Claque

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Wikipedia

Le claqueur by Honoré Daumier, 1842

A claque is an organized body of professional applauders in French theatres and opera houses. Members of a claque are called claqueurs.

History

Hiring people to applaud dramatic performances was common in classical times. For example, when the Emperor Nero acted, he had his performance greeted by an encomium chanted by five thousand of his soldiers.[1]

The recollection of this gave the 16th-century French poet, Jean Daurat, an idea which has developed into the modern claque. Buying up a number of tickets for a performance of one of his plays, Daurat distributed them to people who promised to give him applause. In 1820 claques underwent serious systematization when an agency in Paris opened to manage and supply claqueurs.[1]

By 1830 the claque had become an institution. The manager of a theatre or opera house could send an order for any number of claqueurs. These usually operated under a chef de claque (leader of applause), who judged where the efforts of the claqueurs were needed and initiated the demonstration of approval. This could take several forms. There would be commissaires ("officers/commissioner") who learned the piece by heart and called the attention of their neighbors to its good points between the acts. Rieurs (laughers) laughed loudly at the jokes. Pleureurs (criers), generally women, feigned tears, by holding their handkerchiefs to their eyes. Chatouilleurs (ticklers) kept the audience in a good humor, while bisseurs (encore-ers) simply clapped and cried "Bis! Bis!" to request encores.[1]

The practice spread to Italy (famously at La Scala, Milan), Vienna, London (Covent Garden) and New York (the Metropolitan Opera). Claques could be used in a form of extortion: writers or singers were commonly[quantify] contacted by a chef de claque before a debut and forced to pay a fee[2] or have their work booed.

Richard Wagner withdrew a staging of his opera Tannhäuser from the Parisian operatic repertory after the claque of the Jockey Club derisively interrupted its initial performances[3][4] in March 1861.

Later Arturo Toscanini and Gustav Mahler discouraged claques, as a part of the development of concert etiquette.

Although the practice mostly died out during the mid- to late-20th century, instances of actors paid to applaud at performances still occasionally appear, most famously with the Bolshoi Ballet.[5]

See also

Notes

  1. 1 2 3  One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Claque". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 6 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 423.
  2. ↑ Everist, Mark (4 December 2002). "La férule sévère et souvent capricieuse - Control and Consumption". Music Drama at the Paris Odéon, 1824-1828. Berkeley: University of California Press. pp. 129–130. ISBN 9780520928909. Retrieved 21 August 2025. By the 1820s the claque, known also as the chevaliers de lustre or the romains, was a well-organised, fully professionalized, system that was as much in control of the destinies of soloists as it was of plays and music drama. [...] For a new work. or for the debut of an artist, the chef de claque would approach the playwright and demand a number of the free tickets the author had received from the administration. Some of these would be used to get the rest of the claque into the theater, and the rest would be sold outside the door; this, and the straightforward cash payments made by artists, was the way in which extortion generated income. If the authors and artists cooperated with the chef de claque, they could look forward to guaranteed applause throughout the premiere or debut; if not, the chevalier de lustre would ensure that no member of the audience would express their approval [...]. Such a freelance organization worked well until the moment when more than one chef de claque approached the authors or artists, as happened at the Théâtre-Français during the 1820s.
  3. ↑ Millington, Barry, ed. (1992). The Wagner compendium : a guide to Wagner's life and music. New York: Schirmer Books. p. 281. ISBN 9780028713595.
  4. ↑ Grey, Thomas S. (2013). "Tannhäuser, Paris scandal of 1861". In Vazsonyi, Nicholas (ed.). The Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. pp. 581–583. ISBN 9781107004252.
  5. ↑ Barry, Ellen (14 August 2013). "Wild Applause, Secretly Choreographed". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 15 August 2013. Retrieved 22 May 2020.

References