Hiss and make-up

From boos to vegetables, opera stars have had to put up with all sorts being aimed in their direction over the centuries

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There is a famous scene in EM Forster's Where Angels Fear to Tread, in which a group of Edwardian tourists attend a performance in Tuscany of Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor. 'However bad the performance is tonight,' one of them quips, 'it will be alive. The Italians don't love music silently, like the beastly Germans. The audience takes its share – sometimes more.'

Though forewarned, his companions find themselves discomfited by what they hear that night from an audience that at times acts as if it were drunk. Their fellow listeners tap their feet and drum their fingers along with the music, talk through choruses, murmur and sigh approvingly throughout arias, and finally explode into jubilant shouts and applause. Forster uses this scene to symbolise the respective national temperaments of the Italians and the British: the former exuberant, warm and in touch with their emotions, the latter uptight, cold and repressed.

In earlier eras, however, British audiences would have been noisy, too. At London's opera houses during the Georgian period, there was a culture of audience members coming and going throughout a performance, eating, drinking, talking and flirting, which must have meant singers were used to performing against a background of constant hubbub. This relaxed, at times indifferent, attitude to watching an opera – with audiences concentrating only during the 'big tunes' – lingered on well into the 19th century. As the Victorian period progressed, however, the Queen's regular attendance at Covent Garden and the dimming of house lights eventually encouraged better decorum and a culture of quiet, attentive listening. Wagner's theatrical reforms at the Bayreuth Festival, designed to focus audience attention firmly on the stage, also gradually began to set an example of respectful audience behaviour that was adopted across northern Europe.