The Role of the Musical Conductor

EIGHTY years ago in Leipzig, when a new composition of Johannes Brahms was announced for a first performance in the Gewandhaus Concerts, it was surely secondary who the conductor or the soloist would be. Today, when the same compositions are played in the same subscription cycles for the same audiences every other season, the works themselves are no longer the main focus of interest. The personality of the conductor has become the factor of prime importance.

What then are some of the tasks of the serious conductor in his present, highly esteemed role?

Before starting rehearsals of an opera or a symphony, I spend many lonely hours with the orchestra parts, marking them carefully as to phrasing and length of notes. This may seem odd, considering that the printed musical text should be explicit in those matters, yet the farther back we go into past centuries and decades, the less specific do the scores seem. It is here that interpretation begins. Almost any phrase in a classical composition is open to several ways of execution. If I want to have it played in the manner which I deem right, I must be sure that the parts of the orchestra players are marked clearly and unequivocally. The type of bowing on the violin which should be used for a detached passage is often a subject of varying ideas. The length of certain notes, whether they should be held through their full value or somewhat shortened, is frequently a disputable item. Many fine musicians differ on how to execute a shake — when to start with the principal note and when with the auxiliary note. The question of grace notes is endless in its possibilities for disagreement.

Of course, every serious musician believes he knows all the answers. After one knows all the answers, there is left only the good taste of the individual, which decides in favor of one or the other manner of performance. You can be sure that the contemporaries of Bach and of Mozart had no qualms about the bowing, the length of notes, or the shakes. The style was a matter of course and not at all a subject for debate or for important differences of opinion.

Our contemporary musicians simply cannot be trained to be perfectly at home in three centuries spanning many different styles and countries. The technical demands today are so high that only the exceptionally endowed musician will be able to acquire a deeper understanding of different periods and their stylistic demands. Here is one of the important, though little understood, functions of the conductor: to educate the players toward a better understanding and a deeper penetration of our repertory.

MOST symphony conductors who travel to various orchestras carry with them their own full orchestrations— a set of parts representing their ideas in minute detail.

In opera, the orchestra is only one factor. Singers must be prepared. The chorus must memorize and study its part. The pianist who plays for the ballet must be informed of the tempi which the conductor has decided upon for the ballet numbers. In the kaleidoscopic machinery of opera, the dancers are the most difficult to satisfy. Think what an enormous difference a slightly faster speed of the music can make to a complicated pirouette or to a monstrously high jump into the air! Aware of most conductors’ gross inability to feel with their feet, the Paris Opera has a special ballet conductor who takes the place of the evening’s regular maestro as soon as the danse divertissement is about to start.

In opera, there is little awareness of exactly what the conductor does. I have found to my amazement that many music critics consider the conductor responsible only for the orchestra. This is totally wrong, though I regret to say that some conductors do leave the preparation of the singers in other hands and start coordinating them with the instruments only in the final orchestra rehearsals. This can never lead to a truly integrated performance. The singers are coached by assistant conductors, especially in new works or with singers new to their roles. All memorizing is aided and accompanied by auxiliaries and assistant conductors, and yet the principal conductor (at least the one who takes his leadership seriously) should never relinquish control over the preparation of the singers. The main criterion of a first-rate operatic performance is mutual understanding between the leading singers of the cast and the conductor.

In the symphonic field, there is a parallel relationship between the soloist who performs a concerto and the conductor. Too often, the general practice is for the soloist to arrive at the very last moment, if possible the morning of the day of the first performance. He comes to the last regular orchestra rehearsal, and the conductor tries valiantly to guess exactly what the soloist will do in matters of tempo and phrasing. A concerto is like a duet of two fully equal partners, the solo instrument and the orchestra. The concertos of Beethoven, Brahms, and Bartók — and many others — were written to be performed in a spirit of unanimity between the soloist and the conductor, and such unanimity cannot be accomplished in one quick rehearsal on the morning of the concert. The adjustment which mature musicians, who have their own opinions and interpretive ideas, must make cannot be achieved in a few hours.

In this quest for unanimity, a good many explosions occur in the world of music, and while some of them lead journalists to write flamboyantly of vanity and malice, of intrigue and cabal, the basic cause is often artistic incompatibility. I can recall several cases of such incompatibility, some of which I witnessed and in some of which I was one of the incompatibles myself. How do such crises arise? There are different approaches to all musical masterpieces, no matter how often we may be told that there is only one right way. As an artist gets older and more set in his ways, he is not only reluctant but often unable to change. To be quite frank, I myself was better at accompanying soloists fifteen or twenty years ago than I am today. The reasons are simple enough. As we develop our own ideas more strongly, it becomes a rather loathsome task to conduct a passage or movement in a tempo which is different from the one which we consider the right one. There are soloists, virtuosi, and singers whom I genuinely admire when I am a listener but with whom I am in sufficient musical disagreement to make collaboration a chore rather than a pleasure.

As I have come to understand some of the difficulties of adjusting interpretations to someone else’s concepts, so have I also understood why, during his last twenty years, Toscanini preferred to cast opera performances with singers who were not of top caliber. There have been exceptions, of course — Lotte Lehmann, Jan Peerce, and Licia Albanese, to mention but a few — - and I should not wish to imply that only pliable mediocrities have appeared with Toscanini. Toscanini preferred singers whom he had taught their roles. When he performed Verdi’s Falstaff in Salzburg, he asked for Mariano Stabile as Falstaff. In 1921, he had taught that role daily to Stabile during a period of seven months.

There is nothing more irritating than public performances at which the soloists and the conductor disagree. In my student days, when I went three or four times each week to the opera and to symphony concerts in Vienna, I was terribly upset when I witnessed a performance at which a leading baritone would drag away at each tempo and the conductor would try to force him into what he thought was the proper harness.

There was a time in nineteenth-century Italy when rehearsals were held at the home of the prima donna. Of course, it was she who would have the final word in any dispute over what tempo was to be taken for the Miserere in Verdi’s Trovatore. The public has always patronized popular operas to hear its favorite singers. The singers know this, and because they know it they try to dictate the conditions under which they will perform. In the United States, however, they run up against many sensitive organizational elements, including the managers. A short while ago an incident of this kind happened at the Metropolitan between a baritone and a conductor over some liberties which the vocalist took against the wishes of the conductor. Mr. Bing suggested to the baritone one of the better airlines to Italy.

IN MUSIC, the leader — and that is precisely what the conductor is — finds himself in control of very highly skilled people whose excellence in their special fields must always be respected. Yet rehearsals involve so much criticizing and suggesting, prodding and coaxing by the conductor that they can easily become wrangles. It is here that sensitivity, tact, and authority come into play.

In the summer of 1958, I worked with two different orchestras, one in Holland and one in Italy, on very taxing assignments. I found at once that neither of these orchestras was quite prepared for the highest level of excellence. In Holland, I had to ask for administrative help to overcome practices which were against the interests of our work. The orchestra was accustomed to having two sets of wind players alternate, so that nobody would be overworked. But with the number of rehearsals at hand, I considered it impossible to prepare a highly complex opera by Stravinsky as it should be prepared, and I had to insist that this old custom be abandoned.

In Italy, I had to alter some cherished easygoing ways for the sake of top results on records. I had to get people who were absolutely unsettled by a prolonged heat wave to give more than their best, and it was not easy. I am quite sure that many a disgruntled player later sat at home and, over his Dutch gin or his Chianti, told his family, “That conductor, what a bastard, but we did some excellent work.”

How different all this is from the baton-wielding, lion-maned individual as he appears to popular fantasy. Even some of our music patrons are not fully aware of the tremendous preparatory work which is part of a conductor’s activities. I have often been asked by some well-meaning greenroom visitor if I had arrived just prior to the concert!

To give just a rule-of-thumb ratio, it is comfortable to have for rehearsal six times the playing time of the music to be performed. As our standard program length in the United States is about eighty minutes, four hundred and eighty minutes, or eight hours, is a comfortable period for preparation. This is divided into either three three-hour rehearsals or four two-and-a-half-hour rehearsals, including rest periods. How much time the program needs depends on the selections, quality of orchestra, and the conductor. A program of novelties or fairly unknown music must be rehearsed more than the standard concert repertory.

I have found that great orchestras, such as the Philadelphia and the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, play the well-known classical symphonies better if the rehearsal merely establishes the particular wishes of the conductor. These extraordinary orchestras have not only played together for a long time, they also know intimately a great deal of the repertory, and when a conductor who visits with them brings his own orchestra material, he need do no more than point up a few of his special wishes and he will be greatly rewarded. They are unanimous in attack, release, intonation, and phrasing. They do not have to be educated. One can and should treat them as very high-class instruments. But when a conductor works with a lesser band where several musicians change every season, where not even a concerted attack can be taken for granted, where the concertmaster fights with the first oboe player about the exact pitch of the “A” by which they tune, then the conductor must be prepared to embark upon the task of teaching the basic facts of music to those fellows who are pretending to be an orchestra.

FIFTY years ago, a conductor’s year was spent in one city, at the opera house, or with the symphony orchestra, or both. Very few conductors traveled extensively to perform as guests abroad. They changed their posts for better ones when opportunities arose, but such moves would be from one permanent position to another. In time, a conductor and his orchestra became a solid entity, at one in style and manner, presenting musical fare of the utmost integration and often of profoundly satisfying quality. I regret that this era seems to be over.

We now live in an era of musical democratization, of wider distribution, of traditional repertory, of quick affection and faster disaffection. This has had its impact upon the conductor in symphony and opera and upon his mode of functioning.

When I look at the musical scene in several European countries, I am struck by the changes that have taken place. Very few orchestras have conductors as music directors. Most radio stations in Europe, the main carriers of fine music, have musicians of the administrative type, but not conductors, as their music directors. The long line of conductors who were directors of the Vienna Opera — Mahler, Weingartner, Strauss, Schalk, Krauss, Walter — is being continued nominally, yet the last two directors, both of them successful international conductors, have been absent from their post much of the season. The Viennese tell of the recently appointed director of the Vienna Opera who started his tenure sitting for several months near a phone far away from the scene of his position. When he appeared for the first time in the flesh, the doorman at the stage door refused to admit him because he didn’t know the man.

In my recent work in Europe, I was in contact with two organizations, neither of which has had a music director for a number of years. Conditions were very close to musical anarchy. Even the famous Concertgebouw Orchestra had as its chief conductor an outstanding man who was at the same time musical director and chief conductor of an orchestra seven thousand miles away, in Los Angeles. Two of the leading English orchestras have no music directors, and so it goes almost everywhere. The problem was summed up by the managing director of the Israel Philharmonic, who said to me: “No conductor whom we would want as our music director would be willing or able to spend the bulk of the season here; those who are willing and able to spend that time here are not good enough to be our permanent director.”

The modern conductor — that is, the successful one — with his commitments in many distant places cannot possibly be expected to discharge the duties of a musical director properly. If he were fool enough to give up his wanderings, he would quickly lose stature. New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago enjoy the unique distinction of having permanent directors of international stature who take charge of their musical activities almost 100 per cent, but I defy anyone to mention a fifth city, either in the United States or in Europe, which has a first-rate conductor present and active for more than 50 per cent of the regular concerts.

THE preparation of a conductor must be encyclopedic — not only in music but in related fields. He should be well versed in literature and pictorial arts. He does not have to play all the instruments, but must have a thorough knowledge of what each instrument can do. Orchestra musicians are quick to spot chinks in the conductor’s armor, and while they may not always have the proper reverence for the stature of a conductor, they are accurate judges of musical competence and knowledge. If a conductor asks for a certain effect or a specific mode of execution and if by some misfortune he is told by the player that what he asks for is impossible, he has received the equivalent of a no-confidence vote from the entire orchestra.

A flowery conductor once admonished a player to “give to a phrase more moral strength.” What can a player do with such a suggestion? Most of the time the passage is meaningless for him until he plays with the orchestra in a rehearsal. If, however, important passages in the player’s part are blocked out beforehand by the conductor and if, in running through the work, the conductor will specifically ask him to play with more articulation, to avoid breathing in this spot and to lengthen an end note there, the part in question may well emerge with that “moral strength.”

What and how much to say in preparing a work — that depends. An ideal orchestra rehearsal includes little or no talk by the conductor. Parts well marked in advance, plus a clear conducting technique, should suffice — except, of course, for correction of inevitable errors.

There are several funny stories about the discovery of mistakes in orchestra parts by alert conductors. This is always a credit to a new man and gets him off to a good start with the players. An ambitious maestro once decided to impress a new orchestra with his fine ear, and he spent some time sprinkling a few well-chosen wrong notes in various orchestral parts of the symphony he would be rehearsing first. When he reached the place where he had changed an “F” to an “F sharp” in the first horn player’s part, he stopped and called out, “First horn, play ‘F’ please.” To which the horn player replied, “I did play an ‘F,’ but some damned fool marked an ‘F sharp’ in the part.”

No amount of skillful rehearsing will alter the basic quality of an orchestra or an operatic cast. No coaching or coaxing will make a mediocre tenor sing like a first-rate tenor, and no amount of prodding will change a third-rate band of players into the Philadelphia Orchestra. Once the conductor has agreed to appear with an orchestra or with an opera company, he is thereafter entirely dependent on his own tricks, on his own art, on his magnetic power. They will produce the results which will finally make the performance, and by these results he will be judged.

Toscanini, and many another accomplished and renowned conductor, took no chances. The Maestro never accepted invitations or engagements from less than topnotch organizations. If and when he made a mistake and let himself in for a session with a mediocre group, one of two things happened: either he walked out or he insisted that the weak spots in the orchestra be strengthened. The only time the Maestro conducted in Holland, he was asked not to the Concertgebouw but to another orchestra. For reasons unknown to posterity, he accepted. When he found that the orchestra was no better than poor second-rate, he began to ask for superior musicians in “that chair” and at “that desk” and “this desk.” By concert time, a large percentage of the important chairs were filled by superior players who were not members of the orchestra. Which merely proves that Toscanini knew that he could not make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

The conductor’s real function, what he does in actual performance — that is far more difficult to describe. Up to the moment of performance, he studies his program, coordinates preparation, suggests improvement, corrects, cajoles, threatens, flatters, compliments, criticizes; he speaks, shouts, writes; he marks parts, changes seating arrangements, poses for publicity pictures, grants interviews (or breaks his neck seeking to be interviewed); he does a score of things, and yet none of them adequately ensures the caliber of the performance the public will hear.

There are conductors with clear beats and those whose beats can hardly be understood. Among both types, there are great masters. So it is not the beat. There are all sorts of physical specimens among the great masters of conducting: old, middle-aged, and young; tall, average, and short; fat, medium, and thin; with and without mustache; with crops of beautiful hair, long or short; without hair; some using long, some short batons, some using their hands; some of these hands are short and stubby-fingered; some are long with well-manicured nails. No matter how it is turned, there is no evidence to prove conclusively that certain ingredients make the conductor while others make only the time beater. The truth is that the personality of a conductor decides how the performance goes; and in this term “personality” lies practically the whole mystery of life itself.

In the United States, the theory of incompatibility between opera and symphony conducting will not die. Notwithstanding the eloquent proofs of the careers of Toscanini, Walter, Furtwängler, and many others, the idea persists that a conductor is primarily either a concert man or an opera man.

It is true that the schedules of opera and symphony are difficult, if not impossible, to combine. This is owing, however, to limitations of time and place and has nothing to do with conducting talent or ability. The hazards of the theater are always greater than those of the concert platform. More people are involved in an opera performance, and as the singers and the chorus perform from memory, the possibilities of error and resulting imbalance or rockiness are greater. In a symphony concert, the orchestra plays from parts; conductors work from memory only if they are sure. Opera further has the risk of longer intervals between repeat performances, while concert programs are usually repeated in close dates and then discarded.

In opera, changing principals from performance to performance is necessary and generally accepted today; no planned changes are ever made in repeat performances of concert programs. Musicians are not sick or indisposed as frequently as are opera singers.

The symphony conductor who directs a program for the fourth time in a row can confidently expect the fourth reading to be a further improvement on the previous three. In the opera, the fourth performance may have four times the hazards which beset the first. Thirty days may have passed since the previous performance of the work; two leads have changed hands, and although they were rehearsed with the company at the piano, they had no orchestra rehearsal. The singer of one of the subsidiary roles has fallen ill and had to be replaced by an understudy of great sureness but lacking in a first-rate voice. The conductor, who is aware of all this, knows that he must be on guard to expect unforeseen twists and turns — that anything may happen.

The good conductor always listens to the musical response that follows his beat. In opera, he must listen in two different directions, in the pit and on stage; and at some moments when there is separate backstage music, his third ear must be pressed into service as well. As for the technical part of beating time and moving the hands, I am reminded of the classic answer which Richard Strauss gave to a young hopeful who wanted lessons in conducting from the master, who was famous for producing the most hair-raising performance without getting his collar moist: “There is really not much to that business of conducting. This” — and he drew with his right hand the outline of a four-beat bar — “is four; and this”— gesture — “is three; if you know how and when to use these, you know how to conduct.”