“Alright, class, from the top: one and two and three and. . .” – Mr. Largo
American primary schools are filled with godawful bands. While a few students might genuinely like playing music and even have some skill, most of the members are kids that have no particular aptitude for music, aren’t overly fond of their instruments, and/or are only in the band because their parents made them join. In this context, “band” is just another class or after school activity, something most of the kids will go through the motions for, if only to keep the adults off their backs. At the head of this artistically doomed enterprise is the music teacher, someone who has, for whatever reason, ended up teaching on the lowest rung of musical education.
Mr. Largo perfectly exemplifies every bad stereotype there is about school music teachers. He’s an authoritarian, he long ago lost whatever passion he had for music or his work, and, as Lisa would reveal in Season 2, his most profound lesson to probably his best student was that “even the noblest concerto can be drained of its beauty and soul”. We can see all of these traits in Largo’s brief two scenes in “Moaning Lisa”.
In the first, at band practice, he not only lashes out at Lisa for not playing along dully like the rest of the students, but evinces not a whit of empathy for her or the hardscrabble Americans she invokes as her justification for straying from the sheet music. All he cares about is making those kids play “My Country Tis of Thee”, and if their rendition is off key, off rhythm and only barely recognizable as the song they’re trying to play, well, he doesn’t care about that.
In his second appearance, just after Marge has given Lisa her terrible advice about smiling no matter what, he point blank tells Lisa that he doesn’t want any more “creativity” from her. For Largo, music isn’t about being creative, it’s about muddling through with strict adherence to the original, however inadequate or terrible sounding.
As a character, and despite his inclusion in the opening credits, Largo never developed into a standby the way many other Season 1 creations did. He didn’t become Lisa’s foil the way Krabappel and Skinner were Bart’s, and except for background shots he rarely appeared outside of the school. But as with so many other characters, Largo didn’t need a great deal of backstory or his own star turn in an episode to make him seem like a real person. He was a music teacher who, by temperament, talent and good, old fashioned apathy, was cut out to be little else. He didn’t really like his job or his students, and that made him a perfect fit in Springfield and at Springfield Elementary.
