What can a real composer learn from the success of Hermann Nitsch?

I can understand your friend's frustration. When you can't even get a trio played, yet a "pseud" like Nitsch can get a nearly 2-hour "symphony" played by a big orchestra, that can really sour a real composer.

The lesson here is that you have to cultivate relationships with performers like Jan-Peter Marthe who are given to that kind of "gushing hyperbole." And that you have to spend a lot of time promoting yourself, and not as much time actually writing music.

It's a lesson a real composer might not want to learn.

Nitsch didn't tap into anything new. Composers today have few options for getting orchestral works performed. Many young composers today have given up on writing orchestra music because at this stage in their career it's nearly impossible to get it performed. And these options to get it done are the same ones that have been around for more than a century.

1) you can win a contest for orchestral music

2) you can finance your own performances

3) you can rent an orchestra (there are numerous orchestras in eastern europe with rates of about 500/minute of music)

4) you can gradually build up your reputation over decades and hope to get noticed.

Simple - get a reputation as a performance artist who creates shocking, controversial, and outright disgusting exhibits in order to stir up as much publicity and controversy as possible.

From Wiki - "Nitsch's work... first drew attention in the early 1960s when he exhibited a skinned and mutilated lamb. The lamb was crucified against a white fabric-covered wall, with the entrails removed and displayed below a white table, splashed with blood and hot water. Nitsch's subsequent work has ... juxtaposed slaughtered animal intestines with quasi-religious icons such as staged crucifixions, satirizing and questioning the moral ethics of atavistic religion and sacrifice."

Once you've become a major public figure due to the controversy, anyone who wants to achieve your level of fame will willingly participate in any aspect of your "art".

At the top: There is nothing there to learn about being a real composer of any sort, and that is for sure!

The foremost lesson is: to sell yourself in a cheap spectacular way is also spectacularly cheapening: it falls under all those negative categories of 'sell-out' / 'cop-out' / 'prostituting oneself,' etc.

It is a perfect example / demonstration of personal / artistic integrity vs. a complete lack of personal / artistic integrity.

That depends upon individual desire: whether the urge to be known is greater than the urge to be known through ones work. This is distinction which has become more than blurred for many of the generation weaned on MTV 'Real World,' where people became known not only 'for merely existing' but did not seem to care if they were known because they were absolute uninteresting jerks, i.e. not known for anything of merit.

It shows that Marketing Hype can get you an immediate amount of attention, and in many areas, may bring you temporary notoriety, and perhaps financial success. To sustain either means putting in as much work on the hype as the work being hyped. You also have to be perfectly happy knowing this "success" came to you through maneuvering the gullible vs. persuading the more intelligent via the work itself.

It should, imo, be a perfect illustration to show there are varied interpretations of 'success' depending upon varied misunderstandings of the word.

That leads to learning the distinction about sheer ambition 'to be known' vs. an ambition to be known through quality work.

Which leads to the importance of learning the precise shade of meaning of the word 'notorious.' Notoriety (undesirable) and fame (semi-desirable) are two very different things: contemplation of those two qualities is a good exercise to calm the outrage felt over the pseudo success of a seriously pseudo pseudo.

It is a strong demonstration confirming that if you plan to be in the arts -- with fame and fortune foremost on your mind and your primary goal, the arts a mere vehicle for you to get there -- you are already far off the mark of probably ever being a truly good artist, your ambition being in conflict with what is necessary to patiently pursue excellence for its own sake: instead thoughts of 'how to market' yourself for the tinsel crown are crowding out the intention to make good art.

So - a lot to consider, very little or nothing to consider if that homunculus is not sitting on your shoulder, constantly whispering in your ear and urging you to first and foremost want 'recognition and lots of money.'

One thing about selling yourself -- like virginity, you can never ever buy it back, regardless of how much money you make.

Best regards.

P.s. Nitsch's entire career reminds me of the saying, "Every whore needs a gimmick." They need the gimmick to distinguish themselves from all the other whores in the marketplace....