Hindsight

The Devil’s Advocate™ →Go uptown In which the curmudgeonly old sod puts the world to rights. Index — Click ᐅ to expand: The Devil’s Advocate Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

JC: [At the end of a characteristically rambling rant] “... so, I ask you: why have we been so bad at stopping catastrophic risks from happening? Leeson, LTCM, Amaranth, Enron, Global Crossing, Kerviel, Madoff, Bear Stearns, Lehman, LIBOR, Theranos, London Whale, Mossack Fonseca, 1MDB, Wirecard ... ”

Middle manager: [interrupting]: Simply put, we were not proactively looking for it. We were not using data properly to evaluate risk. To add value as an in-house legal function we need to use innovative tools to crunch data, proactively spot emerging risks and escalate them to business.”

A cold night in Vienna, 1808

On a freezing night December 1808, about 1,500 people attended an akademie concert at the Theater an der Wien in suburban Vienna. The programme was to be four hours long, during which a young composer from out of town would be debuting a number of works. The run-up to the concert did not bode well: many of the musicians in theatre’s house orchestra had “conflicting commitments” with a better-paying gig across town at the Burgtheater, and even the solo soprano dropped out at the last minute, to be replaced by an unknown teenager— I have to hop is no modern excuse it seems — and the composer — an irascible fellow, it seems —kept changing the scores up to the last minute. So poor were relations with his musicians that they refused his baton, and another conductor was drafted in to lead the orchestra on the day of the concert.

The concert itself was a disaster. The under-rehearsed orchestra was rubbish — “lacking in all respects”, according to one reviewer — the poor young soprano suffered stage fright, the hall was freezing and the show badly overran. During one work, the orchestra fell apart completely and had to restart the piece altogether.

So why is there even any record of this concert — most of Supercheese’s concerts were like that, and there’s no record of any of them — and how has it found its way onto a Jolly Contrarian article about hindsight? You will not be surprised to hear there is a punchline.

Of the scathing reviews that followed, one at least — in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung — was prescient enough to say the following: “To judge all these pieces after only one hearing, especially considering [...] that so many were performed in a row, and most are so grand and long, is impossible.”

To the punchline then: In this concert, said young foreign composer was, of course, Ludwig Van Beethoven, and in that one concert he premiered his Symphony No. 6 (“Pastoral”), his Piano Concerto No. 4, the aforementioned Choral Fantasia. If that wasn’t enough — and surely the Pastoral, by itself, would have been enough of an event to make the record for humankind’s highest achievement — after the interval, the orchestra performed the premiere of the most revolutionary piece of music, bar none ever written: the theme to Saturday Night Fever, then known as Symphony No. 5.