When is it all right to interrupt a concert?

What had happened? A gentleman in the rear balcony had become suddenly indisposed. His distress was visible to the conductor. No doubt there is a protocol for such occasions, and Nézet-Séguin had followed it. Not a word was said. Yes, there is something more important than a symphony concert, and that is concern and respect for a fellow human being.

Fortunately, the gentleman was able to be assisted from his seat and led out a rear entrance. Thibaudet struck his chords, his concentration amazingly unbroken. The music resumed. No one in the audience had stirred. Everyone could see what was going on. Due silence had been observed. It was a moment of high civilization in which everyone instinctively did the right thing. The perfect decorum in the hall communicated respect for a fellow human being more than any commotion could have. The ushers did their job. We all hoped the gentleman would be well.

It’s almost impossible to imagine a similarly instinctive coordination of acknowledgment, patience, and respect in any other public space. Great music can do a lot of things. Sometimes, it even makes us worthy of ourselves.

An orderly protest, but . . .

Which brings me to the Michael Brown protest in St. Louis. There, too, by report, the protesters were orderly. They sang a song when the concert audience was expecting to hear the Brahms Requiem. But they could have accomplished their First Amendment ends by, say, distributing leaflets outside the concert hall suggesting that members of the audience reflect on Michael Brown’s fate while listening to memorial music. It would have been a less dramatic statement, but also a less polarizing one, since people are decidedly not of one mind about the issue. And it would have respected a precious good that has been steadily eroded in our hectoring, wired world: civic space, the right of citizens to go about their business unimpeded.

There are times when decorum needs to be breached, for example, when it is repressive; that is, designed to silence or exclude appropriate discussion. Not everyone will agree when such occasions arise, but an instance might be when a war resister stands up to protest an appropriation to fund an undeclared war that Congress itself has refused to debate. Good manners is not an absolute virtue. I’ve done my share of communicating my own views in public, solicited or not, and a certain toleration for disturbance is part of a robust democracy. But the Michael Brown protest was wrong.

It is all right for someone to approach me in the street with a leaflet for some cause or other; it would be wrong for someone to block my path until I took it. A concert audience is similarly on its way when it awaits the beginning of a program; it has a legitimate expectation of free passage. You can lobby it out of doors all you like, but a concert hall is not Hyde Park Corner, no matter how urgent your message.

No exceptions?

Is this rule absolute? No rule is. Let us suppose that an orchestra had hired a notorious and unrepentant Nazi to play or conduct. Would it be right, even mandatory, to try to interrupt such a performance? The question is not idle. A few years ago, the Philadelphia Orchestra played a concert with former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice as its piano soloist. Rice is in my view an unindicted war criminal, and the Orchestra besmirched itself in engaging her.

I registered my own protest in writing about it at the time. If some people had wanted to buy tickets and silently walk out on Rice’s performance as it was about to begin, they would have had my sympathy and support. The issue, in such a case, would have pertained to the event at hand. The Orchestra Association was in fact making a political statement of its own in inviting Rice to begin with, and the floor, so to speak, was open. Moreover, it was forcing its views not only on the public, but on any musicians who themselves might not have wished to play with her.

Michael Brown is another matter. We are all properly concerned about his death, which, whether the result of a criminal act or a justifiable case of self-defense, has exposed an underside of racism in Ferguson and elsewhere that is very much the public business. But not in a concert hall.