.)

The applause rituals at the NYD concert are the applause after the first few bars of the "Blune Danube", followed by the Happy New Year wishes from conductor/orchestra and the clapping during the Radetzky-Marsch.

[PerfectWagnerite]

I do not think the "Invitation" is as popular as it used to be and despite a waltz it is certainly not one of the Viennese staples. (They might deny it, but the Viennese are surprisingly parochial, I believe.)

Probably because they are jealous that a German and a Frenchman can come up with a waltz (perhaps the greatest concert waltz), forever young, that blows the garden-variety Viennese waltz out of the water.

Here (at around 8:26) the conductor almost chides the audience for clapping prematurely.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vf0on9TKtB4

And here the conductor doesn't pause at the cadence and goes right into the cello solo, hushing the clapping before it can even start.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MQ7oSpptH4

[DaveF]

A couple at concerts I've been at: at a Prom sometime in the 1980s, as the climactic Dona nobis pacem in the finale of Honegger's Liturgique symphony was dying away, one person didn't just applaud but bellowed "Bravo!" at the top of his lungs - with two minutes of quiet coda still to come;
And in Cardiff in 2003, after the greatest performance of the Rachmaninoff Symphonic Dances I've ever heard, conducted by our beloved maestro Otaka, the audience went mad immediately after the final chord, with the long tam-tam crash completely lost.  Perhaps, if Havergal Brian's symphonies ever enter the repertoire, the tam-tam swishes that end many of them will be drowned out by wild applause - or not.

[(poco) Sforzando]

What are your favorite pieces where the audience thinks it's over and starts clapping but the piece is actually not over yet? Two well-known ones are Tchaikovsky's 5th Symphony and Weber's Invitation to the Dance.

It's beyond me why audiences should feel impelled to applaud the Tchaikovsky, since the B major chord before that coda is so plainly a dominant needing resolution. But they do, and for every applauder there will be an angry seatmate ready to shush them and shoot dirty looks. As I remember last time I heard it live, Lorin Maazel barely allowed more than a second or two between the chord and coda; better that I suppose than premature ejaculations from uncontrollable audience members.

At the Metropolitan Opera, one almost never hears the endings of most acts because the house invariably starts lowering the curtain before the music ends, and the audience invariably takes this as their cue to applaud. I have yet for example to hear the last notes of Aida, or the sforzando E-major chord closing Act Two of Meistersinger, without those endings being drowned out by the audience.

[listener]

The gentleman who applauded with a 'bravo' after waking following the second movement of the Debussy String Quartet left immediately and was not seen for the rest of the season.

[Chris L.]

There are lots of pieces that might cause someone to prematurely applause if they're new to classical and don't know any better. I say if the performance of a part or movement of a larger body of work was so exceptionally brilliant that it deserved special applause then to hell with the "rules" and do so.

[(poco) Sforzando]

There are lots of pieces that might cause someone to prematurely applause if they're new to classical and don't know any better. I say if the performance of a part or movement of a larger body of work was so exceptionally brilliant that it deserved special applause then to hell with the "rules" and do so.

It was quite common to applaud after movements in the 19th and early 20th centuries. We hear of Bruckner being called on stage between movements of his 7th symphony when performed in Vienna under Nikisch. Adolf Busch's old recording of the Brahms Violin Concerto includes applause afer the first movement, and it would be a dull audience indeed that didn't applaud the first movements of the Tchaikovsky piano or violin concertos. Even Mozart writes of getting applause *during* movements, in reaction to particularly brilliant passages in his concertos. (The only modern parallel I can think of is ballet, where dancers are frequently applauded midway through their variations - I'll never forget the thunderous applause Paloma Herrera of American Ballet Theatre received during the last few minutes of the Rose Adagio from Sleeping Beauty, for instance, and any dancer can induce applause during a set of grand jetées.)

This is different from inappropriate or ignorant applause, I would say. I remember also our local community orchestra playing the Academic Festival Overture (incredibly badly, as it happens), and the conductor making a preliminary speech asking the audience not to applaud until they hear the last three chords. Sounds simple, no? Well, one old fool decided to applaud anyway before those last chords, leading his wife to shush him and proving that when it comes to applause, there's no keeping a good man down.

[Gurn Blanston]

Haydn encouraged audiences to suffer from premature acclamation. As Walter B. mentions above, Symphony #90. Also, Quartet Op 33 #2 can make you get whiplash in your wrists trying to stop if its the first time you've heard it. 

I like that they aren't a cerebral sort of arcane thing which only a highly schooled musician would get, they are an obvious practical joke meant to make you laugh out loud. And they do. Every time, even today.