The words “performer,” “performance,” and, increasingly, “performativity” (as well as their close cousins “actor” and “acting”) have been taking on a lot of extra duties of late. Just as one was getting used to incompetent politicians being called “bad faith actors,” up popped an attack on “malign Russian actors.” I’ve known a few of those and wondered which theater company these new ones worked for, until I realized that they were not Thespians at all: they were under instructions from the Kremlin.
The word “performance,” of course, has a long nontheatrical history—the economy performs well or badly, as does a new car. People have anxiety about their sexual performance. Writing of President Biden, the historian George Dillard recently observed that “all of the worries about Biden’s age are about his ability to perform the role of president, not his ability to do the job of president.” Dillard’s essay was headed “How the US Presidency Became a Performance”—and Biden’s performance is now, of course, about to be retired by popular demand.
Political performance is one of the many aspects of the phenomenon that Richard Sennett illuminates in The Performer. Not that he’s neglected the subject before. His collected works—some twenty books, including three novels and a series of studies of urban life notable for their breadth of reference, wit, and ability to make imaginative connections—resemble a great quilt in which each panel represents a reconsideration of the same themes through a different filter. In the 2021 introduction to The Uses of Disorder, first published in 1970 when he was twenty-seven, he notes that “most writers get only a few big ideas in their lives. I was lucky to have one when I was twenty-five: that by living in a big, messy city, you could develop as a human being.” Not where he lived, though: “The cities of my youth…had diminished diversity and complexity.”
Seven years after that book appeared, in The Fall of Public Man (1977) he examined the origins of what he calls the decay in social life, tracing it back through the eighteenth century and tracking the parallel growth of a kind of theater divorced from most people’s experience of reality. In the middle of that century, he writes, “a social life did exist in which the aesthetics of the theater were intertwined with behavior in ordinary life.” By the century’s end, he says, the theater had become vivid in a way that ordinary life, increasingly standardized, had ceased to be:
The performer’s social rise was based on his declaration of a forceful, exciting, morally suspect personality, wholly contrary to the style of ordinary bourgeois life, in which one tried to avoid being read as a person by suppressing one’s feelings.
The same was true of musicians. In Respect in a World of Inequality (2003), which opens strikingly with his memories of his childhood in the Cabrini Green model public housing project in Chicago, Sennett reveals that his intended career as a cellist ended before it started when he had a botched operation on his hand, but not before he had put in many, many hours of practice. He also studied conducting with Pierre Monteux, the first conductor of The Rite of Spring, so when he writes about performance in the more conventional sense he knows whereof he speaks. His affecting novel An Evening of Brahms (1984) is also about musical performance: the rise of the cello-playing central character, the crisis in his relationship with his less talented pianist wife, his musical challenges and triumphs, culminating in a loving description, in considerable technical detail, of Brahms’s German Requiem.
So it would seem that The Performer is a book that has been waiting to be written for some time. Sennett notes that as he started it,
a cluster of demagogues had come to dominate the public realm. Donald Trump in America and Boris Johnson in Britain are skilled performers. Malign performances of their sort draw on the same materials of expression, though, as other kinds of expression. Blocking, lighting, and costuming are non-verbal devices used in all kinds of performances, as are the pacing of words and sounds, the expressive movement of arms and feet.
Physically, performance constitutes an art—an impure art.
To counter this corruption of expression, he proposes an anti-Keatsian approach in which “the claims of truth, of correctness, no longer rule, and expression becomes instead an exploration.”
Sennett has, he admits, already explored the relations of art and society, first in The Fall of Public Man and then in The Conscience of the Eye (1990), but these books were written not “from the vantage point of the artist” but from that of the sociologist. The danger, he observes, is “to reduce performing art to a simple manifestation, a representation, of society. The ethical problems of performing lie deeper, inside the art.”
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Sennett studied cello at Juilliard, where most of his teachers were Central European escapees from Hitler who were relieved simply to be able to play great music; their task was to conserve it, possibly at the risk of embalming it. To him, the school felt isolated from the real world, a fortress. But now, sixty years later, he understands that his teachers were sustained—kept alive, indeed—by performing, even if their art was appreciated by an ever-dwindling number.
The notion of performance as essentially for the benefit of the performer is a stimulating one and leads Sennett to one of the most striking passages in the book, about a performance of As You Like It by the patients in the AIDS ward of a Catholic hospital:
The players were costumed in hospital gowns, their makeup consisting of a flesh-coloured cream which disguised the reddish-brown lesions of Kaposi’s sarcoma on necks, faces and hands. The results on the whole were convincing, pleasing the actors, releasing them from dwelling on the cancerous sores on their bodies. In bed or sitting in chairs—few had the strength to stand for long or move about—the patient/actors read out their lines, often smiling to themselves as they went along.
“In retrospect,” says Sennett,
there seems something heroic about the actors refusing—if only for two hours—to be patients, submissive to their fate. Don’t pity us, don’t pray for our souls—at least, not yet! We have escaped to the Forest of Arden.
He notes here a deep truth: performance allows one to transcend one’s physical and indeed mental condition. It is—can be, perhaps should be—a liberation. There is a sense in the wider world, away from the theater or the studio or the concert hall, that performing is somehow inherently false. Untrue. Only bad acting is false.
From this Sennett moves to ritual, whose purpose is consolation and which is governed by strict rules. Focusing on the Jewish practice of Kaddish—prayers recited for the dead—he notes that “were you to add riffs and embroideries, you would distract from the power of the ritual itself. Your ‘agency’ is not the point of you saying Kaddish.”
Ritual looks to a practice which does not vary from place to place, whose organization of words and movements changes slowly, whose timing is strict, a performance which anyone who is in mourning can give. Whereas acting is elastic in time, adaptable to place, puts demands on the skill of the performer, and is focused on their persona. The sum of acting’s parts can be transgressive, whereas a ritual such as Kaddish aims at reintegration into the community.
It seems to me that it’s more complicated than that. Greek tragic theater is both ritual and visceral: the story has no surprises. One goes not because of curiosity about the outcome but for the restatement of terrible truths about the human situation that must be faced. The task of the actor is to make the play freshly inevitable—something you watch with your hands over your eyes, dreading what’s to come. And that of course requires a performer, not a celebrant, someone who fills the role with the emotions of the character. This sense of lived performance, of acting, was understood by Plato, who in his early dialogue Ion has Socrates ask the eponymous masked rhapsode, the reciter of verse:
When you produce the greatest effect upon the audience in the recitation of some striking passage, such as…the sorrows of Andromache, Hecuba, or Priam, are you in your right mind?… Does not your soul in an ecstasy seem to be among the persons or places of which you are speaking?
“That proof strikes home to me, Socrates,” says Ion, “for I must frankly confess that at the tale of pity, my eyes are filled with tears, and when I speak of horrors, my hair stands on end and my heart throbs.”
The issue of whether the tears the performer sheds are real has haunted all discussion of the subject, from Plato to Diderot, Stanislavski to Strasberg. Predictably, Sennett cites Diderot, about whom he writes extensively and illuminatingly in The Fall of Public Man, to shed light on this question. Sennett writes that in his classic text The Paradox of the Actor (1773), Diderot baldly asserts that “the less deeply a performer feels, the more they can make an audience feel.”
The problem with this analysis is that it fails to take into account the crucial notion of character, the credible presentation of which is the actor’s primary task. This can sometimes happen with lightning speed, an instant understanding of the person behind the words; most often it painstakingly evolves during (and often long before) rehearsals, the purpose of which is to engage with every aspect of the character as revealed in the play or screenplay, so that finally one is effortlessly able to think the thoughts of this other person. Those thoughts, when engaged with, will produce emotion, positive or negative, entirely proportionate to the situation and will take up residence in the actor’s nervous system. This produces physical results; the body and the face change involuntarily.
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This is the opposite of faking emotion; it is entirely authentic. The supreme exemplar of this approach was Diderot’s hero David Garrick, who brought to the English stage hitherto unparalleled speed of thought, freedom of emotion, and physical responsiveness, which enabled him to effect and sustain astonishing transformations. But he never allowed the character’s emotions to overwhelm the performance. Sennett gives a particularly striking account of an actor allowing the character to take possession of her mind and imagination while remaining entirely in control:
New Yorkers my age may recall an instance of Diderot’s paradox in a film of the seventy-year-old Ida Kamińska playing, in Yiddish, the young Ophelia in Hamlet. Mrs Kamińska was so affecting in this role, pouring her soul into the part of the doomed young girl, that no one thought about her barely disguised wrinkles or prominent veins.
I have witnessed this myself. In my youth, I was briefly the dresser of the great Irish actor Micheál MacLiammóir, who told me one evening after the show that he had seen the new Franco Zeffirelli film of Romeo and Juliet, which had disappointed him. “The Romeo just wasn’t young enough, you see.” This was surprising: the actor in the film was barely twenty. Then MacLiammóir—a run-down septuagenarian, short of breath, in an obvious toupee, and wearing rather heavy street makeup—started to speak the famous lines: “It is my lady—oh, it is my love/Oh, that she knew she were!” His age melted away and he was seventeen again, passionate, tender, boyish. I have never seen a better—or a younger—Romeo.
Sennett inevitably invokes Stanislavski, whose complex work he illustrates somewhat skimpily. He makes no mention of Michael Chekhov, Stanislavski’s star pupil and one of the greatest actors and acting theorists of the twentieth century, who, cramped by what he felt to be the elaborate and sometimes ponderous apparatus of his teacher’s method, struck out in a different direction. The purest example of acting, he insisted, is when a child, playing with his nanny, seizes a broom and, brandishing it as his sword, immediately becomes a pirate king. This instant engagement with character, rather than Stanislavski’s painstaking construction of it brick by brick with scrupulous attention to naturalistic detail, was the essence of Chekhov’s approach, resulting in a series of deeply creative performances. This is not so much performing the character as unleashing it; the character plays himself. The crucial element is the engagement of the mind and the imagination in the present, not the reenactment of something premeditated. It is thus as far from ritual as possible.
I dwell on this because the idea of acting is clearly bound up inextricably with performance, which Sennett is somewhat reluctant to define, perhaps because he has bigger concerns than mere acting. Later in the book he writes of musical performance in precise detail, as well as other nonartistic performances—political, social. Interestingly, he finds there to be an essential moral ambiguity about acting in the sense of playing a character. It is not clear exactly where he feels the ambiguity to lie, unless it is in the mere fact of departing from the version of oneself upon which one has largely settled and which other people recognize.
Sennett surprisingly extends his exploration of performance into the realm of the pictorial with Caravaggio’s The Taking of Christ, which shows Judas approaching the just-arrested Christ and kissing him. What is particularly notable about this painting is that Judas is crying. Caravaggio, he says,
paints a little sliver of white between the eye socket of Judas and his nose, a sliver which appears to be light glistening off a stream of tears. Visually, this detail is disorienting: Judas’s tear ducts seem to be spurting out a horizontal wet stream rather than dripping drops down the cheeks…. The white line of tears is puzzling…. Are his tears fake or real?
Tears can certainly be faked. And in many cultures they are an almost ritualistic response to misfortune, the crier appearing to be quite separate from her or his tears. Sennett reports seeing professional mourners in Morocco, “one mourner taking up just on the last notes of another, the timing linked to starting and ceasing to weep.” He adds that “just this staging of tears among the paid professional mourners allowed others at funerals to release their emotions.” Is that moral ambiguity? Or social service? On the stage, it is a function of great mental connection with an image. A fellow actress in David Hare’s play Plenty asked Kate Nelligan how she wept every night when she spoke the line, “I mean, there are girls today who mourn Englishmen who died in Dachau, died naked in Dachau, men with whom they had spent a single night.” And Nelligan replied, “What I do is think of men, men dying naked in Dachau, and I cry.”
In The Taking of Christ, Sennett again insists on “the moral ambiguity of performing.” If Judas’s distress is fake, then he’s not being morally ambiguous, he’s lying. The situation of the Player in Hamlet, “all his visage wanned,/Tears in his eyes,” is quite different. There is no suggestion that he’s being dishonest or false. Hamlet is contrasting it favorably with his own emotional rigidity, his pusillanimity:
Yet I,
A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak
Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause,
And can say nothing—no, not for a King.
His self-disgust is real enough, though of course, being who he is, he externalizes—performs—it. Would it be more real if he didn’t? Surely not. It is in Hamlet’s nature to dramatize his emotions—his real emotions. Sennett devotes a remarkable amount of space to interrogating the moral validity of performance. Often it seems that what he is talking about is credibility: when meaning and expression are at odds.
He has a very striking section about the 2021 Capitol insurrection, focusing on the soi-disant shaman Jacob Anthony Chansley, horned, painted, bare-chested:
I was struck by how carefully Chansley had kitted himself out. The sexy bare chest with its traces of hair was a fleshy sign that contrasted with the abstractly painted hard face; the fur and the horns were, again, a pairing of soft and hard. Any make-up artist would have admired the pairings: they did indeed make him look half-man, half-beast, seeming more menacing than he was in fact. His aura was dispelled as soon as he, a stumbling speaker, opened his mouth.
Nonetheless, the images of him remain potent, linger in the mind. Sennett writes in depth of Wordsworth’s experience of the French Revolution, whose theatricalized violence so chilled the poet that he was cured of his revolutionary impulses:
The dramatizing of violence is undoubtedly the most dangerous of all performances. Which might dispose us to think that a return to sanity and civility requires that we stop performing. Civilized life might require dispassionate discourse instead…. The willing suspension of disbelief might be fine inside an opera house, but is destructive in society. But if we believe only what can be proved, by avoiding fantasy we would do another kind of violence to ourselves. The imagination would wither…. Violence is a fact we have to live with rather than transcend. And the spaces of performing suggest how we might do so.
Sometimes, as here, Sennett, having flown various interesting kites, seems to be unable to bring his speculations to a satisfactory resolution.
Ranging ever more widely, he takes us back, as in his magisterial Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (1994), to the origins of theater, describing what he calls the three ancient forms that have come down to us: the open stage, the closed stage, and the hidden stage. This section of the book is frankly confusing: the open stage (the agora, the public square, so richly described in the earlier book) is here characterized as a form of theater where people go to see and be seen, the men generally naked, a sign, says Sennett, of their self-confidence and pride in their own bodies. In his conception, the closed stage is the Pnyx on the hillside, where performances by masked actors are given; it also serves as a forum for politicians and what we might call influencers. The last space is the hidden stage, which exists only in Plato’s well-known description of human life as a shadow puppet show.
The illumination afforded by this analysis is limited. The open stage in Sennett’s description is simply an urban space where, as in many European countries today, social life is on display. The closed stage is a formal space where performances of one sort or another take place, in front of what Sennett somewhat judgmentally describes as captive audiences. The hidden stage is a purely poetic image and thus irrelevant in practical terms. For Sennett the significance of the first two stages is that in the agora the citizens are now audience, now performers, thus active rather than passive. In the Pnyx, the audience is demarcated from the performers, whether actors or orators, and is thus passive, which in Sennett’s view marks a decline: spectators in the Pnyx concentrate more submissively, he says, on the performers. This notion of the active or, more precisely, interactive audience begins to assume increasing significance for him.
He then takes us on a tour of the development of theaters and audiences over the centuries, offering—as in The Fall of Public Man—a lively account of the unruly interchange between audience and stage in the eighteenth century, with theatergoers baying for the blood of unloved performers, mockingly chanting along with their speeches, raucously demanding encores of what they liked. For an actor, this is a vision of hell, though Sennett seems to find it authentic. He does not in this section mention Bertolt Brecht, who championed the notion of the critically alert theatergoer. Brecht famously wanted the audience in a theater to have the same relationship to the performers that the crowd at a boxing match has to the pugilists, but what he was after was critically informed audiences, not audience participation.
This vision of audiences as active, not passive, reaches its climax in Sennett’s disapproving description of the theater that Wagner created in Bayreuth for his work, with its hidden orchestra and its stage designed to lend the action a mythic quality:
In his famously total theatre (Gesamtkunstwerk), Wagner sought to combine music, blocking, lighting and costuming. The closed stage made possible the Gesamtkunstwerk. Its coherence denies the very idea of a street—the many activities happening in a street, the often senseless disorders, the distractions at every new turning…. In Bayreuth, the audience, silent, seated uncomfortably on bleacher-like seats for hour after hour, concentrates on a marvel that is many-layered but which coheres. The spectator is meant to be transported to a higher realm. But both the flâneur and the worshipper at Wagner’s shrine are essentially the same. They are spectators—to life, to art.
Sennett refrains from explaining Wagner’s purpose, both in his work and in his theater, which was to engage the audience’s subconscious, inspired—as he had been from boyhood—by the Greek theater. He sought to submit them to a spell, separating them from their daily existence. But, pace Sennett, this is precisely why a great many of us like to go to the theater: to get away from the meaningless roar of the city’s streets, mingling undifferentiated noise from machinery and cars, music blasting from every shop and restaurant, and the babble of different tongues. Interestingly, Sennett unfavorably contrasts the audience at Bayreuth with the crowd in a sports stadium:
There are two ways a spectator can identify with performers. I’d wager few in the audience at Bayreuth would identify directly with Wotan—“I am a god”—but at the Emirates [Stadium in London] it’s as though the fans themselves are playing the game. Wagner did everything he could to create a tangible divide between actor and spectator—the double-framed stage, the mystischer Abgrund hood covering the orchestra seating; identification with the stage thus involved a leap of imagination, a convoluted interpretation, whereas in the Emirates physical identification—“I feel the kick,” or “I am running”—makes identification more direct.
These contrary forces have shaped more largely the long history of stage and street. Along one path, the theatre has sought to integrate itself into the city by joining actor and spectator. Along another path, art has sought to withdraw from the street, which is enabled by separating actor from spectator. The one path leads to open art, the other to closed.
This apportioning of merit to one form of performance over another is deliberately provocative. Sennett has the good grace to acknowledge that “missing in this too neat summary are the performer’s own feelings.” It would be interesting to know how he might feel if his performance of, say, Brahms’s First String Sextet were accompanied by comments, acclaim, protests, jokes, parodies, traffic noise, and other disruptions.
Sennett is never less than sharp and subtle, but it’s not always clear what the connecting thread between sections might be; there is always, nonetheless, much to surprise and enjoy. Two chapters stand out for their élan and illumination. “The Paradox of Presence” ebulliently examines the nature of charisma by way of Louis XIV’s extraordinary and unexpected gifts as a terpsichorean. In the winter of 1653, when he was barely fifteen, the young king revealed himself to be a remarkable performer in Ballet royal de la nuit, devised by his chief minister, Cardinal Mazarin. It lasted thirteen hours:
The storyline resembled an off–on switch: during most of the night the dances dramatized chaos, nightmares and disorder; then, at the break of dawn Louis suddenly appeared arrayed in rubies and pearls and diamonds—a glittering young king banishing darkness and misrule.
It’s an unusual way of asserting one’s authority—plié power—but clearly the boy-king’s stamina through the thirteen hours, his grace, skill, and ability to hold the center of attention, were all qualities that would serve any monarch handsomely. The Performer’s account of this relatively obscure aspect of Louis XIV’s grip over his subjects (particularly his courtiers) provides a dazzling instance of the political uses of performance, though Sennett’s view that as the king ceased to be able to cut a caper he lost his charisma and his control of the country is not entirely supported by the facts.
Though he had a number of flamboyant predecessors as monarch-performers—Nero, Heliogabalus, and the empress Theodora among them—after Louis few European monarchs followed his lead, preferring to cultivate remoteness as the proof of their sovereignty. Elizabeth II made ordinariness her keynote; her greatest gift was never rising to the occasion. She could be witty, though her conversation was, on the whole, measured and her personal appearance unremarkable. But in joy or in calamity she remained exactly the same, conveying a curiously reassuring sense of continuity and authority. This, of course, was as studied a performance as the Sun King’s.
Sennett’s final thoughts in his investigation of public performance, whether of music or of texts, are curiously downbeat:
There was a puzzle contained in being performing artists. The actor impersonated others, the musician played scores not of their own making, and these scores were increasingly detailed; the dancer followed directions laid down by a choreographer, and these too were ever more complex. How could you shape yourself if you were enacting art not of your own making? The performer served a new master: the creator.
This is somewhat baffling. Actors have always impersonated others. Likewise, musicians, despite the profusion of composer-performers—Mozart, Beethoven, Paganini, Chopin, Liszt, Saint-Saëns, Rachmaninoff—have always performed other people’s music. And choreographers, like playwrights, have often created moves and roles for specific dancers upon whose particular gifts (and fame) they depended to get their work performed. It is hard to imagine the world of performance Sennett would like in place of the present one.
But whenever one becomes a little skeptical about his conclusions, Sennett always has another engrossing section up his sleeve. “A Theatre of the Defeated,” for instance, is a fiercely riveting account of the unemployed longshoremen who spent their days in a club near the New York waterfront called Dirty Dick’s, which Sennett frequented. He presents the unvarying pattern of their lives as an imaginary play called Defeat:
The actors are manual labourers, and the script lays out the trials they suffer in getting work. They become angry and rightly so, because circumstances beyond their control have caused them to fail. At a certain moment a demagogic politician appears to them, playing on their hurt. What makes Defeat a distinctive play, however, is that nothing then happens. The demagogue exits stage-left, and the workers return to their preoccupations with paying what bills they can, or taking on temporary jobs to fill in the days. The curtain falls without a catharsis.
This routine played out in real life. Every morning the dockers tried to get work, which they invariably failed to do, and then repaired to the bar, where they would steadily drink. At a certain point, they would watch the television, which at the time frequently featured the racist presidential campaign of Governor George Wallace, who demonized black workers, accusing them of stealing work from white ones. The drinkers in the bar would cheer and shout out his slogans, which they knew from their own experience to be untrue:
Yet just here was the most surprising thing about the scene in Dirty Dick’s. Wallace appeared and disappeared on screen. Once he finished speaking, the volume of the TV was turned down again, a sports channel was redialled, and people lapsed back into silence. Nobody ran out into the streets to find a Black person they could throttle. Subdued, depressed, their strivings unaccounted and their pain unrelieved: that’s how the curtain fell on this performance of Defeat in New York.
Sennett sees in this the limitations of the famous Aristotelian catharsis, the purging of pity and fear. The longshoremen experienced none, but neither, he says, did Athenian audiences:
There lurks in everyone’s psyche the desire to kill and the thrill of forbidden sex. These are not going to be erased thanks to a night out at the theatre; the theatre provides only temporary relief from the inner demons. Catharses in art are thus not like vomiting, which truly expels poisons from the body. The inner poisons remain, but thanks to art they stop making us feel sick—for a while.
This is unduly reductive. Surely the experience of tragedy was, and is, at its core, about facing what it is to be human.
Perhaps the single outstanding section of the book describes the achievement of Bayard Rustin, the organizer of the historic 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which culminated in Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic “I Have a Dream” speech. Rustin determined that there must on no account be any disruption of the event and, above all, that there must be no provocation of the FBI or the National Guard:
At the march he did everything he could, in the face of hostile authorities, to create a relaxed, informal atmosphere among those who in their private lives might well have been at odds. In this, the inclusive march differed from right-wing political events, which almost always dramatized a sharp, demonizing distinction between Us and Them.
The march addressed the question of who “we” are in an Arendtian way. “We” lost its exclusive semiological referent pinned to race; it thus made visible the values of “integration” and “equality.” Rustin’s choreography shows how masking can serve a political purpose; by hiding identity, masking promotes solidarity.
Rustin was openly, if discreetly, gay. He had been a singer and had appeared in musical theater alongside Paul Robeson. These things seem to have informed his instinctive orchestration of the march as a performance of great discipline and focus.
Among the considerable if incidental pleasures of The Performer is Sennett’s remarkable range of acquaintance. We find him here in conversation with his teacher Hannah Arendt, there arguing a point with Isaiah Berlin, elsewhere making music with his friend Roland Barthes (who plays the piano “passionately and badly”). This is not name-dropping, simply the mark of someone who is engaged with the world, and whose perceptions are often linked to his personal experience.
Despite the range of his references, Sennett has a clear purpose here, which is pithily expressed toward the end of the book in a paragraph about the American philosopher John Dewey, who, says Sennett,
rejects any deification of art and the artist; we are all stuck in the same mud. The artist is special only in that he or she has command over the materials and the craft which could prove illuminating to other people, who enter into the experience—ideally—as interrogators, not fearing to criticize and judge. His view empowers the spectator.
This no doubt laudable objective does, however, have the effect of dwindling the achievement of the artist/performer. Surely some respect is due to one who ventures into the dangerous territory of the subconscious, then strives to shape what she or he has found into something accessible, memorable, meaningful? This is tough, serious work, make no mistake. Sennett has a curious resistance to acknowledging the difficulty of art and the heroic effort sometimes involved in creating it. So The Performer, which is constantly fascinating and often illuminating, finally ends up not entirely doing justice to its ostensible subject. Oddly, toward the end of An Evening of Brahms, Sennett deals eloquently with the nature of performance from the musical performer’s perspective:
The composer has made a pact with you and me…. He has no interest in our plans, grievances, or hobbies. All he wants is hard work and fealty to the ink. If the truth be told, we in turn do not care just for him, no matter how great the sounds he creates; we want our voices, the voices of ambition, grief, and desire, to be heard through his.
That’s more like it.
