Journal of the

Conductors GuildSpecial 35th Anniversary Retrospective Issue

1975-2010

Volume 30

7 1 9 Tw i n r i d g e L a n eR i c h m o n d , VA 2 3 2 3 5 - 5 2 7 0T: (804) 553-1378; F: (804) 553-1876E-mail: guild@conductorsguild.orgpublications@conductorsguild.orgWebsite: www.conductorsguild.org

Officers

Michael Griffith, PresidentJames Allen Anderson, President-Elect

Gordon J. Johnson, Vice-PresidentJohn Farrer, Secretary

Lawrence J. Fried, TreasurerSandra Dackow, Past President

Board of Directors

Conductors Guild Staff

Journal of the Conductors Guild

Max Rudolf Award Recipients

Thelma A. Robinson AwardRecipients

Theodore Thomas AwardRecipients

Advisory Council

Ira AbramsLeonard AthertonChristopher BlairDavid Bowden

John BoydJeffrey Carter

Stephen CzarkowskiCharles Dickerson III

Kimo FurumotoJonathan D. Green

Earl GronerClaire Fox HillardPaula K. Holcomb

John KoshakAnthony LaGruth

Peter Ettrup LarsenBrenda Lynne Leach

David Leibowitz*Lucy ManningMichael Mishra

John Gordon RossLyn SchenbeckMichael Shapiro

Jonathan Sternberg*Kate TamarkinHarold Weller

Kenneth WoodsAmanda Winger*Burton A. Zipser*

*ex officio

Pierre BoulezEmily Freeman Brown

Michael CharryHarold Farberman

Adrian GnamSamuel JonesTonu KalamWes KenneyDaniel Lewis

Larry NewlandHarlan D. ParkerMaurice PeressDonald PortnoyBarbara SchubertGunther SchullerLeonard Slatkin

Claudio AbbadoMaurice Abravanel

Marin AlsopLeon Barzin

Leonard BernsteinPierre Boulez

Frederick FennellMargaret HillisJames LevineKurt MasurMax RudolfRobert Shaw

Leonard SlatkinEsa-Pekka Salonen

Sir Georg SoltiMichael Tilson Thomas

David Zinman

Beatrice Jona AffronEric Bell

Miriam BurnsKevin GeraldiCarolyn Kuan

Katherine KilburnOctavio Más-Arocas

Laura RexrothAnnunziata TomaroSteven Martyn Zike

Herbert BlomstedtDavid M. Epstein

Daniel LewisGustav Meier

Otto-Werner MuellerGunther Schuller

Paul Vermel

Jeffrey Carter

Executive Director Amanda WingerAssistant Director Scott Winger

The publication date of the presentissue of the Journal of the Conductors Guildis November, 2010. The ConductorsGuild reserves the right to approve andedit all material submitted for publication. Publication of advertising isnot necessarily an endorsement and theConductors Guild reserves the right torefuse to print any advertisement.Library of Congress No. 82-644733.Copyright © 2010 by ConductorsGuild, Inc. All rights reserved. ISSN:0734-1032.

Editor

Table of Contents

The Conductor Gustav Mahler, A Psychological Study (JCG Volume 1, No. 3, 1975)by Dr. Ernst J. M. Lert

Contemporary Mozart Performance: A Diverse Landscape (JCG Volume 2, No. 2, 1981)by Max Rudolf

Rehearsal Efficiency and Score Analysis (JCG Volume 2, No. 3, 1981)by Alan Pearlmutter

Schubert’s Position in Viennese Musical Life (JCG Volume 3, No. 3, 1982)by Otto Biba

Appropriate Brass Timbre: A Conductor’s Responsibility (JCG Volume 5, No. 1, 1984)by William E. Runyan

The Rationalization of Symphony Orchestra Conductors’ Interpretive Styles (JCG Volume 11, No. 1&2, 1990)by Jack B. Kamerman

Oral History, American Music (JCG Volume 11, No. 3&4, 1990)by Vivian Perlis

Medicine in the Service of Music; Health and Injury on the Podium (JCG Volume 12, No. 1&2, 1992)by John J. Kella

From Classroom to Podium: Teaching All of the Craft (JCG Volume 13, No. 2, 1992)by Jonathan D. Green

Dimitri Mitropoulos: The Forgotten Giant (JCG Volume 15, No. 1, 1994)by William R. Trotter

Are Our Audiences “Skeered to Clap”?: A Brief Survey of Applause Practices (JCG Volume 16, No. 2, 1995)by Robert Ricks

Benjamin Britten’s WAR REQUIEM: Notes on Conducting (JCG Volume 23, 2002)by Paul Vermel

Toscanini and the Myth of Textual Fidelity (JCG Volume 24, 2003)by Linda B. Fairtile

Conducting Cannot Be Taught (CCBT) (JCG Volume 27, 2008)by Harold Farberman

page 16

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page 24

page 32

page 38

page 47

page 51

page 19

page 65

page 73

page 85

page 94

page 104

page 116

...Advancing the Art and Profession

Mission of the Conductors Guild

The Conductors Guild is dedicated to encouraging and promotingthe highest standards in the art and profession of conducting.

The Conductors Guild is the only music service organization devoted exclusively to the advancement of theart of conducting and to serving the artistic and professional needs of conductors. The Guild is internation-al in scope, with a membership of over 1,600 individual and institutional members representing all fifty statesand more than forty countries, including conductors of major stature and international renown. Membershipis open to all conductors and institutions involved with instrumental and/or vocal music, including symphonyand chamber orchestra, opera, ballet/dance, chorus, musical theater, wind ensemble and band.

History of the Conductors Guild

The Conductors Guild was founded in 1975 at the San Diego Conference of the American SymphonyOrchestra League, and it continued for a decade as a subsidiary of that organization. In 1985 the Guild becameindependent. Since then, it has expanded its services and solidified its role as a collective voice for conduc-tors’ interests everywhere. It is supported by membership dues, grants, donations and program fees and isregistered with the Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c) 3 not-for-profit corporation.

Purposes of the Conductors Guild

1. To share and exchange relevant musical and professional information about the art of conducting orchestras,bands, choruses, opera, ballet, musical theater and other instrumental and vocal ensembles;

2. To support the development and training of conductors through workshops, seminars and symposia onthe art of conducting, including, but not limited to, its history, development and current practice;

3. To publish periodicals, newsletters and other writings on the art, history and practice of the professionof conducting;

4. To enhance the professionalism of conductors by serving as a clearing house for knowledge and infor-mation regarding the art and practice of conducting;

5. To serve as an advocate for conductors throughout the world;

6. To support the artistic growth of orchestras, bands, choruses and other conducted ensembles; and

7. To communicate to the music community the views and opinions of the Guild.

1 JCG Vol. 30

The Conductor Gustav Mahler

A Psychological Study

(JCG Volume 1, No. 3, 1980)

By Dr. Ernst J. M. Lert

No attempt (as far as I know) has yet been made at a

scientific analysis of orchestral conducting in the

light of modern psychology. There are, to be sure,

textbooks on conducting, but they teach only the

technicalities of the profession. There are also

histories of conducting, but they are, in the main,

mere records of the development of those

technicalities. As for the numerous biographies of

outstanding conductors—these are hardly more than

fictional life stories, records of triumphs and

struggles, eulogies of arraignments of the individual

art of their subjects, achieved by citations from

newspaper criticisms, edited and colored by the

personal bias of the biographer. In short, there exists

no scientifically reliable description of the artistic

nature of the conductor’s work.

Almost twenty years ago, in the course of a short

biography, I tried to trace the development of a

typical operatic conductor.1 This juvenile attempt,

however, stopped at a point where the real task

should have begun: the psychological analysis of

conducting in general and of Lohse’s in particular.

I shall now try to make up for that omission of long

ago by analyzing Gustav Mahler’s art of conducting.

Some will ask, “Why Gustav Mahler? Why not

Toscanini or Stokowski?” Gustav Mahler the

conductor is unknown to the present generation, for

he left no gramophone records of any of his

interpretations, while Toscanini and Stokowski are

still here to testify to the relative accuracy of any

analysis of their conducting art.

True; yet while Toscanini and Stokowski are with us,

Mahler, the conductor, stands aloof in the distance, a

safer historical subject, because he is free from the

distortions of partisanship still inevitable with

the other two. Besides, Mahler’s published

correspondence is a fund of evidence, a veritable

revelation of his approach toward music.

His compositions, his method of scoring are

incontrovertible facts illuminating his mentality as

conductor. Finally, and perhaps most important and

intriguing of all, Mahler’s career as a conductor

reached its peak just when the European mentality

was passing through the crises Victorian

bourgeois-individualism and twentieth century

mass-mindedness.

Philosophically, Mahler was an idealist in the days

when Schiller’s individualistic idealism was being

supplanted by Hegel’s and his school’s absolute

idealism; that world outlook which later degenerated

into a collectivistic dogmatism out of which, in turn,

sprang all the pseudo-philosophic “isms.” Therefore,

Specht’s elaboration on the following anecdote is, at

best, a sorry joke indeed. At the close of a concert

featuring Mahler’s Third Symphony, Richard

Strauss, who had conducted, said jestingly, “During

the first movement I had a vision of interminable

battalions of workers marching in the (socialistic)

May-Parade at the Prater.” Quite obtusely Specht

adds, he is sure that Mahler, had he heard this

Straussian bon-mot, would have exclaimed; “That’s

it! I didn’t know it myself until this moment, but

that’s it!” (Strange! Because the printed score of this

first movement bears the programmatic title: “Pan

awakens, summer marches in.”)

JCG Vol. 30 2

What a hopeless misconception on the part of

Specht to imply that Mahler hijacked Marxist music

from the Kurt Weills and Hanns Eislers before they

were born. He has literally made “Capital” of the

absolute. That Mahler the idealist should have

portrayed in tone masses of proletarians marching

for higher wages and shorter hours is simply

unthinkable. Mahler’s marches (like Beethoven’s)

celebrate the progress of no man-made factors. In

his music it is only the march itself that marches. To

Mahler, whose entire boyhood was spent in the

atmosphere of a military barracks, the march

pulsation was a general human expression, to use

his own favorite term, a “sound of nature”—

Naturlaut (Letters 215). “It cannot be denied,” he

wrote, “that our music involves the ‘purely human’

(all that belongs to it, including ‘thinking’) (sic!)…If

we wish to make music, we must not think of

painting, poetic imagery, description. By making

music one expresses only the integral (i.e. the

feeling, thinking, breathing, suffering) human

being” (Letters 277). To him music is beyond all that

is matter-of-fact. “The realm of music starts where

the dark, shadowy feelings assume full sway, at the

threshold of that ‘other world,’ where things are no

longer bounded by time and space” (Letters 187).

So thought the mind that called Schopenhauer’s

explanation of music (as expressing “the essence of

all things”) the best definition of music (Letters

126); the mind which contended that the musician

lives “inwardly” (Letters 202) with little interest for

and capacity of understanding the outside world.

(Mahler unconsciously proved the truth of this when

he travelled through Italy without visiting museums

and cathedrals.) (Letters 482).

A musician standing at the borderline between

two civilizations, he is compelled to admit

programmatic tendencies in modern music: “There

is no modern music since Beethoven which has not

an inner program,” says he (Letters 296), but

proceeds at once to separate himself from the

tone-painters and describers. “You are right in

saying that my music eventually arrives at a

program as the ultimate revelation of a dominating

conception, while with Richard Strauss such a

program is presented at the outset as a given task to

be performed…In evolving a major musical

conception I always come [to] the point where I

have to reach for the ‘word’ as the indispensable

bearer of my musical ideas” (Letters 228).

This is a blank affirmation of Mahler’s conception

of music both as spiritual and rhetorical. According

to him, music does not imitate, it tells; it evokes no

reality, but expressing the world beyond our senses,

only the idea of reality.

Corroborating my description of a mystic2 the recent

Mahler book by Bruno Walter tells us that his

favorite readings were Lotze’s Mikrokosmos,

Fechner’s Zend Avesta and Nanna, oder dasSeelenleben der Pflanzen, Eduard von Hartmann’s

Philosophy of the Unconscious, and the

philosophical poems of the mystic Angelus Silesius:

philosophers all, and, if not outspoken mystics, with

a decided inclination toward mysticism. Mahler

studied these authors to confirm his own painful

experiences of the double personality of the limited

man and the limitless artist.

It is his rhetorical conception of music which makes

him feel so close to Siegfried Lipiner, a Viennese

dramatist. Lipiner treated great mythical subjects

(Adam Hippolytos) as transcendental philosophies

personified. His characters are not life-like

individuals. They are impersonal megaphones

declaiming high-sounding commonplaces, packing

involved ideas into skeleton-formulas, much like

Wagner’s philosophic libretto-slogans. Lipiner,

also a case of borderline-crisis between Victorian

Romanticism and modern mass-ideology,

anticipated the manner of the collectivistic

expressionists, while remaining philosophically the

enlightened individualist. His practice, as dramatist,

of expanding the individual to a universal symbol,

brought him into close kinship with Mahler; his

skeleton-language literally crying out for fulfillment

through flesh and blood, or through music, was

thoroughly Mahlerian. “My dear Siegfried,” Mahler

wrote to him (Letters 283), “You are really creating

music. Nobody will ever understand you better than

3 JCG Vol. 30

the musician, and I may add, particularly myself!

Sometimes it strikes me as almost absurd how akin

my own ‘music’ is to yours.”

An important admission!

Mahler confesses his rhetorical conception of music

as an expression paralleling transcendental poetry

achieved by simple, slogan-like formulas. In fact,

for his texts Mahler not only used, but himself

produced such poetry as evidenced both by his

adoption of humble folklore verse from the

Wunderhorn, and by the creation of such lines as his

own (Vater, sich an die Wunden mein: Kein Wesenlass verloren sein—Letters 161). In the Eighth

Symphony his treatment of the mighty medieval

hymn Veni Creator Spiritus and the transfiguration

of this rhetorical conception on an exalted plane.

Mahler’s abstract idealism in life and music has

been demonstrated.

II

“But Mahler was attacked for his stark realism as

conductor and composer,” objects my honored

opponent.

“The real mystic is the real realist,” I answer with

the New York lady of a former article of mine.3

Unfortunately the superficial textbook-and-

magazine-philosophers fail to realize that the “idea

of reality” includes “reality” as an object to be

spiritualized, and this process of spiritualizing is a

mental struggle of stirring passion. Mahler’s

despotism, his sudden angers, his terrible

nervousness, his unbearable sarcasm, his fanatical

insistence on the accurate execution of all his

intentions, his (apparent) absentmindedness, his

insatiable greed for correcting and improving,— all

these personal features of the musician, which so

often contradicted the soft-hearted man, are but

symptoms of his enforced struggle to project

ephemeral reality into the timeless form of the idea.

He himself relates the following significant

instance:

Taking part in the funeral services for von Buelow

he hears the chorus sing “Auferstehen, ja

auferstehen” (“Arise, yea, arise”). These words

move him profoundly; he has found the finale for his

Second Symphony, that finale which expresses the

resurrection of all flesh on Judgement Day. This

personal experience at the obsequies of an

acquaintance (von Bulow was nothing to Mahler)

combines with his ever-present childhood

impressions of marches and Military signals, and

they become, through subtle alchemy, abstracted

and magnified into “Great Roll-Call” and the

tremendous Resurrection chorus of all humanity.

As modern directors of Shakespearean plays,

heedless of the clock of time, produce Julius Caesarin modern costumes and uniforms; as Connelly, in

The Green Pastures, merely expressed the Bible in

terms and characters of New York’s Harlem of

today, so Mahler, the first modern artist to conceive

humanity as an army marching to its destiny,

Resurrection, midst the fanfare of military trumpets,

read into Beethoven’s Ninth the mass-minded

orchestra message of spiritual propaganda for the

super-national unification of humanity. Reality and

ideology: is every fiber of his being the typical

Austrian, he was a traditional individualist, yet he

claimed New York, the world-core of modern

standardized collectivism, as his “spiritual

homestead” (Letters 393).

Another proof of his spiritual world outlook is the

almost complete absence of romance in his life. We

know that many conductors virtually live on the

sex-appeal they exercise on their audience and on

the female singers. In Mahler’s case we know of but

one romance during his entire career as conductor

prior to his marriage. That lone love incident

occurred in his early twenties and so disrupted his

inner life that he fought down and overcame the

sensual impulses it evoked as though they had been

his worst enemies. He married rather late to remain

a one-woman man to the end of his life. Thus the

boy who wanted to become a martyr lived up to

his idealism until he died. As was his life so is

his music—never sensual, and even so was his

conducting.

JCG Vol. 30 4

Beside that of other famous conductors, whose

spiritual oscillates between their scores and friendly

bridge, skat or tarok-tables, Mahler’s education

seems to have excelled by far the usual learning of

professional musicians. Nevertheless he reveals

himself exclusively the musician to the uttermost

boundaries of his rather considerable learning. His

letters show an almost complete lack of humor,

much as the letters of Wagner (but unlike those of

von Bulow or Reger). He expresses his thoughts by

means of keen formulas tinged with sentiment and,

often, with violent sarcasm. Whatever the subject of

his commentary, he always returns to the two

integral problems of his personality: the double life

of the musician and the problem of expressing a

given reality by music (program in absolute music).

Yet he fails consistently to find any solution, or, at

least, any new or convincing solution.

Furthermore, his life and his letters betray the

notoriously poor taste characteristic of musicians in

all matters outside of music. He himself admits that

the musician has no appreciation of the visible

world. Strangely enough, even in the world of the

audible, Mahler is not highly discriminating. It is

very significant that he speaks of Halevy’s La Juiveas “a wonderful, sublime work; I number it among

the loftiest ever created.”

III

Although idealism is a permanent feature with

Mahler, the expression of this Weltanschauung(world outlook) is anything but permanent. Like

most idealistic artists he shows no striking,

deviating development. Das Klagende Lied and

Das Lied von der Erde are, from conception to

orchestration, unmistakable expressions of the same

mentality through the same style. Mahler’s

development is one of expansion, of increasing

depth, refinement, and differentiation, without any

accompanying material change or growth in his

artistic personality. Beethoven started in the Haydn

style, and Wagner in the Meyerbeer manner, but

Mahler the composer started as Mahler.

So too was it with Mahler the conductor. His

conception of the works he interpreted was the

same, from Olmutz (1882) to New York (1907).

It was not the matter, but only the manner of

expressing them that changed as he matured.

Mahler connoisseurs will shake their heads and

point to Mahler’s violent, often grotesque

movements of the baton, hand, head, feet, body, and

eyes during his early years, in contrast to his

statuesque, almost affected-looking immobility

towards the end of his career. It is true that Mahler

(when I, as a little boy, saw him conduct at Vienna)

made upon me the weird impression of a frenzied

gnome. He frightened and fascinated me at the same

time. Yet many years after, when he conducted the

premier of his Sixth Symphony (perhaps the most

typically Mahlerian of all his works) his statuesque

immobility before the huge orchestra, even when it

exploded into an indescribable turmoil of

temperament and despair, created just the same

uncanny impression, nay, an even more frightening

one, because a single impulsive movement of his

hand or head would have relieved the almost

unbearable tension. That immobility of his was

anything but calmness. Frau Mahler relates how at

Essen, at the general-rehearsal of the same

symphony, Mahler “ran up and down in his

dressing-room, irrepressible sobs literally bursting

from his lips” (Letters 13).

That external change (his abandonment of the

baton-waving manner) has no counterpart in any

inner development. Mahler was at first little

understood by the orchestra because he did not

“beat” the trodden path of tradition. Any given

aggregation of performers, prior to a proper grasp of

his style, had to be trained to the intensity of

polyphonic thought and expression which was

Mahler’s orchestral ideal. Mahler too had to find the

proper technique for his new polyphonic method of

handling an orchestra. Gradually the orchestras

grew accustomed to this new style. Eventually he

found that he could eliminate most motion as super-

fluous and concentrate on that subtle fluidum which

establishes a deeper communion between leader and

his men than any amount of waving and signaling.

5 JCG Vol. 30

“But Mahler did change continually!” I hear many

object. “Why, he even changed his own works!”

Well let us see what Mahler had to say for himself

on that score. He writes to Bruno Walter from New

York, 1909 (Letters 417): “Just as I want my

scores edited anew every fifth year, so I require fresh

preparation each time for conducting the scores of

other composers. My only solace is that I REALLY

NEVER HAD TO ABANDON MY WAY FOR A

NEW ONE, BUT WAS ALWAYS IMPELLED TO

CONTINUE ON ALONG THE OLD PATH.”

The “changes” he made never affected the meaning

of a work, they served only to intensify, to clarify

that meaning for the immediate environment by

means of the particular group of players on a given

occasion and in accordance with that relentlessly

evolving spirit of change which we call the “march

of time.”

IV

“The essence of every re-production is exactness,”

Mahler used to say in his crisp, slogan-like manner,

apparently contradicting another favorite expression

of his: “The best music is not written in the notes.”

Yet a reconciliation between these two apparently

clashing ideas is not out of the question. A subtle,

invisible band joins them inseparably. That uniting

psychological force is the conception of the artwork

by its conductor-interpreter.

Since our understanding of the words or works of

others depends entirely on the sum of our inborn

individuality and our private fund of acquired

experience, we cannot grasp their “exact” meaning.

We can only understand them as our own mind

receives them. This personally-tinged understanding

of a thing is, in fact, our “conception” of it. Not only

does our personal color qualify the “view-point”

with which we regard a work, but so do impulsive

changes we unconsciously inflict upon the original

by our own individuality.

To the interpreting artist the re-production of a work

is “correct”, if all the written notes and marks of the

author are reproduced literally. This process is, after

all, merely technical; and it can be, is being, and

always has been done by every technical artisan, for

“He has the parts well in hand,”

But

“Alas, without the spiritual band.”

This “spiritual band” is the sole key to the meaning

of the original, that “best music [is] not written in

the notes” which even the utmost of sheer technical

prowess cannot conjure forth in sound. This

imponderable quintessence of an artwork achieves

revelation through that power or mental assimilation

possessed only by one able to switch off his own ego

completely in order to merge it with the ego

dominating the work itself. Furthermore, an intense

power on this part of this new, assimilated self is

required for the expression of this quintessence

through the actual orchestral reproduction. The most

amazing example of such genius and power in the

world today is Arturo Toscanini. Yet Toscanini is a

realist by nature, mentality, and education. His

intuition functions exactly like that of a great

scientist; his power of re-producing an artwork is the

very instinctiveness of nature itself. In short, he

possesses the extreme faculty of Einfuhlung, i.e., of

so merging his own ego with the object of his

attention that his own life becomes one with the life

of that object. However, the madman who identifies

himself with Napoleon, and Toscanini, who

assimilates his spirit to Verdi’s Requiem so that

Verdi’s own spirit seems to interpret his work, are

certainly two opposite poles, although they revolve

on the same axis.

Though the power of such identification of work and

interpret[ation] was not natural to Gustav Mahler, he

often came quite close to it. He once wrote to Bruno

Walter: “In a word: one who does not have genius,

should keep away from the work; but whoever has it

needn’t be afraid of anything…Any prattling back

and forth about the matter strikes me as if one, who

has made a baby, racks his brain afterwards over the

question whether it is really a baby and whether it

was produced with the right intentions, etc.

The thing is simple. He just loved and—could.

Period! And if one doesn’t love and can’t, why,

JCG Vol. 30 6

no baby comes of it. Period again. As one is and

can—so the child will be. Once again: Period!”

(Letters 277).

V

The idealist is by nature, a split-personality.

Therefore, that happy fusion of work and

interpretation, which is prerogative of the objective,

naive, realistic artist Toscanini, was denied to

Mahler the idealist.4

Mahler himself throws considerable light upon this

matter in the following synthesis of cited extracts.

“What is it that thinks within us? And what is it that

acts within us?” (Letters 415).

“Why do I believe that I am free while I am

imprisoned by the walls of my character as in a

cell?” (Walter, p. 90).

“I experience strange things with all of my works

while conducting them. Wondering curiosity, as

poignant as a burning sensation, takes hold of me.

What is that world which mirrors such sounds and

shapes? BUT ONLY WHILE I AM

CONDUCTING! For afterwards, it is all

extinguished suddenly; (otherwise, one could hardly

resume living). This strange reality of visions, which

suddenly melts away like the chimera of a dream, is

the deepest cause of the split-life of an artist.

Condemned to a twofold existence, woe to him if

life and dream become confused. For then he must

answer terribly for the laws of the one world in the

other.” (Letters 419).

This discord between man and artist, this eternal

struggle between reality and the idea of reality is the

bitter legacy of transgressing idealism.

Here is the key to Mahler’s individual conception of

music. Here is his contradictory position between a

world which has been and a world to come. Here is

the intuition which made his interpretation, even of

the old classics, point to the future.

And not a happy future. He foresaw the breakdown

of our civilization—through the all-too-

comprehensive realization of absolute idealism;

hence his fundamental sarcasm, perhaps the most

striking feature of the man and the musician. “Why

did you live? Why did you suffer? Is all this nothing

but a gross, terrible JEST? We must solve these

problems in some way, if we are to continue

living—even if we shall only continue dying.”

(Letters 189).

Not only did this outlook on a world, present and

future, express itself in his own music, but he also

imposed it on whatever music he conducted. Its

constant theme was the conflict between two worlds,

a tragic struggle, in which triumph meant the

attainment of the “other world, where things are no

longer bounded by time and space,” in short, the

world where the unio mystica is a fact.

This is the goal toward which all his symphonies

strive. No less appropriately, he might also be

called the finale-conductor because everything he

conducted was subjected to a dominating

finale-concept. Everything else in the world itself

was subordinated to that idea. Take his production of

Mozart’s Nozza di Figaro. Some great French

bonmotier said of the play by Beaumarchais: “Voila,

c’est la revolution qui marche.” Mahler revealed in

Mozart’s opera buffa the bitter social arraignments

of Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe. From the sarcastic,

devilish hurry of the overture he continuously built

up to the slow movement of the finale, where pure

humanity opened yearning eyes for a moment only

to be eclipsed again by the commonplace of the

noisy stretta-finale, implying that the old order will

go on and on. The central idea of rebellion was

ever-present. All the sforzati, sudden ff and pp, all

the apparently sweet melodies with their bitter

underlying meaning, were aimed at that climax.

Specht (p. 95), describing Mahler’s reading of this

work, only mentions how the little wedding-march

seemed irritated by “accents of stinging

painfulness,” played against the “dark background

of a silent crowd of people behind the iron

garden-fence, While two big bowls of sinister red

fire lit up the wedding-ceremony.” Actually, Mahler

7 JCG Vol. 30

even re-interpolated the original trial in court and

composed biting secco-recitatives for it, to point out

the modern revolutionary trend of Mozart’s work.

To him the demiourgos was in everything. Since he

was convinced that the central-idea created the

art-work according to an architectonical plan

(blueprint), everything had to be subordinated to that

idea. To Mahler there could be no independent

episodes in an art-work. His was this fascist

ideology half a century before Fascism; everything

functions only as a cog in the machine of the

art-work’s microcosm.

His absolute unity of idea and execution, his

despotic insistence on architectonic structure, his

finale-conducting were but the natural consequences

of the split-personality of the idealist striving and

struggling for final amalgamation.

The clash of reality and idea is the very core of

dramatics. Mahler the musician dramatized

everything he conducted. Yet the factors of his

dramatizations were never personified. He never

portrayed the struggle of petty humans, but only of

ideas. Impersonal abstracts alone clashed in the

world of his creation.

VI

What were the technical means employed by Mahler

during a performance to transmit to an orchestra his

complicated conception of a musical composition?

Analyzing a conductor’s art from a technical

viewpoint means testing it for the following: his

sense of rhythm, his sense of tempo, his dynamics,

his agogics, his reading of harmony and

counterpoint, his treatment of orchestration.

Rhythm is music in its most primitive state. When

the impish, impious von Bulow, punning on the

Bible and Goethe, exclaimed: “In the beginning

there was Rhythm”, he unwittingly uttered a

scientific truth, amply corroborated in our own day:

viz., that the first musical expression of animal and

man is purely rhythmic. The drum is the earliest

musical instrument; the dance is the very backbone

of music. Rhythm retains its natural, pristine

correctness so long as it is the pulse of music

performed by a coordinated group of musicians. The

moment an appointed leader superimposes his

individual rhythmic conception upon the group’s

collective (almost instinctive) sense of rhythm,

there arise discrepancies in the styles of

performance. Rhythm now becomes a problem. As

early as the Sixteenth Century critics protested

against the “arbitrary rhythmical movements” of the

conductors. The sense of rhythm is inborn. It may be

subtilized, but it cannot be acquired.

Toscanini brought a copy of his recording of

Mozart’s Symphony in D Major (K. 385) to Italy

and played it for his colleagues. The first movement

of the symphony finishes in the middle of a record,

leaving no indication as to the exact moment the

second section will begin. Involuntarily the Maestro,

who had been beating the time during this record,

with the close of the first movement, gave the

up-beat for the second section on the very dot it

actually began. This showed that for Toscanini the

pause between the two movements had an exact

rhythmical value. At a concert this pause cannot be

observed faithfully because of the disturbing

conditions in the reactions of the audience. In the

enforced calm of the recording laboratory, however,

it can be so observed. Originally measured before a

living orchestra, this pause was reproduced in exact

facsimile by the same conductor, although he now

beat the time to a mere mechanical instrument—the

gramophone.

Toscanini is, of course, an extreme example of

rhythmical logic.

Pauses emphasized by Fermatas, technical marks of

prolongation, separate the fanfaresque chords which

began the overture to The Magic Flute. When

Mahler finished the first chord, the ensuing pause

was so long that I looked up from my score to find

out why the conductor did not continue. Just then he

attacked the second chord. Now came a pause that

JCG Vol. 30 8

seemed still longer. When the third chord finally

sounded the audience had grasped the idea Mahler

wished to convey: the solemnity of the “trumpet”

call. He was the herald whose pronouncement

awaited the reaction of his listeners. “Compose your

thoughts for this message!” Thus Mahler established

the central-idea of the Realm of Saratro.

When, after the fugue, the same three chords

returned, Mahler made the pauses even longer than

before. That was quite logical and natural; for the

mind, having been swept along with the tide of the

Allegro, was now in a turmoil and needed still more

time to recompose itself. Out of this breathlessness

the central-idea must emerge again, more impressive

and clear than at first. Its solemnity must be revealed

on a still higher level.

A similar rhythmical presentation of an idea by

Mahler during his early years (Leipzig) has been

transmitted by Max Steinitzer (Stefan, pg. 43). “It

was something to remember, the way he took the

first four measures of the great Leonore Overture[No. 3]. In the most simple manner each one of the

descending octaves became a moment of increasing

import for us, until finally the low F-sharp lay

revealed in its majestic, calm immobility.”

These few instances (I could have cited many more)

suffice to show how Mahler made rhythm a primary

spiritual element of his interpretations. Rhythm to

him was not the natural pulse-beat of a composition

but rather the rhetorical accentuation of the evolving

content of the work. His was a logical, perhaps a

psychological, but certainly not an instinctive

treatment of rhythm. Therefore the rhythmic

element was a highly subtle matter for him. It would

oscillate between rigid strictness and reckless

daring. It was dominated by thematic considerations

alone. Even beneath an apparent rigidity there was a

world of almost imperceptible degrees of pulsation

that was in open disagreement with the normal

rhythmic beat of the music, sacrificing that to

intensify the music’s underlying spiritual content.

He treated rhythm in the works of Wagner and

Beethoven just as he did in his own symphonies:

with freedom and flexibility, introducing startling

accents and irregular melodic scansions.

In a word, Mahler’s reading of rhythm was

primarily rhetorical, not uniformly measured. He

unhesitatingly disobeyed the letter of a score in this

respect so that he might be more faithful to its spirit.

VII

Tempi! The first disputed and still debatable of all

the characteristics of conducting. “He takes all the

tempi wrong!” is the commonest criticism one

conductor whispers to you about another, implying

that the so-called “right tempo” is the sine qua nonof all correct interpretation.

When is the tempo “right”?

The great Monteverdi, in the preface to his eighth

book of Madrigals (1683) distinguishes between two

different species of tempo; the tempo dello mano (of

the hand) and the tempo dell ‘affetto dell’ animo(affected by the mind). By this Delphic

distinction Monteverdi means the tempo beaten by

the hand of the conductor as opposed to that

produced by the effect of the music upon the

performers. To him the latter is the only right tempo,

for he adds, somewhat maliciously, that it “operates

without anyone beating time,” meaning that the right

tempo does not need a conductor.

Yet there can be no scientifically demonstrated right

tempo just as there is no set, objectively correct

interpretation. There is only a subjectively right

tempo, i.e., the tempo which is right for one

particular conductor.

We have a very precise, scientifically accurate

device for fixing the right tempo: Malzel’s

metronome. It is over a hundred years old. It stands

on every piano. Composers have used and still use it

freely and frequently to indicate the exact tempo

they want. However, musicians and especially

conductors don’t pay much attention to it. Even

those who haven’t read Beethoven’s letters will cite

Beethoven’s dictum on the metronome the moment

9 JCG Vol. 30

you mention it to them: “It (the metronome) is a

stupidity; you must FEEL the tempi!”

That’s just what Monteverdi said in 1638-and what

Sibelius said (to Rodzinski) in 1937.

Yet subjective feeling is an unreliable means of

achieving correctness of tempo, unless…

The late Max Smith devoted the last years of his life

to a study of Toscanini’s conducting-art. Smith

assisted at all the Maestro’s rehearsals and

performances and, stopwatch in hand, measured

carefully the minutes, seconds, and split-seconds

Toscanini required for performing certain

compositions. He timed at least twenty different

performances of the Eroica and of Debussy’s LaMer and found that Toscanini’s readings of the same

compositions on various occasions never differed in

the slightest in this respect.

The late Otto Lohse used to look at his watch before

giving the first upbeat and after the last note of an

opera-act. His various timings of the same act of an

opera, including the first act of Gotterdammerungand the last act of Meistersinger, never varied more

than a few seconds.

Yet the majority of conductors, when sounded upon

this very stability of tempo, will scornfully sweep

the question aside, insisting that they are not

metronomes, but free artists, conducting only

according to the dictates of their heart and mood.

Nevertheless it is just stability that sets off the

creative artist (even as interpreter) from the arbitrary

Gipsy. Toscanini illustrated this axiom once and for

all when he said, “I can’t understand arbitrary

changes in anything which is evident. If I study and

restudy a work until I have attained a clear vision of

it, then that vision becomes final. It cannot be

altered thereafter.” He meant that conception could

never entertain any essential, organic changes, such

as revisions in tempo. What IS the real essence of

any art-work? It is its integrity crystallized in the

unalterable impression: Thus it is; so it must be; it

cannot be otherwise. One may not alter the smile of

Mona Lisa, nor the inscription on the door to

Dante’s Inferno, nor the prelude to Tristan undIsolde, nor for that matter, Toscanini’s reading of

Beethoven’s Pastorale. A work of art (and

conducting also has to be such a work) is

irrevocably fixed, if it is really a work of art.

Though innumerable books, booklets, and articles

have been written on Mahler, there never was,

unfortunately, a Max Smith with his stopwatch to

report whether Mahler subscribed to that rather

amateurish notion of the artist being swept along by

his momentary whims, or whether his tempi were as

unchanging as his general conception of a

composition; for the steady integrity of his tempi is

the test of a conductor’s artistic integrity.

We have only a few rather contradictory documents

pertaining to this subject. There is, for instance, a

mythical letter (unpublished and anonymous)5

supposedly written by a member of the Vienna

Philharmonic Orchestra after Mahler’s first

performance of Lohengrin at the Vienna Hofoper.

The writer asserts that he had played Lohengrinunder Wagner’s own direction and claims that, since

that time, Mahler was the first conductor with the

right tempi. He stresses especially Mahler’s

conception of the prelude, which he took just as

slowly as Wagner himself, and the prelude to the

third act, which he lead in genuinely Furiosomanner. In short, his conducting was Wagnerian,

because Mahler “knew how to modify the tempi”

to conform with Wagner’s intentions.

If that letter is authentic it is a revelation. If it is

apocryphal, i.e., trumped up to defend the conductor

against the criticisms of the profession, it is still

more eloquent, for then it proves that Mahler was

inclined to slow up the slow tempi and speed up the

swifter ones. A very primitive and crude statement,

perhaps, but it hits the nail on the head. It implies

that in order to bring out the central ideas as clearly

as possible, Mahler accentuated every detail of

contrast as sharply as possible, and especially

contrasts of tempo. The Romantic tradition in music

was all for the transitional evasion of violences;

it doted on so-called medium-tempi and

JCG Vol. 30 10

standardized, unobtrusive contrasts. Into that

atmosphere of old-time Viennese mellowness

Mahler crashed like a bombshell. Even at Hamburg,

some years before, when he took over some concerts

for von Buelow (who was quite a violent dramatizer

himself) the orchestra rebelled against Mahler’s

tempi (Letters 136) just as they rebelled anywhere

against his scorn of the classical tradition (Letters

102), against his habit of acceleration (Letters 477).

Furthermore, our letter implies that Mahler used to

“modify” the tempo. That again (along with our

disclosures concerning Mahler’s rhythmics) means

that he subordinated the tempo to the central idea of

the composition. Thus, according to Steinitzer

(Stefan p. 43), he began the terzetto of the dying

Commendatore (in Don Giovanni) in a rather fast

tempo, but immediately started to slow down very

gradually and steadily, until the few bars of the

postlude resulted in an “Adagio of the most moving

effect.” I remember this gradually expiring music

well, because it was the first time that an operatic

death-scene did not make a ridiculous impression on

me, for I really had the feeling of the inexorable

(steadily retarding!) approach of Death. Steinitzer

does not mention this effect was achieved in the first

place by the reluctantly drumming monotony with

which Leporello stammered his fast-beating

counter-melody.

We see by this little instance how the general idea,

in this case the concept of the dying father, modified

the interpretation. Mahler’s modifications consist

not only in the striking pp Steinitzer notes relative to

beginning of the Allegro of the third Leonore, but

also in the slow beginning of that movement and its

subsequent acceleration. Here we have the

finale-conductor again, introducing the spiritual

significance of architecture into his interpretation.

VIII

His highly individual employment of dynamics was

one of the features by which one could single out

Mahler’s conducting.

An examination of the dynamics in Mahler’s

orchestral works reveals most interesting data

concerning the orchestral language in vogue during

the period of transition from Romanticism

(Wagner, Strauss) to modern realism and

expressionism (Alban Berg, Stravinsky). Such a

study, moreover, throws particular light on

Mahler’s style as a conductor.

Mahler was so sensitive that he himself rehearsed

Le Nozze di Figaro (one of his most carefully

prepared standard performances at the Vienna

Hofoper) with orchestra and complete stage

personnel throughout six successive general

rehearsals when he brought that production to

Salzburg. And why? Only because he wished to

accommodate the opera perfectly to the acoustics of

the Salzburg theatre.

The conductor’s (Mahler’s) treatment of dynamics

was also subordinated to the demands of rhetoric.

In Mahler’s time the outstanding style of dramatic

interpretation on the legitimate stage was that for

which Max Reinhardt (inspired by Stanislawski’s

Russian Art Theatre) was held responsible. It

consisted in a rather fervid naturalism expressed

through exaggerated declamation, exploiting all the

possibilities of dynamics, from the hushed whisper

to the stentorian shout in opposition to the pleasant

transitions favored by tradition. The audience was to

be taken by surprise. It was not characters, part of

real, unobtrusive Nature, who acted the drama, but

mere ideas personified, overstated by actors who

were forced to be “symbols.” As Mahler puts it

(Letters 281) “all that is material must be dissolved

into form; a higher realm of phenomena where types

are individualities.”

It is in keeping with such principals that Mahler

reproaches the singer cast as Ortrud (Lohengrin) for

having been too “loud” during her first scene with

Elsa. “That was not the right tone for the

hypo-critical Ortrud with her mysterious behavior,

her assumed meekness” (Letters 155). It made no

difference to Mahler that Elsa would see through

Ortrud’s too obvious distimulation. What mattered

to him was that Ortrud be established as a regular

11 JCG Vol. 30

villainess regardless of logic and psychology.

(Logic and psychology were, and still are, despised

by the idealists of expressionism.) I remember that

scene very well; it was my first Lohengrin. In order

to stress his idea of an innocent, sweet Elsa as

contrasted with a saccharine, yet dangerous Ortrud,

Mahler exaggerated all the musical marks Wagner

wrote into this scene, the little cresc and dim, the

sudden sfz and pp. Thus he created a magnificent

suspense; he led up to the outburst “EntweihteGotter” in a way that caused the audience to applaud

that invocation, if only to relieve its own tension;

then he literally drenched the following scene,

Ortrud’s poisoning of Elsa’s confidence, with the

colors of a thrilling mystery-play. I could not help

the feeling of overemphasis, unnatural declamation,

cheap obviousness. Lohengrin, which (musically

and dramatically) borders perilously on bad taste,

attained with Mahler a strange flavor of artistic

perfection through ham-acting singers and a

ham-declaiming orchestra. He engineered the

dreamy prelude, from the pppp, (not the original pp)

up to the ff of the brasses, instead of portraying the

climax of an organic growth (usually one of

Mahler’s strong points) exploded like a sudden

onslaught of blunt reality. Speidel, Vienna’s most

renowned dramatic critic, described this effect as

“magical” (Zauberhaft), while I remember only a

harsh awakening from a dream. Yet the Wagnerian

idea, the “program,” was carried out; the Holy Grail

descended to “Earth,” to be sure, but in this case it

reached “Earth” with a crash. What was Mahler’s

reason? At the very end of the opera one knew it.

There the motif returned again, austerely elevated,

fff instead of the original f. The outburst in the

prelude had been but a foreboding of this final

touch. The effect was striking, a real delight to every

intelligent theatergoer.

However, in the theatre and in the concert hall I

don’t want to be “intelligent.”

Mahler doted on dynamic contrasts. That anecdote

concerning the premier of his First Symphony is

significant of Mahler’s sudden dynamic assaults.6

He loved the “drastic treatment of the orchestra,”

(Stefan, p. 65), claiming that Beethoven favored it.

When he edited Beethoven’s Ninth, he intensified

the markings, freely reinforcing or muting sound

effects. In fact, such was his general practice.

One of his instructions given to the conductor of his

Second Symphony portrays, perhaps better than

anything else, the theatrical nature of Mahler’s

dynamics.

He writes (Letters 316): “The audience is raised to

the highest tension by the fanfares of the trumpets;

now the mystical sound of the human voices

(which may enter ppp, as if out of the remote

distance) must come as a surprise. I suggest that the

chorus (which has been seated until this point)

remain seated, and rise only with the E-flat major

‘Mit Flugeln, die ich mir errungen.’ I have found

this to be an infallibly astonishing effect.”

IX

By the term agogics we mean not only “the process

and the result of modifying strict tempo to bring out

the full expression of a phrase” (tempo rubato)

(Pratt). We include within the limits of that term

also any details of execution pertaining to the

expressiveness of an interpretation.

In this connection the conductor-composer speaks

best for himself in a letter full of good advice to a

beginner in composition (Letters 191): “You are still

too intent on ‘sound and color!’ That is a defect of

all talented beginners doing creative work today.

I know of a similar stage of my own

development…Mood-music (Stimmungsmusik) is a

dangerous foundation (Boden). Take my advice, for

these things are no different than they were. Aim at

THEMES clear and plastic, which may be readily

recognized in any transformation or development

whatever; next, at abundant variety, heightened by

the clear contrasting of opposing themes, but above

all, rendered interesting by the unfailingly logical

development of the central-idea. With you all this

still seems confused. Furthermore: you must get rid

of the pianist in you! Yours is not a setting for

orchestra, but one conceived for the piano, and then

somehow translated into the orchestral language.

JCG Vol. 30 12

I too suffered from the same trouble. Today we all

originate from the piano, while the old masters came

from the violin and from singing.”

You see? “Sound and color” are not Mahler’s

primary concern. He finds the expression of

“moods” dangerous. Plasticity (which means

distinctness) and the “logical development of the

central-idea” are his leading principals. Therefore

you will find no sweet sentimentality in Mahler’s

interpretation. The “soulful” vibrato, the sensual

devices are alien to his ascetic intellectuality. He

prefers to oppose phrases of “genuine contrast”

against each other. He does not want the orchestral

score approached from the pianist’s viewpoint, for

he regards pianistic phrasing (especially that

instrument’s wealth of rubati and grupetti) as

anti-logical, knowing it to spring from the chordal

nature of the piano, a basic trait at variance with the

melodic, singing quality of the orchestra.

Mahler would say to his orchestra: “I breathe every

breath with you.” (Letters 156) In other words he

formulated even the small details of agogical

expression in the rhetorical way, ever intent on the

content of the single phrase, the meaning, to which

the sound and color were to be subordinated.

X

He was a “linear musician,” one who reads the

orchestral score horizontally, perceiving melodies,

as opposed to one who reads “vertically,”

concentrating on the harmonies.

“There is no harmony; there is only counterpoint”

is an utterance legend ascribes to him (Stefan, p. 94).

He proved this principal when he was a youngster,

when he arranged Bruckner’s Third Symphony for

piano for four hands. He followed the orchestral

score faithfully, striving “particularly hard to render

the single voices in the characteristic range of the

instruments, even though such practice sacrificed

facile and convenient rendering on the piano”

(Stefan, p. 29).

Mahler experienced music thematically, not

harmonically. To him “accompaniment” did not

exist. Every part of the orchestra expresses itself

independently. It was Mahler who first showed that

even second violins of Verdi were not monotonous

fillers-in, giving them thought, life, and importance

of their own. If Mozart is called the savior of the

woodwinds (especially of the clarinet), Mahler

justly may be called the savior of the middle voices

(the filling-in parts) of the orchestra. His jest on his

own style of composing also applies to his style of

conducting when he quotes an imaginary critic and

writes: “My musicians play without paying the

slightest attention to each other and my chaotic and

bestial nature reveals itself in all its vile nakedness.”

(Letters 220).

Listening to Mahler’s music today we regard it as

comparatively tame and harmonious. Yet in his own

interpretation it sounded anything but simple.

Similarly he made Beethoven and Wagner anything

but the mellow classics they had seemed before him.

We must remember that Schoenberg and his school

were born out of the performances of Tristan undIsolde conducted by Mahler, for his Tristan often

sounded like that modern atonality it actually

created. Mahler’s daring in leading of discordant

parts against each other, regardless of traditional

harmonic and esthetic tenets, created the revolution

we call “modern music.” The central idea, Day vs.

Night, manifested itself by clash and discord,

even during moments of the most peaceful

transfiguration. Only the design counted, never the

color. Today Mahler’s polyphonic conducting does

not appear revolutionary at all since almost every

conductor born east of Munich calls himself a

“pupil” of Mahler, though he never gave a single

lesson in conducting during his entire career.

Result: the orchestras execute faithfully the most

extravagant stupidities of their conductors.

The Vienna Philharmonic of 1900 was a band

calculated to inspire fear in a conductor. “Suppose I

did come to Vienna,” wrote Mahler (Letters 102).

“What tortures would I have to undergo there with

my manner of handling things musical? If I were

only to attempt teaching my conception of a

Beethoven Symphony to the famous Richter-trained

13 JCG Vol. 30

Philharmonicum I would at once find myself in the

midst of the most disgusting squabbles. That was

my experience even here (at Hamburg), though,

thanks to the support of Brahms and Buelow, I

occupy here a position of unquestioned authority.”

XI

Mahler was the father of that huge orchestra of our

period of mass-minded superlatives that has to be

furnished every conductor who has even a modicum

of self-esteem. They can’t perform with less than the

now accepted 20-20-16-10-10 proportion of strings.

Mahler transplanted his own magnified orchestral

conception of the classics, particularly to

Beethoven. He explained his principal notions of

orchestral treatment when he justified his retouching

of Beethoven’s Ninth. In an announcement to the

public he said:

“The unsatisfactory condition of the brass

instruments at that time [Beethoven]

rendered impracticable certain sequences of

sound necessary to the undisturbed

maintenance of the melodic line. It was that

defect which gradually brought about the

perfection of those instruments. Failure to utilize

these improvements in order to achieve as fine a

performance of Beethoven’s works as possible

would be a crime.

“The ancient device of multiplying

(Verfielfachung) the string instruments

eventually resulted in a corresponding increase

of the wind instruments in order to attain a

balancing reinforcement of certain parts without

the slightest emendation of the orchestral voices.

It can be demonstrated by means of the orchestral

score…that the conductor was concerned only

with following Beethoven’s intentions to the

smallest detail. Though he refused to be

hampered by ‘tradition’ in this regard, he

wished neither to sacrifice the slightest

intention of the master nor to permit such

an intention to be lost in an overwhelming

concordance of sounds” (Stefan, p. 66).

By “concordance of sounds” Mahler meant the

result of the traditional practice of conducting

Beethoven from the melodic-harmonic viewpoint,

for he knew Beethoven as one who created not in

harmony, but in counterpoint. Therefore in his

edition of Beethoven’s Ninth, to balance the

preponderance of the strings, he doubled the

woodwinds, he added a third and fourth pair of

French horns, and in the last movement a third and

fourth trumpet. In 1900 such an innovation was

attacked as sacrilege; today it is a common practice.

Mahler dethroned the first violins from their

ancient absolute sovereignty over the orchestra. The

hitherto apathetic state of the second violins and

violas was elevated to one of equality with the first

violins and cellos respectively. The ascetic Mahler

did away with the constant, sweet vibratos, with the

sensuality and pompous glamour of the string

section. The Vienna Philharmonic, glorying in the

popularity of their emotional soarings, the sensuous,

almost Gipsy-like sobbing of their strings, resented

being banished from the golden Viennese heart to

the limbo of the Mahlerian transcendent brain, but

the rich Schmaltz they lost was amply compensated

by a proportionate gain in deliberate, impressive

delivery. Never before and never since Mahler did

they play the prelude to Lohengrin, the Adagio of

Beethoven’s Ninth, the transfiguration music of

Bruckner’s Fifth with such unearthly, breathtaking

spirituality. Mahler wanted singing passages in the

strings played with the whole length of the bow, to

contrast them with the short figures gasped at the

frog or tittered at the point. He reveled in the higher

positions of the violin G and D strings without

indulging in the sentimentality natural to such

fingerings. His secco of short, hard chords played by

the whole section had the reckless, despotic

dryness of a volley of gunfire; his tremolo was

insidious rather than weird, for it sounded

completely dematerialized. In general (if I may be

permitted the comparison) Mahler’s treatment of the

string section had something of the intellectual style,

the severe chastity of the Busch Quartet’s playing

today; not much sex-appeal, but lots of logic.

It was through Mahler that the woodwind section

attained the importance it enjoys in all good

orchestras today. He tempered the different colors of

the various instruments to organ-like equality. When

(especially in his beloved Beethoven) the different

JCG Vol. 30 14

strings; sensuality, even a certain vibrato to the

trombones and particularly to the Bayreuth Tubas,

whenever they sobbed out their theme. Again, for

contrast’s sake, he had a certain way of getting a

secco from his trombones that made you shiver: that

hard, short sfz, almost like barking. He featured

short but violent crescendo exaggerating them as in

roaring glissandi (e.g., in the prelude to The FlyingDutchman). He blended woodwinds and brasses to a

unity of sound never realized before. It is in no idle

praise of his conducting to assert that even

specialists could not differentiate between

woodwinds and brasses in the “offstage” passages of

the cemetery scene in Don Giovanni.

His percussion-battery shows equally the influence

of his military boyhood surroundings. All his

symphonies employ a large battery, culminating in

the Sixth, where he used an especially constructed

gigantic drum (an entire bullhide stretched over a

huge square sounding-board, beaten by a gigantic

wooden hammer). This instrument really sounded

like “fate pounding at the door,” a programmatic

nuance which Beethoven had been content to

express with a modest kettledrum. Mahler’s

percussion declaimed heavily. Glitter and despair,

roughness and delicacy, literally ran amok in his

percussion. He showed a marked difference in his

handling of timpani and bassdrums, piatti, and

tam-tam. Their rhythm was always dominating; the

entrance of the battery had somewhat the effect of

outstanding solo-work.

XII

The conductor Mahler, consistent idealist by

temperament and mentality, built up his

re-productions (interpretations) on a rhetorical

development of the central-ideal of a work to its

final climax and exit (the finale conductor).

All tectonic features (rhythm, tempo, dynamics,

agogics, polyphony, orchestration) were

subordinated to the architectonic structure and had

no independent significance. Mahler’s rhythms were

rhetorically accentuated, his tempi dramatically

modified, his dynamics and agogics histrionically

declaimed, his reading multi-voiced, contrapuntal

woodwinds alternated concertante, you never felt a

break in color unless it was intentionally so marked,

to achieve contrast. He even trained the single

instruments to make imperceptible transitions from

one position to the other. On the other hand, he

exaggerated the tonal differences between those

positions, if the dramatic expression so required. He

made the naturally dark low register of the flute or

clarinet sound almost black and urged the high

register to shrillness. (Note the “vulgar” use of the C

and the higher E-flat clarinets in his own

symphonies.)

Often in unison of strings and winds (flutes with

violins or cellos and double basses with bassoons)

he forced the weaker winds to dominate the strings,

even by doubling the winds, if necessary.

Mahler’s pet hobbies in the orchestra, however, were

the brasses and percussion. (He grew up near the

military barracks in Moravia.) The French horns, the

group which tradition made transitional from the

woodwinds to the brasses, were (strange enough for

a basically Romantic musician) the most indifferent

group to Mahler.7 I can’t remember any particular

feature of his treatment to them.

The trumpets and trombones, especially the

trumpets, were his chief concern. These are the

instruments most often mentioned in his letters.

What he denied to his strings, he gave to his

trumpets: sensuality, sweetness, even sexuality. This

is one of the ironical “twists” in his musical nature.

His exultant, solo-like projection of the climactic

trumpet passage in the second Finale of Aida still

rings in my memory. It yelled like a joyous animal

while violins sounded restrained. The disciple of the

wonderful Austrian military bands became a master

in blending the brasses. They also were never mere

accompaniment, “padding” of the highlights of a

composition. Theirs were dramatic functions

throughout. Somehow I always had the impression,

when Mahler made the brasses enter, that they

seemed to be already playing though they were

certainly silent until that moment; or, with typically

Mahlerian contrast, they came in as a sudden

surprise. To them too he gave what he denied to the

15 JCG Vol. 30

Mahler have we biographical works which can be compared

with Wyczewa and Saint Foix on Mozart or with Kurth on

Bruckner. The Stefans, Spechts, etc., are fanatical fighters

against anybody who dares the slightest criticism of their idols,

but they themselves do nothing of real importance to explain

these idols.

6 At the attacca introducing the last movement, a dignified

lady, shocked by the violence of the “attack,” dropped her

handbag, spilling its contents on the floor. (Letters 477).

7 EDITORS NOTE —“The horn (in the treatment of which

authorities agree Mahler was one of the greatest masters of all

time) had never so important a role. To the noble level of

expressiveness it had attained in Bruckner’s hands Mahler

added a new power, enabling it by means of dying echoes to

carry smoothly an idea already exploited into a changed

musical atmosphere. Sometimes a solo horn would issue with

overwhelming effect from a whole chorus of horns among

which it had been concealed, or singing in its deepest tones it

would lend a passage the air of tragic gloom. In Mahler’s

resourceful use of the horn every register seemed possessed of

a different psychological significance.” Gabriel Engel, GustavMahler – Song Symphonist.

8 In our times of rugged collectivism and instinctivism, the

nomenclature “intellectual” is regarded as an insult equaled

only by that of “individualist.” Therefore, we must bear in

mind that in Mahler’s time brains and personality were the

most honored property of man.

REFERENCES

Gustav Mahler Briefe – Paul Zsolnay Verlag, Wien 1924.

Gustav Mahler – Paul Stefan – R. Piper & Co. Verlag, Munich

1920.

Gustav Mahler – Richard Specht – Duetsche Verlags Anstalt,

Stuttgart-Berlin 1925.

Gustav Mahler – Bruno Walter – Wien 1937 – Herbert

Reichner Verlag.

Note: Numerals after the word “Letters” in this article refer to

pages in Gustav Mahler Briefe, copyright by Paul Zsolnay

Verlag.

rather than harmonic, his emphasis one of design

rather than color, in short, interpretations which

individualized the orchestral parts, making them

carriers of integral, yet interdependent ideas.

The net result of such conducting was an unabashed

intellectualism8 vehemently presented, almost

placarded, by clairvoyant brainwaves.

Beethoven’s dictum, “Music must beat fire from a

man’s mind,” is often quoted, seldom felt, and rarely

grasped in its ultimate meaning. Yet it was fully

realized by Mahler the conductor.

With the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, Mahler

performed seventy-seven concert works. Twenty-

five of them were by Beethoven.

*****

Ernst Joseph Maria Lert (1883, Vienna – 1955, NewYork City)was an Austrian composer, librettist, stagedirector, writer, and music historian.

The preceding article is reprinted by permission ofthe Bruckner Society. It originally appeared inChord and Discord, January 1938, Volume I number9, pages 10 through 28.

ENDNOTES

1 Otto Lohse ein Duetscher Kapellmeister (Leipzig, Breitkopf

und Haertel, 1918).

2 Chord and Discord, December 1936.

3 Ibid.

4 Notwithstanding the great progress of modern psychology,

the best psychological explanation of the difference between

the realistic and idealistic artist is still Schiller’s study,

“On Naive and Sentimental Poetry.”

5 It seems to be the common fate of the great revolutionary

musicians to find biographers who overflow with praise and

orthodox zeal, but who lack reliability, scientific seriousness,

and sincerity of research. Neither of Richard Wagner nor of

JCG Vol. 30 16

Contemporary Mozart Performance:

A Diverse Landscape

(JCG Volume 2, No. 2, 1981)

By Max Rudolf

Are there guidelines for the performance of Mozart’s

works? If we look for readily applicable universal

rules, accepted and practiced by a majority of

performers and teachers, the response would have to

be negative. If, however, we conduct a survey of

present usage which compares selected readings of

Mozart’s works, live or recorded, two lists would be

created. The first would include characteristics that

most of the readings have in common. The second

would be a list of the divergent or non-conformant

practices. The degree to which the divergent

practices outnumber the similarities would certainly

fluctuate from one work to another. Whatever the

ratio, the lack of unanimity as regards tempo,

expression and other details of interpretation, is a

recognized and accepted fact. Some listeners

welcome the diversity. Others, partial to a favorite

artist whom they regard as a master of the “Mozart

style,” are blithely unconcerned about other Mozart

admirers who may confer the same honor upon a

performer with totally divergent ideas. Obviously,

observations based on comparisons do not proffer

guidelines. Rather, they act as a guide to the

available choices which are derived from prevailing

performance practices, individual taste, or force of

habit.

In order to separate transitory musical customs from

a composer oriented evaluation, musicians, when

searching for the “Mozart style,” ought to seek out

tangible criteria, such as the manner in which a

composition was conceived, notated, and meant to

be performed. This should be done in the light of

what one might call Mozart’s “workshop.” In order

to gain insight into his “workshop,” thorough

knowledge of a score is not sufficient. Each single

composition must be viewed as part of Mozart’s total

creative effort. Moreover, we must attempt, through

the use of biographical data and other pertinent

sources, to formulate a living picture of his

personality as an artist and human being, as well as

of his musical habits, aspirations and tastes. To quote

Goethe’s simple mandate: “Whoever wants to

understand the poet must go in the poet’s land.”

A discussion of this type often raises more questions

than it can possibly answer. For example, is

information available which could inform us as to

how Mozart conceived, notated, and performed his

music? Did he expect performers to comply with his

own interpretations? Is it possible, under present

conditions, to strive for authenticity by emulating

performance practices which have evolved over

nearly two centuries? If so, is it desirable? Finally,

how do we explain the diversity of approach to

Mozart among prominent musicians? Limited space

permits only brief answers.

We do not always know how Mozart conceived a

work. In a number of cases, a comprehensive study

of his letters and contemporary reports allows for

acceptable conclusions, yet more frequently much is

left to the “educated guess.” Specific data should

always therefore be of special interest. One wonders,

then, why Mozart’s own German translation of two

scenes in Don Giovanni (to which he added colorful

stage directions that well illustrate his ideas)

has gone virtually unnoticed. In the recent past the

accuracy of Mozart’s musical notation has been

ascertained through autographs and other important

17 JCG Vol. 30

sources. Although we had long suffered from

unreliable editions, since about 1950 most of the

composer’s output has been made available in

well-researched volumes. They should be consulted.

If a performer fails to do so, he will probably

continue playing (or singing) incorrect notes,

distorted rhythms, “modernized” phrasing, and be

mislead by faulty tempo indications. It is indeed

hard to believe that works such as Mozart’s

Haffner Symphony are still being performed from

bowdlerized scores.

For the performance of orchestral and ensemble

music, Mozart generally expected the players to

adhere to the written text. Solo performers,

however, whether in arias, sonatas, or concertos,

were allowed to alter the melodic line by adding

ornaments, changing the rhythm, and inventing

variations. For musicians who accept the sanctity of

the written note virtually as an act of faith, it seems

almost incredible that Mozart not only permitted,

but expected, tampering with his music. It is

interesting to note that Mozart’s ideas on this subject

were diametrically opposite to those of his older

confrere Gluck, who rejected the time-honored

practice. Mozart believed that the ability to add

embellishments was an essential part of music

education (contradicting the everything-is-in-the-

score theory cherished by some famous 20th

century musicians). However, textbooks of the day

contained the following caveat: performers who lack

a thorough training in composition and have not

acquired a refined taste should keep their hands off!

On one point Mozart was extremely strict: the

choice of tempo. In his words, tempo was “The

most necessary, the most difficult, and the most

important thing in music...” This attitude is

readily understandable, since the pacing of a

composition determines its intrinsic character.

Consequently, Mozart devoted considerable care to

marking the speed. In his manuscripts he would

cross out one indication only to replace it by

another, more appropriate, tempo marking. He went

so far as to eliminate the word “cantabile” in an

“Andante cantabile” to prevent too slow a pace. It is

only by acquiring such special knowledge, that

performers can hope to understand the composer’s

ideas.

Since Mozart’s days drastic changes have taken

place in musical performance. Not only the pitch,

but also the sound quality and mechanics of all our

instruments, have been substantially altered. Even

more importantly, musical habits, tastes, and modes

of expressions change continually. Although

directions as to how to “read behind the notes” were

well explained in books of the time, Mozart

performances have steadily yielded to performance

devices typical of the Romantic era. To assume that

the great master would have welcomed all these

changes would be a rather tenuous speculation.

Those who disapprove of efforts to revive former

performance practices point to the impossibility of

restoring the physical and mental environment

which is inseparable from each era’s artistic

creations. They also direct our attention to changes

in the public’s receptivity. Modern man, they say,

lives and feels differently. Therefore, new

approaches are needed to infuse life into musical

masterworks of the past, even if this practice causes

a disregard of former concepts of sound, phrasing

and emotional expression. Trusting their intuition

and the “feeling” for style (based perhaps on recent

traditions rather than on factual knowledge) they

remain convinced that they are serving the great

masters of music in the best possible way.

Those taking an opposite position claim to serve a

master like Mozart better by trying to stay close to

his own intentions. They also insist that art created

in former days should be understood and enjoyed

with the help of an imagination that leads the

listener back to the spirit of an era, to the driving

force that produced its works of art. Although aware

of the inherent limitations of their efforts, they

advocate a quest for authenticity, an attitude

reflected in the words of Henry James: “Admitting

that ultimate truth is unobtainable is one thing,

another is trying to avoid errors.”

These differences in attitude are not related to

musical questions alone. They reflect divergent

JCG Vol. 30 18

views on the theory and philosophy of art. Where does this leave the performer? Stravinsky, in his Poeticsof Music, dealt at length with the problem. He spoke of the “loving care to which performers should be com-

mitted. Genuine love for a composer, just as for any love object, must contain an overt demonstration of intel-

lectual curiosity which is, for such a project, the sine qua non! Stravinsky also maintained that, while every

musical performance is unavoidably a sort of translation, performers had to make sure that the original would

not, gradually, over a period of time and unnoticed by the public, take on the character of a free arrangement.

*****

Max Rudolf (June 15, 1902 — February 28, 1995) was a German conductor who spent most of his career inthe United States.

Rudolf was born in Frankfurt am Main where he studied cello, piano, organ, trumpet, and composition (withBernhard Sekles) at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt.[1] He held positions in Freiburg, Darmstadt, andPrague, before moving to the United States in 1940. In 1945, he became a naturalized citizen. He served onthe conducting staff of the Metropolitan Opera between 1946 and 1958, when he became music director ofthe Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra for 13 years. During this period he became a noted orchestra builder andteacher, serving on the staff of the Tanglewood Institute. He wrote The Grammar of Conducting, the mostwidely used text for orchestral conducting. First appearing in 1950, it was republished with significant revisions in 1980 and again in 1995.

After his tenure in Cincinnati, he served as conductor of the Dallas Symphony for a season (1973-74), artis-tic advisor of the New Jersey Symphony (1976-77), as well as regular engagements with major Americanorchestras and opera houses. In between this time, he was head of the opera and conducting department atthe Curtis Institute of Music (1970-73 and 1983-89), which is perhaps what he is best remembered for, sincemany of the leading conductors of this day studied under him.

19 JCG Vol. 30

length of time that brasses and woodwinds have

been idle. This sense can be developed through

experience and will be enhanced if the conductor

himself has spent time playing in orchestras.

Additional efficiency can be gained by planning

what and how to rehearse. This assumes that the

orchestra has already read the composition and is

also dependent upon factors such as the level of the

players, the feasibility of holding a sectional

rehearsal, and the technical demands of the

composition being rehearsed. In general, it is

advisable to decide what to rehearse in advance of

the rehearsal, depending upon the results of the

previous reading. Of course, the crux of a rehearsal

is impromptu decision-making, totally dependent

upon the sounds emanating from the rehearsal.

Maximum rehearsal efficiency will be achieved with

a proper balance between pre-rehearsal planning and

appropriate extemporaneous decisions during its

course.

Aside from the aforementioned organizational

considerations, a significant factor that will develop

maximum interest and efficiency is theoretical,

relevant primarily to nonprofessional orchestras.

Working with students or community musicians can

be a very inspiring experience, since it provides the

conductor with an opportunity to familiarize his

players with the structure of a composition. For

example, fugal passages help players understand the

melodic development of the composition. Often,

rehearsal of a section for one orchestral group is

relevant to other groups. Educating our players

does not entail superfluous verbal commentary.

The primary consideration is not who needs a

rehearsal but what use is being made of it.

Indeed, the fact that the conductor, while

working with the orchestra, still has to decide

on details of interpretation which are of vital

importance to the performance, should contribute

to making a rehearsal an exciting experience.

It is the happy combination of objectivity

and initiative, rationalization and feeling,

discernment and intuition that, in addition to

technical ability, is the decisive factor in leading

a successful rehearsal.1

Whether we are directing professional musicians or

young students, successful communication with

players depends upon the successful rehearsal.

Discipline problems encountered during rehearsal

result from boredom, a symptom of inefficient

rehearsal technique.

The best way to develop fluency in rehearsals is

to consider the needs of the orchestral player.

For example, every player wants to read clearly

marked parts. Thus, before the first rehearsal of a

composition, the conductor is responsible for

making clear markings on all parts, including

dynamics, bowings, and fast page turns. A great

deal of rehearsal time will be gained if parts are

clearly marked to begin with.

Considering the needs of the player means taking

into account the amount of time a section of the

orchestra has been idle. Granted, it is sometimes

difficult to negotiate string and woodwind rehearsal

time, especially if difficult string passages need

considerable practice. Nevertheless, a conductor

needs to develop an inner sense for knowing the

Rehearsal Efficiency and Score Analysis

(JCG Volume 2, No. 3, 1981)

By Alan Pearlmutter

JCG Vol. 30 20

It involves utilizing the rehearsal in such a way as to

interest all players, even if they are not participants

at a given moment.

Smetana’s Bartered Bride Overture provides an

interesting study with regard to structural techniques

and how they can be used to optimize rehearsal

efficiency. Early in the overture is a fugue for

strings, which is begun at m.8 tutti, and is continued

with the second violins at m.14. At m.31, first

violins enter. Violas and outside celli state the

theme at m.52. Inside celli and basses enter with the

fugal theme at m.73. The head motive for the fugue

is quoted in Example 1.

In rehearsing this entire fugal section, the conductor

might consider using the second violins as a model

for the other string sections. The five bar head

motive needs to be played fortissimo, with accents

as written, followed by a subito piano. The piano

(or pianissimo) dynamic must continue throughout,

even after the next fugal entrance. Each section of

the strings should be rehearsed in this fashion, with

the second violins having provided the example.

Efficiency is gained during the rehearsal if the

conductor insists that the strings listen to the second

violins in the first place, in order to gain a proper

concept of dynamics, articulation, and phrasing.

Utilizing rehearsal time in this manner will help

develop string ensemble, and will add needed

interest to the many repeated scales that are being

performed. The entire string fugue should be

performed after each string section has been given

the opportunity to practice the head motive.

Sequences can provide an orchestra with insight into

compositional structure, and can serve to minimize

monotony, if rehearsed properly. At m.128, a four

bar pattern begins, which is repeated three

additional times, in keys which are a minor third

higher than the preceding key. Thus the cycle of

keys are C Major, E-Flat Major, G-Flat Major, A

Major, and C Major.2 These four four-bar phrases

must be performed and rehearsed at four different

dynamic levels: pp, p, mf, and f. During rehearsal,

the orchestra must be advised to make a gradual

crescendo, so that a true fortissimo is reached at

m.144, and not sooner. The orchestra needs to be

made aware of this sequential structure. Moreover,

the fourth bar of each phrase must have hairpins,

without exaggerating the dynamic of the following

sequential phrase. It is extremely difficult to

maintain a gradual crescendo throughout the entire

16 bars, particularly when the final bar of each

phrase contains an expressive swell. Rehearsal of

this 16-bar section based on the preceding

theoretical knowledge will enlighten the orchestra

and encourage a willingness to perform what is

indicated in the score.

Another interesting sequence begins at m.237. A

structure of six six-bar phrases includes motivic

counterpoint on offbeats. It is a fugal sequence

beginning with viola and bassoon. This entire

35-bar passage must emphasize the fugal entrances,

and the syncopated motivic imitation. In order to

successfully negotiate thematic balance, it would be

wise for the conductor to rehearse only what needs

to be audible (Example 2). If only these isolated

excerpts are played during initial rehearsal of this

passage, the orchestra will be informed about its

compositional structure. This in turn will enable the

player to understand that any scale passages during

the course of this section must not overshadow the

motivic elements illustrated. This kind of rehearsal

technique clearly delineates what must be audible,

makes the rehearsal interesting for all players, and

saves rehearsal time.

During rehearsals, conductors sometimes need to be

more attentive to inner voices than to melodic

passages. A case in point is the chromatic

modulation in the Smetana overture which begins at

m.378 (Example 3). Here the modulation is from

D-Flat Major to E-Major, with inner voices

supplying rising tones independent of each other.

Tension is built into the chromatic alterations simply

because the tones do not change simultaneously. In

rehearsal, the celli and violas should emphasize

individual note changes without creating artificial

accentuation. The patterned sequence of chromatic

change occurs instrumentally as follows: winds,

inside celli, outside celli, violas. The conductor’s

gesture should invite these instrumental entrances in

23 JCG Vol. 30

that order. The rehearsal of this passage should emphasize the importance of each individual note change, as

players would not ordinarily be familiar with the parts of other sections. Here again, theoretical knowledge

or analysis can lend insight into making a rehearsal efficient and worthwhile for all players.

Implied in the above study is a simple but important distinction between theoretical analysis for its own sake

and theoretical analysis for the sake of an efficient rehearsal. After learning a score a conductor should

clarify, in his own thought, the important theoretical and/or structural devices used in the composition. The

only theory that need concern him is the theory that will (a) help his orchestra understand the music; (b) save

rehearsal time; (c) help support his own interpretation and, therefore, his reasoning for making musical

decisions prior to and during the course of the rehearsal. Such meaningful and practical score analysis will

serve the best interests of the composer, the players and, of course, the audience. It should also insure the

interesting and effective use of valuable rehearsal time.

*****

Alan Pearlmutter is a conductor and music professor. He currently teaches at Bristol Community College inFall River, Massachusetts. He also has served Boston University’s online graduate music education programand the Department of Fine Arts of Merrimack College in North Andover, Massachusetts. Alan is MusicDirector of Boston’s Kammerwerke Orchestra which he established in 2006.

Alan Pearlmutter earned his D.M.A. at the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore. Alan has had several articles published in the Journal of the Conductor Guild, an organization which he served as secretary in its earliest years.

ENDNOTES

1 Max Rudolf. The Grammar of Conducting: A Practical Study of Modern Baton Technique.

(New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, Inc., 1950), p. 329.

2 It is surely no coincidence that the keys are a minor third apart, since the critical melodic interval of the

overture is a minor third.

JCG Vol. 30 24

Schubert’s Position in Viennese Musical Life(JCG Volume 3, No. 3, 1982)

By Otto Biba

In the first decades of the nineteenth century,

Viennese musical life was decidedly different from

the relatively homogeneous international scene so

familiar to us today. Hence it is not possible to

assess Schubert’s position within this rich tradition

if we insist on making comparisons by today’s

standards, or if we evaluate historical testimony

using our own experiences as the reference point.

The result can be a dramatization of what appears

extraordinary to us now, but was self-explanatory

then; it can also lead to our overlooking a

development that was indeed extraordinary in

Schubert’s time, but seems common practice today.

Franz Schubert has perhaps suffered more than any

other composer at the hands of biographers unable to

distinguish between yesterday and today. We

remain indebted to Otto Erich Deutsch who, more

than sixty years ago, rescued Schubert from the twin

realms of fantasy and fiction. His return to the solid

ground of contemporary documentation can be put

to even better use when we compare events in

Schubert’s biography with those of his fellow

composers and musicians. The sesquicentennial

celebrations in 1978 afforded me the opportunity to

delve afresh into a rich variety of archival material

housed in the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in

Vienna, and elsewhere I was able to examine a

number of important collections of concert

programs from the period. Out of these

investigations several startling new perspectives on

Franz Schubert’s musical and professional life have

emerged. Along with offering a general overview of

Viennese musical life in Schubert’s time, I propose

to define Schubert’s position within this network,

drawing special attention to new disclosures. This is

best achieved under several different headings.

Perhaps most central is the arena of public concert

life. In the early 19th century in Vienna,

concerts were presented either by independent

virtuosi-who assumed both the artistic and the

financial risks-or by private societies. There were at

that time three such organizations: the Gesellschaft

der Musikfreunde, founded in 1812 and still

very active today; the Gesellschaft des

Privat-Musik-Vereins, founded in 1818; and from

1819 on, the Concerts sprituels einer Geslischaft von

Musikfreunden. All three of these societies were on

friendly terms with the others. To be sure, the

Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde was the most

important; it was to play an important role in

Schubert’s life as well. From 1816 on the society

sponsored regular orchestral concerts, and in 1818 it

inaugurated a second series, devoted to Lieder,

polyphonic vocal music, and chamber works. This

later earned the title of MusikalischeAbendunterhaltungen. On a poster from the year

1818 announcing the commencement of these

concerts, Schubert’s name is already found. We read

that masterpieces by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven,

Onslow, Spohr, and Schubert will be performed.

Both Onslow and Spohr, as well as Haydn, Mozart,

and Beethoven, were highly esteemed composers in

their day. Schubert’s inclusion is all the more

impressive in light of the fact that in 1818 not a

single work of his had yet appeared in print.

Before this performance could take place, however,

Schubert’s relationship to the Gesellschaft received

25 JCG Vol. 30

To be sure, we must ask why Schubert did not

exercise the same zeal on behalf of his orchestral

works. No easy answer suggests itself. We know,

for one thing, that as soon as Schubert had

presented and dedicated his Great C-Major

Symphony to the Gesellschaft at the end of 1826,

two copyists set immediately about preparing

performance parts. I was fortunate in being able to

locate the receipts for both copyists in the archives

of the Gesellschaft. With the aid of watermarks

Robert Winter was able to determine that the parts

cited in both receipts are almost certainly identical

in large measure with those now in the Gesellschaft

library; their paper suggests a completion date

during the summer of 1827. From the memoirs of

Leopold von Sonnleithner we know that the

C-Major Symphony received at least one reading

during the rehearsals of the society’s conservatory

orchestra—and this during Schubert’s lifetime.

Apparently a concert performance was never

intended. When, in December 1828, a symphony

had to be chosen for the memorial concert, the Sixth

Symphony was selected. The widespread belief that

the musicians preparing the Great C-Major for its

premiere rejected it because of its unreasonable

difficulties is false. The well-preserved records of

the Gesellschaft make it clear that the work was

never planned for an official public performance.

Nevertheless, we are quite safe in assuming that

Schubert heard the work in an orchestral rehearsal of

the Konservatorium.

The first authenticated performance of the Great

C-Major Symphony––although in abbreviated

form-took place in 1839 at the instigation of Robert

Schumann, under Felix Mendelssohn’s direction in

Leipzig. This performance, however, in no way

marked a rediscovery of the work, as is so often

asserted. Paper and scribal evidence make it clear

that sometime in the early 1830s, and for an

undetermined occasion, several duplicate orchestral

parts were prepared. Moreover, the finale of the

symphony was performed in a public concert in

Vienna in 1836.

a harsh blow. In March of 1818 the young

composer applied to the society for membership. On

patently specious grounds his petition was denied.

We do not know what the precise grounds were, but

my suspicion is that they involved strictly personal

matters. Even at that time Schubert was already a

freischaffender Komponist, one who earned his

entire income through his own artistic efforts,

without either a steady income or a traditional

profession. All other composers supported

themselves either through teaching, or else they

worked in the civil bureaucracy and composed on

the side. Even Beethoven had a base income in the

form of an annuity supplied by a group of

aristocratic patrons. Schubert was the very first

Viennese composer to live solely from his

compositions, and I can well imagine that to some

of his contemporaries this was viewed as

anti-bourgeois and irresponsible. This could have

been one reason why the worthy gentlemen of the

Gesellschaft’s board of directors did not wish to

welcome Schubert into their ranks.

Three years later, however, there was a change in the

constitution of the board, and Schubert’s name can

now indeed be found among the membership.

From this time on, his works received regular

performances in the concerts sponsored by the

society. In 1825 he was elected as an alternate, and

in 1827 as a regular member of the representative

body which provided much of the leadership

for the Gesellschaft. Members of this

Repräsentantenkörpers exercised direct influence on

the makeup of concert programs, and it is probably

no accident that from 1825 until his death Schubert’s

music was second in popularity on the

Abendunterhaltungen only to that of Rossini.

Having been slightly overshadowed by Mozart and

Beethoven in the years following 1821, by 1825

Schubert had surpassed both of them in popularity,

with Mozart now in third and Beethoven in fourth

place. Rossini’s preeminence comes as no surprise

in light of the Rossini-Rummel that had swept over

Vienna, but that Schubert’s popularity was eclipsed

only by the Italian’s is remarkable.

JCG Vol. 30 26

clearly recognized the worth of the young composer

and did everything in his power to promote him.

Even after Schubert’s death his chamber works

remained on the programs of the Schuppanzigh

Quartet. With the dedication of his A-Minor

Quartet, op. 29, Schubert was partly able to repay

Schuppanzigh for his support.

Of the numerous other instrumental virtuosi who

frequently performed Schubert, two deserve special

mention. On 22 April 1827, the violinist Leopold

Jansa and the hornist Joseph Lewy each presented,

at the same hour but in different halls, one

of their regular concerts. Lewy offered the first

performance of Schubert’s Nachtgesang im Walde,

D. 913, for male voices and horns, while Schubert

accompanied Normans Gesang, D. 846, at Jansa’s

concert. The picture of a composer unable to attend

a premiere of one of his own works may be ascribed

to accidental circumstance, but it also constitutes

evidence of how established Schubert was on the

Viennese musical scene.

But the vitality of Viennese musical life is best

attested through the presence between 1780 and

1840 of musical salons, to which I referred above.

Both middle classes and aristocracy sponsored

such events, to which it was customary to invite

acquaintances and friends who, in their turn, might

also bring acquaintances and friends. In numerous

families a welcome was also extended to music

lovers not necessarily known to them. Such

concerts, then, could be described as semi-public.

The performances featured not only chamber music

combinations but orchestral works as well. It might

on occasion be necessary to assemble the performers

in one room and the listeners in another. A number

of families had their own invitations and admission

tickets printed up or handwritten, though very few

survive.

These less formal musical evenings were the active

transmitters of Viennese musical life. The public

concerts put on by the three private musical societies

occurred relatively infrequently. And whereas these

were generally limited to the works of a single

composer, or to works which showed off the abilities

As regards to performances in the composer’s life-

time, it cannot be stressed too strongly that Schubert

was inhibited by an inordinate shyness when it came

to the public performance of his orchestral works.

There is even reason to believe that he worked

actively to discourage such performances, in any

case, he did nothing to promote them. Ascertaining

the reasons for this would doubtless call for a

deeper psychological study. Even so, it would be a

mistake to assume that Schubert never heard his

symphonies. Contemporary performance materials

for the First, Second, Third, Fifth, and Sixth

Symphonies survive in the archives of the

Gesellschaft, and there is every indication that they

were used then. The forum, however, was not the

public concert but the so-called musical salon.

The idea of musical salon is placed in better relief

against the backdrop of concerts organized by

individual artists. It was typical for a composer to

present a sheaf of his newest works in a public

concert organized by himself, largely, or even

entirely, around his own works. It was not until

March 1828 that Schubert was persuaded by his

friends to organize just such an evening. For this

purpose the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde placed

its concert hall at Schubert’s disposal, free of charge.

The concert itself was an unqualified critical and

public success. Along with the artistic acclaim, it

brought him net earnings of 800 gulden. Consider

that his father received 240 gulden per year as a

teacher, and that a minor civil servant received

around 400 gulden per year. Further concerts like

this one proved impossible only because eight

months later Schubert suddenly and unexpectedly

contracted typhus and died.

The most famous instrumental soloists of the day

regularly performed works by Schubert on their

programs. In light of all the publicity garnered

by the Schuppanzigh Quartet with regard to its

performances of Beethoven, it is important to stress

that Schuppanzigh was an equally ardent advocate of

Schubert. Between 1797 and 1826 Schuppanzigh

premiered seven works of Beethoven, but between

1824 and 1828 alone he premiered no fewer than

four works of Schubert. This violinist-conductor

27 JCG Vol. 30

financially no more penalized for a semi-public

performance in a salon than for our customary

public concert.

If Schubert was the first Viennese composer to live

entirely from his musical compositions, what then

were his opportunities for remuneration? In the

period between 1816 and 1821 we can be quite sure

that it was the goodwill and financial support of his

friends that sustained Schubert. These five years

mark the interval between his resigning from the

teaching profession and the publication of his Op. 1.

In the years 1821-22 the publication of Ops. 1-7 and

10-12 realized for the composer a profit of some

2000 gulden. Bearing in mind the annual salary of a

minor civil servant, this amounted to some five

years’ income. In this short period of time

Schubert’s earnings had soared almost to the level of

the imperial Hofkapellmeister, otherwise the best

paid musician in Vienna.

To this healthy figure must be added the sums of

money presented by nobility to whom Schubert

dedicated compositions. The precise sums have

been preserved in only a few instances, but they

were certainly not inconsequential. We know, for

example, that Reichsgraf Moriz von Fries gave

Schubert 200 gulden for the dedication of Op. 2,

half our civil servant’s yearly salary. From

Schubert’s letters we learn that for each printed

opus—generally of Lieder—he received from the

publisher 125 gulden until the spring of 1823, and

from April on 200 gulden, neither of these small

amounts. Again, a comparison with a contemporary

best clarifies Schubert’s position. In the year 1825,

for example, the well-established composer Johann

Hugo Vonsek requested an honorarium of 75 gulden

from the publisher Diabelli for a collection of six

songs; Diabelli found this amount too high. At the

same time Diabelli had become accustomed to

paying Schubert 200 gulden for opuses that

generally contained three, or at most four, songs.

Diabelli’s investment was nevertheless a sound one,

for he earned a small fortune from brisk sales of

Schubert songs over the years, long after the rest of

his stable had ceased to attract buyers. In those days

of a single performer, regardless of artistic merit, the

repertoire at a musical salon was both varied and

innovative. It was at these concerts that the most

important performances of Schubert’s music took

place. For a salon organized by Otto Hatwig, a

prominent citizen of Vienna and an important

musical figure, Schubert composed his Fifth

Symphony. We can also confirm that the

above-mentioned orchestral parts for the First,

Second, Third, Fifth, and Sixth Symphonies, as well

as a few overtures, were used in performances at

musical salons of Otto Hatwig. (I see no reason why

the Fourth Symphony would not have been

performed as well; we can probably assume that its

parts have been lost.)

The orchestra at Otto Hatwig’s included Franz

Schubert among its violists. In fact, we have a

complete list of the participants: seven first violins,

six second violins, three violas, three cellos, two

contrabasses, and paired winds. This relatively large

ensemble was directed by Otto Hatwig himself from

his vantage point as leader of the first violins. In just

these numbers we can be sure that Schubert heard

his early symphonies.

In an earlier paper,1 I had the opportunity to report

on the size of orchestras employed in public

concerts. With their fifty to sixty players they were

markedly bigger than Hatwig’s group; we do not

really know how Schubert would have responded to

a performance by an ensemble of this size. Since a

number of Schubert’s orchestral works are preserved

in contemporaneous collections, we must assume

that performances outside of Hatwig’s salons—

among the most prestigious in Vienna—took place

on a fairly regular basis.

That Lieder and polyphonic vocal works of Schubert

were performed frequently in musical salons is one

aspect of the composer’s musical life sufficiently

well known. Yet too many observers fall into the

trap of equating these salons with our present day

notions of Hausmusik. In fact, critical acclaim

achieved at a salon was just as significant as that

earned in a public concert. Finally, since there was

no such thing as royalty payments, a composer was

JCG Vol. 30 28

have come down to us, a Liebhaber in the privacy of

his own home is not likely to have left a written

account.

The programs in public concerts during Schubert’s

lifetime were quite mixed. Solo works for piano

occur only infrequently. Rather more common were

works for piano and orchestra, and we know that

Schubert received a commission in the year 1818 to

compose a rondo for piano and orchestra. We do not

know why it remained unfulfilled, apparently the

dramatic opposition of a solo instrument with

orchestra aroused little compositional interest in

him. But if any proof is needed to demonstrate the

popularity of Schubert’s keyboard music, it lies in

the numerous reprintings issued by publishers.

These can be discerned on the basis of small but

often highly significant corrections made in each

issue. Schubert’s works were favored for reprintings

by other than the original Verleger.

Finally, the field of dance music enabled Schubert to

demonstrate yet another dimension in his mastery of

instrumental music. This is evident not only from

the hundreds of published works, but also from

certain typical Viennese practices. A common

tribute to an especially popular work was to arrange

its best-known themes as a dance piece. After the

highly successful premiere of Carl Maria von

Weber’s Der Freischutz, for example, a string of

Freischutz-Walzer suddenly appeared. Likewise,

Rossini’s greatest triumphs in Vienna found their

echo in a stream of dance music.

Only a few months after Schubert’s very first opus,

Erlkönig, was published by Cappi & Diabelli, it

became the rather unlikely object of a chain of

Erlkönig-Walzer by Schubert’s friend Anselm

Hüttenbrenner, brought out once more by Cappi &

Diabelli. Other indications of Schubert’s popularity

are the arrangements of keyboard dances which

Cappi & Diabelli regularly commissioned from

anonymous journeymen. The public clamored for

these works to be made available in other than a solo

configuration—for example, for guitar and flute.

the modus operandi was to produce a great deal of

music very quickly, but in very small amounts. The

growing public had a seemingly rapacious appetite

for the new and the novel. That the composer might

share in the profits generated by sales was

completely unheard of. The publisher offered the

composer an honorarium, upon acceptance of which

the work became the publisher’s own, along with the

financial risk—and the profits. We have already

seen that Schubert was better paid than his

contemporaries because the publishers felt assured

of a healthy demand. This is reflected in the size of

the Auflagen. While an initial printing of one

hundred was normally considered high, the first

opuses of Schubert each appeared in three hundred

copies, with reissues following soon thereafter.

Such were the quantities in which Schubert was

published that he can scarcely be compared in this

regard to any of the contemporaries.

Within an eight-year period from 1821 to 1828,

close to ninety-eight numbered opuses of Schubert

appeared, including one in Leipzig. In addition,

there were twenty-eight works without opus

numbers. Only three of these had appeared by 1821.

In the following years, then, an average of sixteen

new works by Schubert appeared annually. He had

indeed assumed a position at the summit of Viennese

musical life, and it is unthinkable that publishers

would have rushed to engrave his works unless there

was a constant and steady demand.

Publishing was supplemented in Schubert’s case by

the widespread copying of his music, much of it

done professionally and some for personal pleasure.

Collections such as the Witteczek-Spaun anthology

of Lieder, part-songs, and keyboard music are only

later manifestations of the keen interest aroused by

Schubert’s music during his lifetime. Keyboard

music was in no small way a participant in this

success. Instruction in music was considered an

essential ingredient toward the well-rounded

education of a young person. Mastery of, or at least

facility on, an instrument was assumed, and the

fortepiano was the preferred instrument. Since the

solo keyboard recital did not yet exist, it is hardly

surprising that so few details about this intimate art

29 JCG Vol. 30

Another strong witness to the popularity of Schubert

as a dance composer is a set of variations by Carl

Czerny. Though remembered today chiefly for his

pedagogical studies, Czerny was an enormously

popular composer in Schubert’s time. In 1821 he

brought out his Variationen über einen beliebtenWiener Walzer; the tune which forms the basis of

this collection is none other than Schubert’s

Trauerwalzer, D. 365, no. 2, which by then had

already become so much a part of the popular

consciousness that it was no longer considered

necessary to supply the name of its composer.

A work of Schubert’s, then, had been raised to the

status of folk music. We ought not to forget that

during Schubert’s time no distinction existed

between Unterhaltungsmusik and Ernste Musik,between “popular” and “classical.” Two of his

most illustrious contemporaries—Joseph Lanner

(1801-43) and Johann Strauss Sr. (1804-49) were

known only for their dance music, through which

both achieved international fame. Schubert was

well acquainted with both men. The first printed

collection of Schubert’s dance music appeared in

1821, the first of Lanner’s in 1825, and the first of

Johann Strauss Sr.’s in 1828. In this light a

newspaper review for the Karneval of 1828, which

evaluates the work of a dozen different composers,

is especially revealing. The best dance music,

reports the reviewer with confidence, has been

composed by the Herren Schubert, Lanner, and

Strauss.

Although in some respects church music occupied a

position of secondary importance, a survey of

Schubert’s stature in Viennese life would not be

complete without mentioning it. Once more there is

a dearth of written accounts of performances, partly

because the semi-public nature of musical

performance in churches rendered such reports

unnecessary. But there are other kinds of testimony.

A large number of churches in Vienna and the

surrounding area, for example, possess music

printed during Schubert’s lifetime, all showing

ample signs of use. And many occasional pieces

which were never intended to be printed received

widespread circulation in manuscript copies. It is

only recently that systematic research has begun to

turn up these documents, and there seems little

doubt that more comprehensive investigation will

unearth even more treasure.

Schubert’s success in the field of religious music

should come as no surprise. For one thing, he began

his career as a sacred musician, and for another

he regularly maintained close connections with

the most important churches and their

Kirchenmusikvereine. No longer were the priests of

the congregation solely responsible for selecting the

music to be used in their celebrations of the mass;

now an association drawn from the membership of

the church saw to it that appropriate artistic

standards were maintained. The active membership

in these Vereine included persons who offered

musical salons or participated in the programs of

the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde and other

organizations; Schubert was well known to virtually

all of them.

One persistent thorn in Schubert’s side was surely

his inability to obtain performances at the highest

ranking ecclesiastical center in Vienna: the Imperial

Court Chapel. Although he had himself worked

there as a boy, and in spite of repeated attempts,

he was unable to gain entry into this bastion of

tradition. Only in 1865 was this situation rectified.

Ill luck may also be said to have plagued Schubert’s

efforts as an opera composer, whatever his own

artistic deficiencies. To be sure, several operatic

works were performed in the two opera houses of

that time, the Kärtnerthortheater and the Theater an

der Wien. For each of these same houses Schubert

also wrote works on commission. A lasting success,

however, eluded him. This relative failure has

achieved the status of an a priori judgement today,

in a curious endorsement of contemporaneous taste.

The actual reasons, however, may be more complex

than the simplistic explanations generally offered.

I do not believe it was Schubert’s unfortunate choice

of libretti, for extremely successful operas have been

created from pitiful texts. It is also too easy to assert

that Schubert was simply not a dramatic composer.

In countless Lieder, part-songs, and settings of the

Credo of the mass he shows himself to be a

JCG Vol. 30 30

highly-charged dramatist. And although he must

have been frustrated with works like DieVerschworenen and Fierabras and, perhaps most of

all, with Alfonso und Esstrella, for which he was

unable to obtain performances, those which did

reach the stage were by no means fiascos.

Only against the background of Rossini’s near

stranglehold on the Viennese musical stage could

the limited success enjoyed by Schubert be viewed

in so critical a light.

I believe there is another, more compelling

explanation. Schubert was not only well-acquainted

with the leading figures in Viennese concert life, in

the musical salons or in sacred music, but many of

them were members of his own circle of friends.

But among the influential personages on Vienna’s

operatic scene—and by this I do not mean singers

but members of the administration—Schubert was

not able to establish a single meaningful contact.

Then, just as today, such contacts were essential.

The sole link he was fortunate enough to forge

turned out to be as much of a liability as an asset. In

1821 the Hoftheater official Ignaz von Mosel—with

whom Schubert was on very good terms—was

appointed to the position of Vice-Director. But

Mosel had developed his own eccentric view of

opera, and it coincided neither with Schubert’s nor

with the public’s taste. In published writings Mosel

advanced the view that opera ought to express

spiritual states and not dramatic actions and events.

Every expression of virtuosity was to be banned

from the stage, and the plot was to be presented

through commentary rather than overt action. In

short, opera ought to approach the ideal of the

oratorio.

There is some evidence that in certain works

Schubert made an effort to compose within these

narrow boundaries. Yet precisely because Mosel

was so out of touch with public desires, even he was

not able to promote his own cause. There were

really only three genres that the Viennese would

tolerate: most preferred were the operas of Rossini,

a genre in themselves; second the French

Spiel-Opern, exemplified by Méhul; and finally the

old-fashioned opera seria in the tradition of Gluck.

To this grouping might be added the German

Singspiel; in any event, the operatic music of

Schubert affords repeated insights into his desire to

absorb from these diverse styles all that was most

suited to his own. Armed with suitable allies,

Schubert’s potential achievement on the musical

stage would have been greatly enhanced.

On a more modest scale, we know that Singspielewere frequently performed in the smaller theaters of

private homes. These might be viewed as the

operatic wing of the musical salons, and the

assumption that especially the early Singspiele of

Schubert were premiered in this setting is almost

certainly correct. Too little research has been

carried out in this area, but for at least one Singspielof Schubert’s, Claudine von Villa Bella—which the

composer set to a text of Goethe’s in 1815—we have

unimpeachable evidence that it was intended for just

such a Haustheater.

If the successive bits of evidence that have

accumulated throughout this essay are viewed as a

whole, then, it becomes clear that our image of a

penniless, threadbare Bohemian is not only highly

tinted but fundamentally inaccurate. Although

Schubert’s continuously growing reputation was still

largely confined to regional boundaries upon his

death, he was, at the age of thirty-one, doubtless

among the most celebrated composers living in

Vienna. Large portions of his musical output were

widely performed and widely published. He was

paid handsome fees and offered generous honoraria

for new compositions. His popularity resided not

only with a few powerful arbiters of musical taste,

but throughout all classes of Viennese society. How

many other composers could point to two different

years—for Schubert 1821 and 1826—when two

public concerts given on the same day both featured

works of theirs? From Lieder to chamber music,

from dance music to sacred music, Schubert enjoyed

a distribution that must have been the envy of many

other composers. Even today we probably underrate

its extent, for many works whose first performance

can only be authenticated in the decades following

Schubert’s death were quite probably unveiled in

one of the many musical salons we know to have

31 JCG Vol. 30

taken place during his lifetime. With only a single handwritten program from one of these evenings having

survived, and with meager statistics, we are left only with the knowledge that such events existed, that they

were held frequently, and that they were enormously popular.

Schubert’s commitment to composition was obviously such that he required all of his waking hours to

pursue it. The choice of this path must have nevertheless required a great deal of courage from a young man

whose social instincts were not particularly radical. Yet his model remains today’s ideal. How many

composers teaching undergraduate theory would not gladly change places with Schubert? Perhaps the only

modification the 20th century might offer are the services of a good investment counselor

accustomed to dealing with irregular incomes. That Schubert could have used.

*****

In 1973 Otto Biba began working as a staff member in the archives, libraries, and collections of theGesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna where he later became its director.

Copyright 1979 by The Regents of the University of California. Reprinted from 19th-Century Music, Vol. 3,

No. 2, November 1979, pp 106-113, by permission of The Regents.

ENDNOTES

1 See Otto Biba, “Concert Life in Beethoven’s Vienna,” Beethoven, Critics, and Performers, ed. Robert Winter (forthcoming).

JCG Vol. 30 32

The preponderance of the so-called standard

orchestral repertoire was composed during the

19th century, and the instrumentation of today’s

symphony orchestra reached its final definition as

that epoch ended. One of the hallmarks of musical

Romanticism was the continuing refinement of the

instrumental means that supported the search for

increasingly subtle and evocative musical timbres.

The infinite resources of the palette of orchestral

colors are among the major achievements of

Western music, and a central focus of those

19th-century developments that begat these

resources lay in the changing nature of the orchestral

brass instruments.

Fostered by the technological advancements of the

Industrial Revolution, the creative abilities of

makers of brass instruments were given full rein,

further stimulating the imagination of composers

and orchestrators with an assortment of novel and

versatile instruments. Central to this phenomenon,

of course, was the invention and eventual adoption

of valved brass. As in any period of experimentation

and rapid technological change, there were

numerous, and often short-lived, solutions to

musical demands. This frequently resulted in major

composers creating compositions that have found

their way into the permanent legacy of the time, but

which unfortunately include parts for brass

instruments that are now rare, obscure, or obsolete.

One of the hallmarks of our culture is the increasing

interest in creating performances that more closely

reflect the original style and overall aesthetic intent

of the composer than hitherto has been the case.

This change in philosophy is reflected in the

unprecedented activity in music journals, music

editions, instrument manufacture, and professional

and amateur concertizing. However, with a few

notable exceptions, this laudable attitude is only

slowly penetrating orchestral circles. Of course,

there are many practical reasons why larger

ensembles respond more slowly to changes in

aesthetic philosophy than may chamber ensembles

or soloists. On the whole, symphony orchestras in

this country are institutions, and as such may be

expected to maintain conservative attitudes.

Furthermore, it clearly would be impractical to

expect the average community orchestra, whether it

be professional, semi-professional, or amateur, to

revert to the use of gut strings and ophicleides. But

there is an intermediate ground that respects the

realities of today’s musical scene, yet affords a

pragmatic approach to greater musical authenticity.

This is especially true of the instruments of the

orchestral brass section. The standard complement

consists of piston-valved trumpets, double horns of

German descent, large-bore trombones, and a bass

tuba (in CC or BB-flat). This is a versatile group and

has become so because of its adaptability and wide

availability. With these instruments, most of the

standard orchestral repertoire may be performed

with appropriate and pleasing results. However,

there are many instances in the repertoire where the

score originally called for brass instruments whose

present-day rarity, obscurity, and obsolescence pre-

clude their general usage. Today, these parts are

almost inevitably given to members of the common

brass section. This practice is emphatically not

Appropriate Brass Timbre: A Conductor’s

Responsibility

(JCG Volume 5, No. 1, 1984)

By William E. Runyan

33 JCG Vol. 30

necessary in many instances. There are practical

substitutions available for the “standard”

instruments that yield more aesthetically

satisfactory results without resorting to esoteric

instruments that smack of antiquarianism. Sad to

say, the issue of stylistic integrity and authenticity is

often polarized between those who admit no

compromise with historic “correctness” and those

who condemn all such concerns as being merely

academic. The thoughtful conductor should

consider a middle ground and avail himself of these

practical substitutes. Thereby, he would avoid the

aesthetic limitations of an insensitive and firm

adherence to the common orchestral brass, yet do so

without undue inconvenience.

When speaking of practical substitutions, we mean

modern brass instruments available to skilled

college and conservatory students, and easily played

by average community orchestra trumpet, trombone,

and tuba players (the horn is not included for

reasons discussed below). Naturally, the reference to

advanced students serves only to indicate the basic

practicality of the following suggestions; the basic

philosophy and its execution is even more

applicable to professionals. Although discussion of

most of this whole realm of instrumental history,

aesthetic intent, and technical details has at one time

or another appeared in public professional forums, it

is painfully obvious that many conductors continue

to ignore their responsibilities in this specific area.

Unfortunately, conductors have often taken the

attitude that these matters are the player’s

responsibility, or that a brass player’s training to a

high executive skill automatically imbues him with

a concomitant knowledge of history and orchestral

aesthetic, as well as a concern for the composer’s

specific musical intentions. All responsible

conductors are keenly aware of the magnitude and

the diversity of knowledge and skills necessary for

musical leadership, and the artistic decisions

concerning the selection of appropriate brass tone

color must not be wholly abandoned to the members

of the brass section. In far too many cases they are

no more qualified than anyone else. The conductor

simply must arm himself with a knowledge of

historical aesthetic philosophies, a concern for a

correct presentation of composer’s intentions,

and – as a means – a basic understanding of the

timbral capabilities of all of the modern, common

brass instruments.1

The following discussion of the correct modern

brass instruments for appropriate tone color is not

intended to be exhaustive, but rather illustrative of

the thoughtful consideration that is requisite in a

variety of orchestral repertoire. The French horn is

not treated, owing to the relative absence of

problems stemming from a variety of instrument

types, radical differences of tone color preferences,

or of special scoring.

***

The average present-day orchestral trumpet player

usually arrives at rehearsal laden with a variety of

trumpets cast in different keys. This is a remarkable

change from the situation in the recent past when

almost every part would be played on one

instrument. And in this case, the wise conductor

generally respects the player’s choice. However, the

situation is much different with regard to the parts

designed for the cornet.

As every conductor knows, 19th-century orchestral

literature composed by Frenchmen, and that

influenced by the French musical tradition, is often

characterized by two trumpet parts and two cornet

parts. This scoring technique capitalized on the tonal

purity of the trumpets and the chromatic facility of

the cornets by assigning appropriate parts to each.

Thus, the cornet parts often were more active, while

those for the trumpets were simpler. The difference

in tonal quality between the two instruments was

pronounced, and the scoring differences often

colored the compositions in ways that are lost in

today’s performances. Unfortunately, nearly all

modern conductors simply allow the two cornet

parts and the two trumpet parts to be played on four

trumpets. It must be admitted that this solution of

convenience is sometimes musically correct, for

despite traditional theoretical usage, composers

actually often wrote very similar parts for both

instruments. However, this does not justify the

JCG Vol. 30 34

modern practice of assuming this is always the case.

There are many instances when the cornet parts

demand consideration of a darker, rounder, more

lyrical sound than that produced by trumpets.

Even a cursory examination of the scores of Berlioz,

for example, will reveal different approaches to

scoring for the cornets and trumpets. In the

Symphonie fantastique there is little difference

between the cornet and trumpet parts, and it would

be a waste of effort to attempt to utilize two

different modern instruments. On the other hand, in

Harold en Italie, the treatment of the two

instruments is somewhat different. In the first

movement “Harold aux Montagnes,” the first cornet

often doubles a lyric solo passage in the bassoon,

harp and cellos; in the fourth movement “Orgie de

Brigands,” the cornets often are the only brass

doubled with the woodwind section in florid

passages. In both of these instances it would be

desirable to recapture something of Berlioz’s

original concept of the appropriate brass tone color.

In another instance Italien, the style is mixed:

much of the time the four parts are similar, but

occasionally there is a valuable distinction of color

between the two kinds of instruments. Moving on to

the 20th century, Prokofiev’s Lieutenant Kije Suitecalls for a solo cornet, and it is imperative that its

tone color be readily distinguishable from that of the

trumpets. The solution to determining just when it is

worth the effort to find an appropriate instrument for

cornet parts, and when it is not, is simple. The con-

ductor must not be mislead by the instrumental label

on the part; rather, it is incumbent that he draw his

conclusion from a close examination of the nature of

the part during his score study.

Having determined that some attempt should be

made to distinguish the tone color of cornet parts in

performance, there remains the knotty problem of

choosing an appropriate modern instrument. It is

simply folly to request that the player use a cornet,

for the sound of the modern cornet is practically

identical to that of the B-flat trumpet. Probably no

other issue is as controversial in brass circles as this

one. Rather than enter the fray here, it will suffice to

simply point out two possible solutions. Some

instrument factories have recently introduced cornet

models that are supposed to have the lyrical, dark

quality of earlier models. If your trumpet players

have access to these instruments, use the correct

cornet mouthpieces, and possess the correct concept

of cornet timbre, then success is possible.

Otherwise, a very plausible solution is to simply use

flugelhorns. The suggestion may seem unusual, but

the increasing popularity of the instrument makes it

readily available, and its range and tone color enable

it to provide a distinctive contrast to orchestral

trumpets.

There are instances in the orchestral repertoire

where the flugelhorn is the only real choice.

Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No. 9 uses the

flugelhorn in important solo and tutti passages. In

the Pines of Rome, Respighi calls for an offstage

band consisting of two each of flicorni soprano,

tenori, and bassi. Unfortunately, these parts are

occasionally given to trumpets and trombones,

conductors assuming it is the only easy solution, but

flugelhorns are the correct instruments for the

soprano flicorni parts and, again, easily available.

The same may be said for the three buccine parts in

Respighi’s Feste Romane. In Das Klagende Lied,

Mahler indicates that for the wind band “in der

Ferne,” flugelhorns, if they are available, are

preferred over trumpets. In his Symphony No. 3, the

famous posthorn solo in the third movement is often

played on trumpet – even in the most august of

orchestras. A brief consideration of the nature of the

historical posthorn, its valved descendants, and the

bucolic atmosphere Mahler creates in this

movement suggests that the mellow tone of the

flugelhorn is much more appropriate. Even an

authentic cornet sound would be preferable to that of

the trumpet.

One must beware of making glib assumptions,

though. In No. 7, “Marche,” of his Te Deum Berlioz

calls for a petit saxhorn suraigu in B-flat, and it has

been suggested that a flugelhorn would be suitable

for the part. It is true that the flugelhorn is

essentially a saxhorn (It. Flicorno) and is generally

the instrument to use in such instances. But here,

Berlioz is referring to the piccolo instrument, an

35 JCG Vol. 30

octave higher than the familiar B-flat flugelhorn.

Furthermore, in his famous instrumentation treatise,

he characterizes the sound of this instrument as

brilliant, clear, and penetrating. Obviously, the only

fit modern substitute for this instrument is the

piccolo trumpet in high B-flat.

In contradistinction to the trumpet players, the

typical orchestral trombonist uses only one

instrument – inevitably a large-bore B-flat tenor

trombone. He uses this instrument, with its dark,

rich timbre, for orchestral literature ranging in style

from Mozart to Mahler, and beyond. That this

application of heavy, Germanic tone color to all of

the repertoire is inappropriate is unquestionable.

Much of the standard literature, including most of

that by French composers and all of the late

classical and early romantic repertoire, should be

performed with a light, clear trombone color. The

heavy, sonorous quality of late-Romantic trombone

style, beautiful though it may be, is simply not

desirable in this music. Recent generations of

American symphonic trombonists have been

immersed in a philosophy that deprecates any

symphonic concept but that produced by large-bore

instruments, yet, the sensitive and responsible

conductor can do much to alter this unfortunate

attitude. Almost all symphonic trombonists have

access to small-bore instruments (they probably

already perform on them in other kinds of

ensembles), and they should be encouraged to use

them when appropriate. The music of Berlioz,

Debussy, Roussel, Ravel, and many others sounds

with far greater clarity, subtlety, and integrity when

this concept of trombone sound is employed. For

example, the trombone solo in Bolero is far more

evocative of the intense, jazz-influenced Paris of the

1920s when it is performed on the smaller

instrument.

The same concern for authentic balance and color is

every bit as important when we consider the

orchestral music of Germany and Austria in the

period roughly from Gluck and Haydn to

Schumann. The standard trombone trio for which all

these composers wrote consisted of alto, tenor, and

bass instruments of small to medium bore. Today, of

course, two large bore tenors and a large bore bass

are generally used for this literature. This practice

completely alters the orchestral texture, balance, and

timbre that the composer intended and lays on a

drape of late-Romantic coloring. The symphonies

and overtures of Mozart, Beethoven, Weber,

Schubert, Schumann, and Mendelssohn regain much

of their desired color when performed with alto and

small or medium-bore tenor and bass trombones.

Although many alto trombone parts lay quite high,

any competent orchestral trombonist can execute

them on the largest equipment. That, however, is not

the point; the timbre and lightness of the alto is what

is desired – not ease of execution of the higher

register. This mad rush toward ever bigger and

darker trombone sound often runs the risk of

endangering the important contrast between horn

and trombone sections, an important aspect of the

scoring of Schubert’s C-Major Symphony, for

example.

The oratorios of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and

Mendelssohn benefit immensely from the use of the

correct alto, tenor, and bass trombones. With these

oratorios’ use of the 18th-century practice of

doubling the choral parts with the trombones, it is

vitally important that trombonists employ light

instruments that blend with, and not dominate, the

choral parts. There can be a significant difference

between the doubling of an exposed d2 with the

altos by an alto trombone or by a large-bore tenor

trombone.

There are a variety of works that would profit from

the use of the alto trombone. Schumann’s Rhenish is

an evergreen on orchestral auditions, primarily for

the difficulty of its ascent to e-flat2. Yet, the true

perspective is simply that Schumann scored the

trombones in this manner in order to evoke an

atmosphere of traditional cathedral music; naturally

the timbre of the alto trombone is the appropriate

one, regardless of the capabilities of modern

performers on large-bore tenor trombones. There is

general agreement that the standard trombone trio

for 19th–century French repertoire utilizes a tenor

for the first part, and this is correct. But the major

exception is Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, where

JCG Vol. 30 36

the high tessitura (up to e-flat2) and Berlioz’s own

original concept and designation of the part calls for

an alto trombone. Finally, it is interesting to note that

much later, Mahler broached the possibility of using

alto trombone in a soft, chorale-like passage in his

Symphony No. 7.

As in the case of the cornet/trumpet parts,

ultimately the determination of what is the correct

instrument to use must be made by a careful

examination of the score, the alto trombone must

not be used simply because the alto clef is

employed – as is the situation in many Russian

publications – or because the composer designated

the alto, which is the case with Brahms’ symphonies

and Elgar’s Enigma Variations, although the first

trombone must ascend to d2, nothing is gained by

the use of the alto. Brahms and Elgar, like Strauss,

may push the range upward, but the timbre of the

large-bore tenor is more suitable for these late 19th-

century works.

Having determined that the alto trombone is often

desirable, the contemporary conductor need not face

the problem of obtaining this instrument that was

current in the recent past. The alto is enjoying a

renaissance in this country, and increasing numbers

of students and professionals play and possess the

instrument. In those situations where it is not

available the substitute is simple: use a small-bore

tenor like that discussed previously. In passing, it

may be suggested that when an alto or a small-bore

tenor is used by the first player, the second should

play a small tenor, and the third should use a

medium-bore instrument with an F-attachment. This

arrangement matches the section for a better blend.

There only remains the matter of parts intended for

valve trombones and contrabass trombones.

Although contrabass trombone parts such as those in

Wagner, Strauss, Verdi, and others manifestly sound

better performed on those instruments, a very

practical compromise is available. For example, in a

student production of Falstaff, any proficient bass

trombonist can usually creditably play the

contrabass part on a double-valve bass trombone by

utilizing his pedal register. Parts written for valve

trombones are uncommon, occurring primarily in

the operas of Verdi, Mascagni, Leoncavallo, and

Puccini. Except in a few instances where valve

effects are essential, e.g., Otello, the technical

facility of modern trombonists enables them to very

adequately cope with these parts on traditional slide

trombones.

The last century and a half has witnessed the use of

a confusing variety of instruments intended as the

bass of the brass family. Ophicleides, serpents, bass

horns, and tubas in a variety of keys and

configurations have all taken their place in the

orchestra. Most contemporary editions of orchestral

music now label these parts simply “tuba,” and in

most instances the present-day orchestral tuba

player can best choose the correct instrument

himself. However, there are occasions when the

conductor needs to share this responsibility.

Although perhaps obvious to many, it still needs to

be emphasized that when one encounters parts

calling for the “tenor tuba,” the instrument needed is

the common euphonium. Found in almost any band,

and the major instrument of hundreds of students in

the United States, the euphonium is not merely a

substitute for the tenor tuba, but literally is the tenor

tuba. They are one and the same. The famous solos

in The Planets, Don Quixote, Ein Heldenleben, and

“Bydlo” in Pictures at an Exhibition should be

played on this instrument. There are other examples

of parts for this instrument in the literature, but

almost never under its common name, euphonium. It

should be pointed out, though, that the part for

“Tenor-horn in B” in Mahler’s Symphony No. 7 is

best played upon the euphonium’s brother, the

baritone horn.

A major problem in the wind parts of French

(and French influenced) music of the first half of the

19th century lies with the ophicleide and serpent

parts. In almost all cases the use of the large BB-flat

or CC tuba is completely inappropriate. These

standard modern tubas possess too great a depth and

breadth of tone for these parts, whose tessitura is

generally far too high, anyway. These parts only

occasionally descend as low as AA (two octaves

37 JCG Vol. 30

below middle C), and often rise high above middle

C. There are only two feasible modern instruments

to use for these parts: the F tuba and the small B-flat

tuba (Euphonium). Every professional tuba player –

and many students, as well – possess F tubas and

may successfully use this instrument to play serpent

and ophicleide parts that have important low notes.

But for the many parts that ascend very high in

exposed, light orchestration, the euphonium is best.

A number of examples come to mind: The Overture

to Rienzi, Mendelssohn’s Calm Sea and ProsperousVoyage, and the first ophicleide part in the

Symphonie fantastique (the second part lies better on

the F tuba). The key to determining which

instrument is appropriate lies in considering the

tessitura of the part and its accompanying

orchestration. Unless the high note is only in the

vicinity of middle C, and the orchestration is

relatively heavy and loud, the euphonium is the best

substitute. Exceptions exist, and the serpent (not the

ophicleide) part in the Overture to Rienzi is a good

example. It serves as the bass to the woodwind

section, and a brass instrument is inappropriate here.

The perceptive conductor therefore must not trust

the publisher’s labels on these parts and must rely

upon his own knowledge of style and history to

make the right choice.

Finally, a word about parts designated for tenor or

baritone saxhorns or flicorni. As in the discussion of

the flugelhorn, the conical bore of the modern

baritone horn and euphonium produces the dark,

round tone quality that characterizes saxhorns and

flicorni. So, for example, in Respighi’s Pines ofRome, the flicorni tenori parts should be performed

on baritone horns, and flicorni bassi parts on

euphoniums. These instruments, combined with the

flugelhorns, evoke the sound of an ancient Roman

band – exactly the composer’s intent – contrasting

nicely with the cylindrical bore of the trumpets and

trombones in the orchestra.

***

A conductor’s responsibilities are many, not the least

of which is to attempt to recreate the musical

expressions of those who’s aesthetic and means of

performance may be far removed from the present.

It is possible to tread that thin line between a

dogmatic adherence to the practice of the recent past

and the impractical pursuit of bringing back the

distant past. All that is needed is an open mind to

new solutions and a willingness to experiment with

them.

*****

William E. Runyan is an Emeritus AssociateProfessor of the Department of Music, Theater andDance at Colorado State University in Fort Collins,CO. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in Musicology atthe Eastman School of Music.

ENDNOTES

1Two highly recommended books on the subject are

Robin Gregory’s The Trombone (New York:

Praeger, 1973) and The Tuba Family (New York:

Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1978) by Clifford Bevan.

JCG Vol. 30 38

The Rationalization of Symphony Orchestra Conductors’

Interpretive Styles(JCG Volume 11, No. 1-2, 1990)

By Jack B. Kamerman

Introduction

This article deals with one aspect (increasing

rationalization) of the career of an occupation,1 the

symphony orchestra conductor, in one setting, the

United States. This theme will focus on the shift in

interpretive style among conductors from the

romantic or subjective approach, which dominated

conducting in the last half of the nineteenth century

and early in the twentieth century, to the neoclassic

or objective approach, which came into ascendancy

in the 1930s and 1940s and continues as the

dominant mode even today.2 I will argue that the

career of conductor, from its emergence in the

mid-nineteenth century to the present day, has

undergone an increasing rationalization, and that

this rationalization and its roots underlie the shift in

interpretive style from romantic to neoclassic. This

rationalization has manifested itself in: 1) the

standardization of interpretations, i.e., their

reduction to “formulas”; 2) the rise of technical

excellence as an end in itself; and 3) the

conceptualization of the conductor as technician and

historian and the increasing importance of

“objectivity,” i.e., emphasis on the “objective”

document (the printed score) rather than the

subjective intuition and emotions of the interpreter.

It will further be argued that this process of

rationalization has been influenced by the following

factors, related, as the numbering indicates, to the

areas of rationalization mentioned above: 1)

a) technical improvements in the manufacture of

instruments, b) the history of the technical

advances in the sound reproduction of music,

e.g., sound recordings, radio, and television,

c) professionalization of musicians, d) changes in

the training of conductors, and 3) a) the change in

repertory from a preponderance of contemporary

music (in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries)

to music of the past (in the twentieth century),

b) enlargement of the division of labor in music to

include nonartistic technical positions.3

The Two Styles of Interpretation Defined

It is obvious that all interpretation of musical scores

is in a sense “subjective.”4 Although composers

have increasingly elaborated and refined the system

of musical notation, to some extent performing any

score relies on an interpretation of the composer’s

intentions. As the musicologist Frederick Dorian

has written:

Obviously one cannot expect to see an inflexible,

mathematical standard in art; if ideas of

composers are subjective and their directions

relative (in spite of such mechanical aids as the

metronome), the interpreter’s knowledge is

likewise subjective, and therefore his way of

performance is subjective too.5

In addition, the older the score, the more difficult

becomes the problem of deciphering a composer’s

intentions. Early scores, for one thing, evidenced a

paucity of tempo indications.6 Also, it is not always

possible to determine whether what is

contained in the score was put there by the

composer. Charles O’Connell, writing of the

reputed king of twentieth-century literalists, Arturo

Toscanini, succinctly made this point:

39 JCG Vol. 30

He [Toscanini] worships a Beethoven score as if

it had come with the ink still wet from the hand

of the great man: ignoring the fact that there is

probably no Beethoven score published that

hasn’t been tampered with, in which dynamic and

metronomic marks haven’t been inserted by

some obscure hack in the employ of Breitkopf &

Hartel or other publishers.7

Finally, composers often altered their own scores

several times. For example, there exists a recording

of one of Chopin’s nocturnes (op. 9, no. 2, in E-flat

major) which was played from a score that had been

modified by Chopin himself. The score contained

several variants never included in the performances

of current “literal” interpreters of Chopin. “Those

who heard Chopin agree that he rarely played the

same piece in the same way. Varying his playing

with his mood, he gave full scope to his imagination

and fantasy. In fact he tried to preserve a certain

improvisatory quality which was impossible to

notate. Indeed, he often played pieces with variants

from his published text. . . .”8 Also, several Anton

Bruckner’s symphonies underwent one or more

revisions as he was persuaded by one “friend” after

another to streamline his scores.

Is the distinction between objective and subjective

interpretation spurious? Not if the terms are taken

as statements of position vis-à-vis a score, i.e.,

adhering to the composer’s intentions held as a

desideratum rather than as an accomplished fact.

Again, Dorian has neatly posed the questions:

Richard Wagner’s poetic and powerful

interpretation of the opening of the Fifth

[Beethoven’s Symphony in C minor, op. 67]

cannot be tested by objective standards, that is to

say, by musical clues provided in Beethoven’s

score. No matter how fascinating we find his

explanation, it must be classified as subjective, as

it brings to the fore Wagner’s views on

Beethoven rather than the actual interpretive

criteria for the music as we understand them from

reading of the script. In any case, the subjectiveapproach reflects the interpreter’s individuality

more than it does the world of the masterwork –

not only in details like those that have just been

demonstrated, but also in the delineation of the

composition as a whole. In opposition to such a

subjective reading stands the objective treatment,

where the interpreter’s principal attitude is that of

unconditional loyalty to the script. Setting aside

his personal opinion and detaching himself from

his individual feelings, the objective interpreter

has but one goal in mind: to interpret the music in

the way the author conceived it. Logically, the

objective interpreter of the Fifth will perform the

opening measures according to the metronomic

and other objective determinations, as indicated

by the score and not by his personal feelings.9

These, then, are the two interpretive traditions

towards which all conductors have gravitated

in varying degrees of polarity: the

objectivist/neoclassic and the subjective/romantic.

The Standardization of Interpretation

The traditional romantic interpretation was highly

personalized. To a large extent, it was made

possible by the availability of long rehearsals

(an innovation of the latter half of the nineteenth

century). Romantic performances had to be

carefully worked out with the personnel of even the

finest orchestra.

Mendelssohn, Bülow, Wagner and Liszt soon

made another advance in that they succeeded in

compelling adequate rehearsal in advance of

public performance. To impose upon the

orchestra or chorus one’s private interpretation

by means of a grueling series of rehearsals would

have seemed impudent to all but a few aggressive

musical authoritarians. But conditions were

ripening for such an eventuality. The orchestral

personnel was becoming more numerous,

entrance cues less routine, and tonal balance

more difficult to maintain. Rubato and other

earmarks of romanticism were being developed,

which . . . made coordination more and more

difficult. . . .10

In addition to adequate rehearsals, a conductor

tenure of sufficient duration was necessary to

impose such personalized interpretations on an

orchestra. Yet, it is precisely these two elements,

prerequisites to the production of highly

individualized performances, that have declined

during the twentieth century.

JCG Vol. 30 40

Unionization of musicians began in the United States

with the formation and charter of a musicians’ union

in New York in 1864.11 Unions eventually

succeeded in limiting the importation of foreign

musicians, improving wages, and – most important

for present purposes – limiting rehearsal hours.

Added to the effects of unionization was the steady

increase in the number of concerts that symphony

musicians were required to play each season.

The figures in Table I (p. 45) clearly demonstrate that

the tenure of U.S. conductors with a given orchestra

has also decreased during this century. In Table I,

the establishment of categories of conductors by

pre- and post-1900 birthdates is somewhat arbitrary.

However, conductors born in 1900 would have

assumed their major posts in the 1930s and 1940s,

the period of the neoclassic revival. Also, please

note that conductors presently holding orchestra

positions (1983) were not included, since their

present tenure remains ongoing.

Jet travel has made globe hopping possible;

consequently, conductors can now simultaneously

hold the music directorship of several orchestras.

The music critic Alan Rich called attention to the

growing similarity in the “sounds” of many

orchestras and attributed this phenomenon to the

lack of a “permanent” conductor. In a piece entitled

“Bigamy on the Orchestral Front,” he wrote:

When his new contract becomes effective, Ozawa

will be in effect the principal conductor of two

major American orchestras 3,000 miles apart, the

Boston and San Francisco. The same situation

obtains for a great many other conductors today:

Boulez in New York and with the BBC

in London; Maazel in Cleveland, London,

and Berlin; Zubi-bubi [Zubin Mehta] in Los

Angeles and Israel; Solti in Chicago and Paris;

etc. . .[Y]ou can buy the most adept orchestral

players in the world, put them together on a stage

in a house with the most beautiful acoustical

conditions in all the world. . . and you still won’t

have a symphony orchestra – not, that is, until a

single dominant personality is put on the podium,

to work with the musicians week after week,

studying the strengths and weaknesses of the

individual players, and gradually molding a sound

that comes to represent the uniqueness of that

orchestra. . . . One of the things that has disturbed

me a great deal lately is the impression that most

of the world’s symphony orchestras are beginning

to sound alike. You begin to suspect this after a

few weeks at Carnegie Hall’s excellent Visiting

Orchestra series; even though every conductor

carries his own ideas about orchestral sound

and balance, there is developing a

world-wide all-purpose tone. The only orchestra

I have heard lately of which this isn’t true is, in

fact, the Philadelphia under Ormandy. I don’t

much like the sound of the orchestra, or the uses

to which it is often put, but there’s one thing, for

damn sure: you know it’s the Philadelphia

Orchestra, even with your eyes shut. That is

because Ormandy stays put.12

Harold Schonberg made much the same point where

he predicted the decline of national schools of

conducting:

. . . [It] is hard to tell the difference between a

young American and a young English or

Hungarian conductor, just as it is getting harder

and harder to distinguish national styles in piano

playing or composition. Even symphony

orchestras are beginning to sound alike, no matter

where their point of origin.13

Another aspect of the standardization of

interpretation is the attempt to reduce performance to

calculable rules or formulas.14 Toscanini represented

the epitome of this movement toward calculability:

He [Toscanini] marks the meter so clearly that

every downbeat takes on a slight stress – not a

pulsation or lilt, as in Viennese waltzes, but a tiny,

tiny, dry accent, like the click of a well-running

machine. This mechanical purring both gives to

his readings a great rhythmic clarity and assures

the listener that all is under control. It is also,

nevertheless, a little bit lulling. One gets

hypnotized by the smooth-working mechanics of

the execution and forgets to listen to the music as

a human communication. . .

Excitement is of the essence in Toscanini’s

concept of musical performance. But his is not

the kind of excitement that has been the

specialty of the more emotional conductors of the

past fifty years. Theirs was a personal projection,

a transformation through each conductor’s own

mind of what the conductor considered to be the

composer’s meaning. At its best this supposed a

marriage of historical and literary with musical

culture. . . . For musicians of this tradition every

41 JCG Vol. 30

piece is a different piece, every author and epochanother case for stylistic differentiation and forspecial understanding. . . .

He [Toscanini] quite shamelessly whips up the

tempo . . . just making the music, like his baton,

go round and round, if he finds his audience’s

attention tending to waver. No piece has to meananything specific. . . .

The radical simplification of interpretive

problems that all this entails has changed

orchestral conducting from a matter of culture

and its personal projection into something more

like engineering. Young conductors don’t bother

much anymore to feel music or to make their

musicians feel it. They analyze it, concentrate in

rehearsals on the essentials of its rhetoric, and let

the expressive details fall where they may,

counting on each man’s skill and everybody’s

instinctive musicianship to take care of these

eventually.15 (emphases added)

Charles O’Connell also notes Toscanini’s attempt to reduce

matters of dynamics to simple general rules:

His dynamics, though, are absolute and

untempered, I think. A fortissimo is always “all

out” and a pianissimo is always at the threshold

of hearing. He himself has said that one should

play an “ff” so strongly that he can’t hear his

partner and a “pp” so softly that his partner can’t

hear him. Here is a masterpiece of clear and

practical definition. It is likewise wrong. Must

“ff” always and inevitably signify the limit of

one’s capacity to generate tone or “pp” the limit

of one’s ability to suppress it? I do not think so,

and I do not think that it is this concept of

dynamic contrast that makes Toscanini’s music

so sharply black and white. . . . Even this kind of

playing has its uses, and if I were in a position to

do so I should recommend to all conductors that

they study Toscanini’s records as virtually perfect

representations of music that sounds precisely as

written, and I should further recommend that they

should go on from there and interject some

element of humanity and warmth.16

That a Toscanini should have arisen is a tribute to his

peculiar genius (i.e., lies in biographical details);

that he should have become the symbol of the wave

of the future is attributable both to public-relations

men at RCA and, in a larger sense, to the

circumstances outlined above, which created the

climate in which a Toscanini and all the little

“Toscanini’s” could flourish and prevail.17

The Rise of Technical Excellence

as an End in Itself

Along with the standardization of interpretation, the

rise of technique also marked the rationalization of

conducting in this century. Orchestral playing until

the mid-nineteenth century was poor by present-day

standards.

At a time when the tempo of a Beethoven

scherzo depended on the technical competency of

the lackadaisical habits or an underpaid

musician, when first chairs were gained by

seniority, and violists were recruited from

superannuated and decrepit violinists, the

greatest needs felt by a conductor and composer

like Berlioz were discipline, accuracy, ability,

and determination to “stick to the notes.”18

The technical improvement of instruments

themselves, e.g., the invention of a new key system

for woodwinds early in the nineteenth century, also

allowed for more accurate playing. While the

technical excellence of musicians continued to

develop during the romantic era, it became the sinequa non of the neoclassic conductors. Where the

script becomes central, emphasis on precision in

performance (the antithesis of Pablo Casal’s caution

to “play the music not the notes”) seems inevitable.

The qualities that are admired in these conductors –

e.g., Toscanini, Szell, and Weingartner – are clarity

and precision.

One hypothesis to explain this focus on technique

was offered by the late Lester Salomon in an

editorial column in Allegro (the official publication

of New York’s Local 802, American Federation of

Musicians). He argued that many conductors

demand an unrealistic level of technical excellence

from orchestral players because they themselves

have never played an orchestral instrument. Rather,

they are pianist conductors.

The Pianist-Conductor Syndrome is caused by a

combination of things. It’s easy to produce a

JCG Vol. 30 42

pitch on the piano – anyone with or without

talent or ability can do it – compared to the

complexities faced by woodwind, brass, string,

percussion and harp players. A pianist doesn’t

have to concern himself with intonation: either

the piano is in tune – more or less – or it

isn’t. . . . Another causative is that the piano is

obviously a percussion instrument and the

ordinary pianist-conductor usually can’t get it

through his skull that an orchestra doesn’t

respond with percussive attacks all the time. The

pianist doesn’t have to face the problem of

creating a pitch on each and every note.19

The fact that fewer and fewer conductors come from

the ranks of the orchestra or from careers as

instrumental soloists (other than pianists) becomes

important, consequently, as a partial explanation for

the focus on technique (see Table 2).

The recording and broadcast industries have

contributed to raising the expectations of audiences

for technical excellence in two ways. First, huge

audiences are exposed to the best orchestral playing

in the world, creating a sophistication through

exposure such as few people could claim before.

Second, technical adulteration of performances can

create in Virgil Thomson’s phrase, “process music,”

a perfection where none existed in the original

performance. Master tapes can be spliced and

respliced, deleting single wrong notes until a

technically “perfect” performance is achieved. Of

course, the interpretive continuity may be sacrificed

in return for this artificial level of technical

perfection. To a listener, however, such a flawless

facade will be perceived as the level of technical

perfection of which an artist should be capable.

Consequently, subsequent “live” performances may

be something of a letdown.

The Conductor as Historian and Technician:

the Score as Document

As the repertoire of orchestras is removed further

and further from the present, the conductor, of

necessity, becomes a kind of interpretive historian.

His interpretations are less and less informed by

conversations with composers, by experiences as a

player in orchestra led by composers, by personal

experiences as a concertgoer to performances led by

composers, or by sharing a common world. His

lineage as a student is now four, five, or more

generations removed from the composers of the

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries whose works

comprise the bulk of the current orchestral

repertory.

Treating the score as the definitive source of

limitless information and insights is further evidence

of the rationalization of conducting. The score is

seen as an “objective” account of the composer’s

intentions; performances are renditions of some

“objective” truth, not personal and affective

statements of the conductor. Again Toscanini offers

a particularly pointed example. In discussing the

romantic conductor, Willem Mengelberg, Toscanini

said, “Once he came to me and told me at great

length the proper German way to conduct the

Coriolanus Overture. He had got it, he said, from a

conductor who supposedly had got it straight from

Beethoven. Bah! I told him I got it straight from

Beethoven himself, from the score.”20 That scores

(as was pointed out earlier) do not in fact ever have

this essential quality is not as important as the fact

that they are perceived as having it.

For most of this century musicologist

(i.e., “specialists”) have been called upon to

research, annotate, and publish authentic scores.21

The conductor is no longer the singular definitive

authority he was in the romantic era. Consequently,

the contemporary performance is no longer viewed

as an expression of his personality; rather, it is a

rendition of the letter of the score. So crucial does

the objective document become that in

performances composers’ tamperings with their own

scores are disregarded as though the “truth”

contained in the original score transcended even the

wishes of the composer. Such an attitude abrogates

the composer’s right to alter and make

improvements in a score.22

In addition to the mediation of the musicologist, the

work of the conductor during recording sessions or

broadcasts is encroached upon by audio and video

engineers and technicians, so that, to some extent,

43 JCG Vol. 30

performances are modified on purely technical

considerations. Commenting on the role of the radio

engineer, Frank Black, a conductor associated with

radio station WNBC, wrote:

If your crescendo threatens to upset the

equilibrium of that needle [on the control panel]

– well, it’s too bad for your crescendo. It simply

never reaches its intended climax. On the other

hand, the engineer can achieve a “fake”

crescendo from his control panel that would

make Rossini green with envy. Yes, he is a very

important person.23

And on the role of the program director:

You need to have confidence in the director. You

may interpret Beethoven, but the director (with

the help of the engineer at the controls) interprets

your interpretation of Beethoven. Your ear tells

you what goes on in the studio, but the director’s

ear is also at work in the control booth and, as the

name indicates, he controls what goes on the

air.24

Given the above, the conductor must to some extent

become a recording technician, experimenting with

different seatings to produce effects, especially for

recordings. Once learned, however, the skills can be

misused. The highly touted phenomenon of

quadraphonic sound, which briefly was hailed as the

final step in replicating the concert-hall listening

experience, quickly degenerated into sophisticated

gimmickry when its primary use became the

creation of effects specific to quadraphonic record

listening.

Conclusion

In this article I have examined some of the

determinants of conductors’ interpretive styles.

I have attempted to point to developments in

conducting that are confluent with rationalization in

other areas of society, which embody, in Schiller’s

oft-quoted phrase, “the disenchantment of the

world,” and which make less and less

comprehensible a critic’s characterization of a

Furtwangler performance of the Franck Symphonyin D, “he burns incense at a mystic shrine.”

*****

Jack Kamerman is an Associate Professor in theDepartment of Sociology, Anthropology and SocialWork at Kean College (Union, NJ). He is Co-editorof Performers & Performances: The Social

Organization of Artistic Work(1983), a collection ofstudies in the sociology of the arts. Mr. Kamermanlast wrote for the JCG on the artistic and financialgoals of the New York Philharmonic, 1922-36 (Vol.9, Nos. 3 & 4).

ENDNOTES

1 Rationalization is the trend, epitomized by bureaucracies,

that makes work and other activities subject to rules or

formulas which make them predictable and, consequently,

brings them under greater control. Henry Ford, for example,

rationalized the production of the automobile by breaking

down the production process into smaller tasks. This action

allowed him to predict with greater accuracy how many

automobiles his factories would produce in a given period of

time and to standardize the quality of the automobiles

produced.

“. . . the career of an occupation consists in changes of its

internal organization and its place in the division of labor of

which society itself consists.” Everett Cherrington Hughes,

Men and Their Work (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1958), p. 195.

Division of labor is the way occupations in a particular field

are organized into a system, e.g., the way all of the occupations

connected with the staging of an opera are related to one

another, or alternatively, the way one of those occupations or

that system of occupations is related to society in general.

2 There were signs of a romantic revival in the 1970s, but

presently the romantic approach is more the exception than the

rule.

3 These factors overlap to some extent, e.g., a style leader such

as Toscanini had an unparalleled exposure because of the

advent of the radio concert and mass-media hard sell.

(See Joseph Horowitz, Understanding Toscanini: How HeBecame a Culture-God and Helped Create a New Audience forOld Music [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987].)

JCG Vol. 30 44

4This was not as salient a problem before the

nineteenth century because much music was written for

specific occasions with little thought given to posterity. And

the performances of that music were often supervised by the

composer; consequently, the matter of interpretation, i.e., a

subjective vs. an objective approach to the score, rarely arose.

5 Frederick Dorian, The History of Music in Performance: TheArt of Musical Interpretation from the Renaissance to Our Day(New York: W. W. Norton, 1942), p. 30.

6 Dorian, p. 28.

7 Charles O’Connell, the Other Side of the Record (New York:

Alfred A. Knopf, 1947), p. 133.

8 Edward Blickstein, “The Lost Art of Chopin Interpretation,”

Reprinted on the jacket of the recording “The Great Chopin

Interpreters,” VM-115 (New York: Veritas Records, Inc.,

1967). Electronic music may solve this problem by

eliminating the interpreter altogether.

9 Dorian, pp. 26-27. Another clear statement of the distinction

is contained in the essay, “About Conducting,” by the eminent

conductor Felix Weingartner, an objectivist. He criticized the

followers of Hans von Bülow (the major subjectivist or

romantic conductor of the last half of the nineteenth century:

. . . it was in the end regrettable that by the

behavior, artistic and personal, of some

“new-modish Bülows” so much attention was

directed to the person of the conductor that the

audience even came to regard the composers as

the creatures, as it were, of their interpreters, and

in conjunction with the name of a conductor

people spoke of “his” Beethoven, “his” Brahms,

or “his” Wagner. (Felix Weingartner,

Weingartner on Music and Conducting[New York: Dover, 1960], p. 110.)

Or later in the same essay, “The conductor must before all

things be sincere towards the work he is to produce, towards

himself, and towards the public. He must not think, when he

takes the score in hand, ‘What can I make out of this work?’

but, ‘What has the composer wanted to say in it?’ ”

(Weingartner, p. 116.)

10 John H. Mueller, The American Symphony Orchestra: A Social History of Musical Taste (Bloomington, IN: Indiana

University Press, 1951), pp. 316-17.

11 For the source of much of this information and a history of

the American musicians’ unions in general, see Robert D.

Leiter, The Musicians and Petrillo (New York: Bookman

Associates, 1953).

12 Alan Rich, Bigamy on the Orchestral Front, New York,

28 February 1972, p. 56.

13 Harold Schonberg, The Great Conductors(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1967), p. 358.

14 See also footnote 1. “The ‘objective’ discharge of business

primarily means a discharge of business according to

calculable rules and ‘without regard for persons’. . . Its

[bureaucracy’s] specific nature. . . develops the more perfectly

the bureaucracy is ‘dehumanized,’ the more completely it

succeeds in eliminating from the official business love, hatred,

and all purely personal, irrational, and emotional elements

which escape calculation.” (Max Weber, From Max Weber:Essays in Sociology, ed. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills

[New York: Oxford University Press, 1958],

pp. 215-16.)

“This drive to reduce artistic activity to the form of a

calculable procedure based on comprehensible principles

appears above all in music.” (Max Weber, The Rational andSocial Foundations of Music, trans. Don Martindale and

Johannes Riedel [Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University

Press, 1958], p. xxii.)

From the same introduction: “In the dynamics of Western

musical development lie many tensions between rational and

affective motives. The value of musical rationalization is the

transformation of the process of musical production into a

calculable affair operating with known means, effective

instruments, and understandable rules. Constantly running

counter to this is the drive for expressive flexibility.” (p. xii.)

15 Virgil Thomson, The Musical Scene (1945) (New York:

Greenwood Press, 1968), pp. 54-55, 0-62.

16 O’Connell, pp. 134-35.

17 Another source of standardization may be the availability of

“canned” interpretations for imitation, i.e., the recorded

45 JCG Vol. 30

performances of famous conductors that short-cut the

knowledge previously acquired through studying the score

extensively or playing the score on a piano. (Dorian, pp. 342-

43.)

Irving Kolodin coined the phrase “the phonographic memory”

to describe the same situation. In a review of the conducting

prodigy Ferruccio Furco, he wrote:

It is far simpler and more direct to hear the music

so often from a recording that its sound becomesa mere device for recalling the arrangement ofsymbols involved [emphasis added]. . . It cannot

be a mere coincidence that such prodigies have

emerged in a time when mechanical reproduction

of orchestral music has been accessible as never

before. . . Did any of this make Burco a

conductor? Does driving a car make one a

mechanic? His performance suggested a new

kind of musical phenomenon – a backseat driver,

rather than a leader or conductor. Given an

orchestra in good order, with ample artistic gas

and technical oil to expend, he could drive along

with it comfortably, perhaps even sense when the

speed limits were being exceeded and call for a

little caution. Should it stall, however, or, what is

more to the point, stop functioning altogether, he

would no more be able to get it going than you or

I on the highway. (Irving Kolodin, The MusicalLife [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958]

pp. 53-55.)

I find his metaphor interesting in itself.

18 Mueller, p. 325.

19 Lester Salomon, “The Pianist-Conductor Syndrome,”

Allegro, October 1973, pp. 3, 11.

20 Schonberg, p. 254. As Schonberg also commented,

“In romanticism the ego was all-important, the performer on

the level of the creator, and one’s aspirations were much more

important than any such vague thing as scholarship or fidelity

to the printed note. Nobody in the nineteenth century thought

about ‘fidelity’; he thought about self-expression.”

(Schonberg, p. 173.)

21 “Musicology, one of the newest of the scholarly disciplines,

has been conditioning all performers and critics to a greater or

lesser degree since World War II. For the past fifty years,

musicologists have been attempting to codify musical thought

and performance practice of the past [emphasis added] and in

the last twenty years a tremendous amount of material has been

published.” (Schonberg, p. 365.)

22 Mueller has called the score “at best an

awkward and incomplete symbolization of the

creator’s intention. . . Indeed there is some evidence that

Beethoven, himself, was not a calm interpreter, but rather

indulged in exaggerated extremes of emotional expression and

rubato style while performing before the Viennese nobility.”

(Mueller, p. 324.) Also, recall the case of the Chopin Nocturnecited earlier.

23 Frank J. Black, “Conducting for Radio,” in Music in RadioBroadcasting, ed. Gilbert Chase (New York: McGraw-Hill,

1946), pp. 68-69.

24 Black, pp. 68-69. This view was supported by an officer of

the Arturo Toscanini Society in a conversation I had with him

a few years ago. I commented on the dry thin sound

Toscanini’s orchestra had in the recordings I had heard. He

said that this was attributable to the acoustics of the recording

studio RCA used and, more importantly, to the engineer who

happened to be on duty. To illustrate his point he played a

rehearsal recording made during the same period as one of the

commercial recordings I had heard, but with a different engi-

neer. Although the orchestral sound was not exactly opulent, it

was considerably richer than the sound accorded by the other

engineer.

Note: Statistics in Table 1 (pg. 46) are given for six orchestras:

Boston and Chicago Symphonies, New York Philharmonic,

Minnesota Orchestra (formerly the Minneapolis Symphony),

Cleveland and Philadelphia Orchestras.

Sources for Tables 1 & 2:

Bloom, Eric (ed.), Groves’ Dictionary of Music andMusicians, 5th Edition, New York: St. Martin’s Press,

1954.

Sabin, Robert (ed.), International Cyclopedia ofMusic and Musicians, 9th Edition, New York: Dodd,

Mead, 1964.

Sadie, Stanley (ed.), New Groves’ Dictionary of Musicand Musicians, Washington, DC: Groves’

JCG Vol. 30 46

Dictionaries of Music, 1980.

Wooldridge, David, Conductor’s World, New York: Praeger, 1970.

*Includes conductors trained as conductors only and conductors for whom no information was available. (Statistics for both tables

current through 1983.)

47 JCG Vol. 30

Oral History, American Music

(JCG Volume 11, No. 3-4, 1990)

By Vivian Perlis

The composer’s presence and advice can be of great

help to a conductor during the preparation and

rehearsal of a new piece. Furthermore, orchestra

players are likely to be more open and audiences

less hostile to new ideas with the composer in

attendance. But what can be done about the many

performances in which the composer cannot be

directly involved? The conductor may search in

vain for biographical information and recordings,

particularly if the composer is young and the piece

new. But all is not lost! Consider making use of the

tape-recorded interviews that comprise a unique and

valuable collection called Oral History, AmericanMusic. The composer’s voice on tape or his person

on video tape can serve as an introduction and

may convey a sense of immediacy and spontaneity

similar to his actual presence.

This unusual project, Oral History, American Music,

is part of the Yale School of Music and Library. By

now, into its twenty-first year, the collection

includes over 700 tape-recorded and videotaped

interviews with major figures in American music.

While the archive contains interviews with

performers and others in the world of music, the

main focus has been on composers.

Is this project of use to conductors? If the conductor

is interested in American contemporary music and

composers, the answer is an emphatic “Yes!”

Perhaps you plan to conduct an unusual score by a

contemporary composer such as John Harbison,

Steve Reich, or John Adams. You could get to

“know” the composer by listening him tell his life

story or by reading the transcript; even more useful

would be that segment of the interview dealing

specifically with the music you are about to conduct.

Are you programming a complex orchestral work by

Charles Ives? It might be enlightening to hear what

the great Ives scholar and performer John

Kirkpatrick has to say about Ives’s characteristic

multi-layering or how Nicolas Slonimsky handled

the conducting of polyrhythms in his early

presentations of Ives’s music. You are playing a

complicated jazz-inspired piece by Anthony Davis

and the composer is coming to your town for the

premiere? You could prepare yourself in advance by

reading the transcript of his interviews in which he

discusses his innovative music and ideas. If the late

Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring is scheduled

for next season, hearing the composer talk about his

own conducting of the piece might stimulate fresh

insight. And so on, through hundreds of examples

from the tape-recorded and videotaped oral histories

included in the archive.

I am frequently asked how and why a concert harpist

with the New Haven Symphony Orchestra turned to

a new career of oral historian. In the late sixties,

I became intrigued with the Charles Ives Collection

of music manuscripts and correspondence at the Yale

Music Library where I worked as part-time reference

librarian. When I visited Ives’ insurance partner,

Julian Myrick, to receive some materials for the

Library, I brought along a tape-recorder. Little did I

know that the act I was about to commit was called

oral history! Mr. Myrick told some unique stories

about “Charlie,” and when Myrick died soon after

our interviews, the urgency of searching out others

who had known and worked closely with Ives

JCG Vol. 30 48

became apparent. Family, friends, neighbors,

musicians, and insurance colleagues contributed to

the first documentary oral history on an American

composer. This kind of Multi-level view was

particularly appropriate for the complex and

paradoxical personality of Charles Ives. After the

Ives project was completed (its final total was

fifty-four interviews), a book of reminiscences

edited from the interviews followed (Yale

University Press, 1974). I am told that the

publication has been effective in making the

iconoclastic and controversial Charles Ives more

accessible to potential listeners and performers.

Despite an oral history “boom” following the

invention of the tape recorder, with projects

proliferating in many and varied fields, music, the

art of sound, had done little to collect and preserve

source materials from creative musicians by means

of tape-recording. During the Ives Project, several

significant composers had been interviewed, and

since it is never wise to approach one talented

composer solely about another’s work, each

composer was interviewed on his own life and

music, as well as about Charles Ives. The result was

a nucleus of valuable materials derived from

conversations with such composers as Arthur

Berger, Elliott Carter, Lou Harrison, Bernard

Herrmann, Darius Milhaud, and Nicolas Slonimsky.

I was aware of a project in the visual arts called “The

Archives of American Art” that systematically

collected oral history from major figures in the art

world: Why not an archive of American music along

similar lines?

In theory, it seemed simple and logical to establish

such a project; in practice, it proved to be rather

involved and challenging. In the early 70s, the Yale

librarian, a conservative gentleman who came from

a time when library materials were literary and

nothing else, was suspicious of the tape recorder as

a library tool. What was this newfangled machine

doing at Yale! Sponsorship was refused by the

library, and the traditional musicologists were also

reluctant to take oral history methodology seriously.

The School of Music, however, offered a home

for Oral History, American Music, with the

understanding that funding had to come from

outside the University. Added to my “new” career

of oral historian was a less welcome one of

fund-raiser. Times change, and so do university

librarians. Oral History, American Music became

a well-known and highly praised archive, with

award-winning publications and productions

deriving from its holdings, earning the respect of

librarians, musicologists, and historians. We now

have a commitment from the Yale Library, and

although fund-raising continues (and becomes

increasingly difficult), the collection is assured of

preservation and accessibility in the future.

It is possible to give only a brief description of Oral

History, American Music in this space, but for those

interested in more detail, a descriptive brochure is

available on request. The project is divided into

various units of research, with a central core unit of

about 250 interviews dealing with living subjects,

primarily composers. Two other units include oral

histories that are similar to the Ives Project, in that

they contain interviews with many people about one

subject. These are the Paul Hindemith and the Duke

Ellington units. The former (seventy-five

interviews) was undertaken for two major reasons:

first, Hindemith’s Yale connection and the many

people still surviving from his Yale years in the New

Haven area; second, the interesting (and much

neglected) documentation of an émigré composer

who came to the United states as a result of World

War II (the Hindemith Project functions as a

prototype for future studies with émigré musicians).

The Ellington Project (eighty-eight interviews) was

initiated because of the composer’s status as one of

the major creative artists of twentieth-century

America and for his wide-ranging influence on

many major figures in the jazz world. Use of this

jazz project exceeds any single unit in Oral History,

American Music. (An adjunct series is concerned

with Ellington’s associate, Billy Strayhorn.)

An unusual oral history unit, also with many

interviews about a single subject, is not about a

composer: it is an oral history of the Steinway piano

company. Undertaken at the time when the great

piano manufacturer ceased being a family-owned

49 JCG Vol. 30

enterprise, we decided to use oral history

methodology to document an “institution” that had

enormous impact on the world of music over a long

period. The Steinway Project (120 interviews) with

family, factory workers, technicians, business

people, and performers has been of interest not only

to musicians, but to a wide range of people,

including scholars of New York history and of

immigration demography. Pianists compose the

largest number of musicians who use the materials,

but conductors have also been tantalized by the

opportunity to hear the great “Steinway artists”

discuss their relationships to Steinway & Sons and

to piano technology. To name a few: Claudio Arrau,

Arthur Balsam, Alfred Brendel, Gary Graffman,

Lorin Hollander, Lili Kraus, Moura Lympany,

William Masselos, Murray Perahia, and Artur

Rubenstein.

The core unit, interviews with living figures in the

world of music, is national in scope and

wide-ranging in styles. The first targets were

necessarily the oldest and most highly recognized

composers, such as Virgil Thompson, Aaron

Copland, Otto Luening, William Schuman, Harry

Partch, and Leo Ornstein. Several major

publications and productions have derived from

these collections, the most ambitious being the two

volume autobiography of Copland, co-authored by

the composer and Vivian Perlis (Copland: 1900Through 1942, and Copland: Since 1943, St.

Martin’s, 1984 and 1989). Copland’s text is drawn

from the interviews made for Oral History,

American Music in 1975 and ’76. Several television

documentaries deriving from the material in the

archive have been broadcast on PBS and are

available as educational aides. These include video

biographies of Eubie Blake, John Cage, and

Copland.

After securing extensive interviews with the older

generation of composers, Oral History, American

Music turned to those in mid-career, such as Ned

Rorem, George Perle, Ellen Zwilich, and many

others. A young composers series has also been

initiated, as well as the updating of all interviews

with active composers every four or five years. The

addition of video-tapes has moved ahead slowly

due to costs, but we hope to add to the fifteen

accomplished to date. One example of use from the

video archive will demonstrate the kind of value

these materials can have to the conductor: Leonard

Slatkin chose excerpts from the Copland collection

to project on large screens at an outdoor festival

in the summer of 1990 in connection with

performances of Copland’s music by the Pittsburgh

Symphony.

Oral History is not simply the act of placing a

microphone, pushing a button, and saying, “Now,

tell me about yourself.” Readers of this journal (who

are frequently interviewed themselves) are aware

that the level of response depends on what the

interviewer knows about the subject – no

professional will talk for long on a professional level

to an amateur. While interviewing is the most

exciting phase of oral history – the time when the

performer’s arts of timing and projecting come into

play – what makes the difference between surface

interviewing and a systematic scholarly approach is

the depth and detail involved, and the successful

result can be achieved only by careful advance

research and study.

In addition to the importance of pre-interviewing

preparation are post-interviewing procedures. The

processing turns the raw materials into an archive

that insures accessibility to users. All tapes in Oral

History, American Music are transcribed, except for

acquired materials. Transcripts are duplicated,

checked for errors, reviewed again in order to

prepare tables of content, and sent to the

interviewee. Since most people do not like the way

their spoken style translates into the written word,

far too many changes are usually made by the

interviewee, which then must be incorporated. The

transcript is finally labeled, catalogued, filed, and

ready for use.

A question has probably entered the minds of

several readers: What oral history interviews have

been done with conductors and why not more? Oral

History, American Music includes an extensive

series on conductor Maurice Abravanel, and many

JCG Vol. 30 50

of our interviews contain segments about composer-conductors, interpretation, and orchestral premieres and

other performances. Brief interviews with several famous conductors are included in a collection of 400 tapes

of the “Great Artists Series” that were recently acquired from radio station WQXR, New York City.

One extensive project in progress (for which I am the consultant) is with colleagues, friends, and orchestra

players who worked with Eugene Ormandy; it is sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania Music Library.

However, these efforts do not constitute a systematic oral history project based on interviews with

conductors. If you are interested in pursuing the matter, we will offer assistance and expertise. There should

be such a project! For oral history is a particular way of preserving history – one that retains the intimacy of

those who have made our musical history. It is a method of relaying the sounds and sights of history, as well

as its content. The qualities of immediacy and spontaneity that characterize oral history interviews will be

attractive to any conductor interested in carrying the composer’s message to his audience.

*****

Vivian Perlis is a historian in American music, specializing in the music of twentieth-century American composers. She is founding director of Oral History, American Music. She is known for her writings and productions, among them books on Charles Ives and Aaron Copland and film biographies of Copland, EubieBlake and John Cage. She was recently named Educator of the Year by Musical America.

* Inquiries about the oral history project may be addressed to:

Oral History of American MusicYale UniversityPO Box 208307New Haven, CT 06520-8307

(203) 432-1988oham@yale.edu

51 JCG Vol. 30

That unfortunate occupational injuries can intrude

into the lives and careers of conductors is no more

clearly demonstrated than by a recent headline

which appeared in The New York Times on July 7,

1992: “Tanglewood Festival Opens Despite

Weather and Illness.” As James R. Oestreich report-

ed, “Dismal weather was only one of the wet

blankets thrown over the opening weekend of

Boston Symphony Orchestra concerts at the

Tanglewood Festival here [in Lenox, MA]. A few

days before the first concert on Friday evening, the

orchestra announced that its music director, Seiji

Ozawa, would be unable to conduct because of

tendinitis.”1 Of course, all who love music wish

Maestro Ozawa a timely return to the podium, and

none more than the medical specialists who are

assisting in his recovery.

Just how pervasive is the problem of occupational

injury in the field of music? A general overview can

be found in a recent survey sponsored by the

International Conference of Symphony and Opera

Musicians (ICSOM). The survey results were

reported in the periodical, Medical Problems ofPerforming Artists, whose editor, Alice

Branfonbrener, M.D., is medical director of the

Medical Program for Performing Artists at

Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago. Of the

2,212 musicians in the forty-seven United States and

Canadian orchestras that responded to the 1987

survey, 82% reported experiencing a medical

problem (physical or psychological), and 76%

indicated at least one problem that was sufficiently

severe to affect their performance. Unquestionably,

instrumental musicians suffer from a wide range of

medical ills. Survey respondents reported problems

such as musculoskeletal pain syndromes in the

following percentages: shoulders (20% of those

surveyed), neck (22%), lower back (22%) and

fingers (16%). Non-musculoskeletal problems

included eye strain (24%), ear aches and other ear

disorders (20%). Psychological stresses were

manifested in stage fright (24%), depressions (17%),

sleep disturbances (14%) and acute anxiety (13%).2

But what about conductors? To some, they may

seem to fall into an altogether different category,

since conductors have the unique task of recreating

musical masterpieces – not through physical effort

applied to the wood and metal of musical

instruments or the vocal folds of the human voice,

but rather through soundless gestures transformed

by ensembles into audible form during rehearsals,

performances or recordings. To many audiences,

this may seem an immensely rewarding and

satisfying profession, since conductors are seen

as the embodiment of the highest level of

artistic achievement. In fact, one study related

occupational success among conductors to life

expectancy, and suggested that conductors have a

much better chance of living to an advanced age

than do other musicians. In a twenty-year follow-up

study 437 active and former conductors of major,

regional, community and opera orchestras in

the United States, it was found that the mortality

rate of conductors was 38% below that of their

contemporaries in the general population.3 In

addition, the relative mortality rate was lower for

each age group, from age 40 to age 80 and over.

Medicine in the Service of Music;

Health and Injury on the Podium(JCG Volume 12, No. 1-2, 1991)

By John J. Kella

JCG Vol. 30 52

Of particular interest was the finding that musicians

as a group generally have a distinctly highermortality rate that the population in general. A study

across different occupational groups revealed that

the mortality rate of male “musicians and music

teachers” is actually 62% higher than that of all men

in the United States’s general working population.4

This was corroborated by another study, done

in England and Wales, in which the mortality of

“musicians, stage managers, actors [and]

entertainers” was 25% above that of all working

men in that region.5 Women are also affected. The

Metropolitan Life Insurance Company found that in

a study of prominent women, the mortality rate of

“performers and entertainers” was 43% above that

of their contemporaries in the United States’s

general population of women.6 Male conductors,

however, with their significantly longer life

expectancies, were found to be comparable to top

corporate executives, whose mortality rate was

much more favorable than that of business

executives at all levels of accomplishment.7

What are the factors accounting for the longevity of

male conductors? The people at Met Life – who

make detailed studies on how, when and why we

pass from “this mortal coil” – attribute longevity to

the idea that symphony conductors are generally:

...gifted, energetic, and productive leaders in the

world music. The professional activities of such

men are vast and varied. In addition to their work

on the podium during a musical performance,

they found and organize orchestras in cities and

communities throughout the country, initiate

special types of concerts, and are active in

musical education, as well as in the

administration of music centers. They also train

apprentice conductors and help to launch the

careers of composers. Just as the corporate

executive seems to be able to cope with and even

thrive on stressful situations, conductors seem to

turn the stresses of their profession to productive

use. The exceptional longevity enjoyed by

symphony conductors lends further support to the

theory that work fulfillment and world-wide

recognition of professional accomplishments are

important determinants of health and longevity.8

Given the good news of increased longevity, why

should conductors be concerned about occupational

problems? Because, though their life expectancy

may be long, the quality of life and health is an issue

for such high achievers. Interviews with great

conductors, for example, reveal many behind-the-

proscenium demands – some self-imposed – that can

impart mental and physical tolls on those who wield

batons. To be successful, conductors must cope

effectively with the physical and psychological

demands of “wearing many hats.” This process

includes – but is not limited to – changing ones role

from inspiring music leader to critical

orchestra rehearser, to supportive psychologist, to

knowledgeable music analyst and historian, to

proficient recording specialist, to convincing fund

raiser, to compelling social activist for the arts, all

performed with unflagging energy during nonstop

schedules. James Levine, conductor and artistic

director of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra,

relates:

What I think people are not aware of is... [that

being a conductor] is a little bit like being a

dancer, or being an athlete. The work that a

conductor does is a tremendous strain on the

nervous system, on the muscles, on your body

physically and on your psyche. And in order to

stay in the kind of shape to do it properly, one has

to do it rather continuously.9

Some conductors have gone so far as to study

the physical effects of their craft somewhat

scientifically. Herbert von Karajan established the

Karajan Foundation, one mission of which was to

explore the complicated process of how music

influences the mind and body. Von Karajan himself

became a subject for some of the research by

measuring his own brain activity, heartbeat, and

level of static electricity while conducting the last

section of the third act of Siegfried during a closed

dress rehearsal. Though no public was present at the

rehearsal, von Karajan reported that:

Now you would think if there is no public you

cannot be nervous. Why should you? The piece

begins very softly and there is no risk at all.

[But]...you know that my heartbeat, from the

moment before I started, went up from – I have a

53 JCG Vol. 30

very low heartbeat – 67 or 68 to 170 for three

seconds. Then it went down. The tension which

is in yourself, which you don’t feel, makes you

do this. We can see where there is a danger if it

remains. If you stop breathing, for instance. And

we found that what we called “energetic phases”

– where you wave your arms and so forth – is not

tiring at all for your body. The most difficult

things are very slow with intermittent pauses,

where you always have to wait. Waiting is an

enormous strain on your brain and on your body.

I know for myself, being in the later part of my

life, if I develop tension suddenly, I start to

breathe very freely [in order to relax], and I

didn’t do this before. This is why, sometimes,

after a performance, I was just dead. Today I can

tell young conductors, “Don’t forget to

breathe.”10

Jonathan Sternberg, who frequently conducts the

Vienna State Orchestra, spoke knowledgeably of

both the physical problems and the psychological

stresses that conductors experience. If a conductor

is new to an orchestra, the orchestra players may

“test” his or her knowledge of the score by “playing

notes other than those in the musical score,” or

playing at times in a manner “not authorized by the

composer.” Once this test of wills has been passed,

Maestro Sternberg experiences a mutual bond of

respect with these exceptional players. In other

situations, knowing details about the lives and

careers of the orchestra musicians may provide

valuable insights that can improve their

performance. Sternberg says, “If I know that a

musician is going through a difficult time I feel

concerned for his welfare – and concerned about his

ability to get through a performance. This is

especially true if a lead player is a wonderful

musician, but has an unfortunate drinking

problem.”11 Von Karajan would agree:

There was a part [in an opera dress rehearsal]

where the leading singer had a very delicate note

to attack. There, I was emotionally involved,

because I said to myself, “If she doesn’t sing it

well, she will have nervousness, and will not sing

it well in the premiere.” It went wonderfully, but

my heartbeat went up to a very high level

anyway.12

Performing Arts Medicine

To understand the many stresses and strains

involved in the performing arts, a new medical

subspecialty has been created called “performing

arts medicine.” The primary goal of this new field

is to prevent the occurrence and reduce the severity

of occupational problems in instrumental musicians,

conductors, vocalists, dancers, and other arts

performers. Several medical centers dedicated to

the treatment of performers have been established in

such major cities as New York, Chicago, Boston,

Cleveland, Washington, D.C., San Francisco,

Detroit, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Hamilton

(Ontario, Canada), and Victoria (Australia), among

others.

One of the largest performing arts medicine centers

is the Miller Health Care Institute for Performing

Artists, which opened in 1985 and is located

“within limping distance” of New York’s Lincoln

Center for the Performing Arts. Under the

leadership of medical director Dr. Emil F. Pascarelli,

the forty-three health practitioners at the Miller

Institute have seen over 7,000 performers in over

20,000 rehabilitation sessions, treating a wide range

of medical and psychological problems. As

coordinator of the Music Rehabilitation Program at

the Miller Institute, the author has personally seen

over 1,000 injured patients in over 3,000

rehabilitation sessions. Treated musicians have

included string players, woodwind and brass

players, percussionists, pianists, guitarists, harpists –

and, of course, conductors. From such extensive

experience, the center’s professionals have

identified specific problems that afflict musicians

and conductors. However, to understand

stress-related physical problems, it is necessary to

define a few important medical terms.

Contemporary names for the cumulative physical

effects of stress on muscles, tendons and tendon

sheaths, ligaments, joint surfaces or cartilage, nerves

and other soft tissues of the body are: Cumulative

Trauma Disorders (CTD), Repetitive Strain Injuries

(RSI) and Repetitive Motion Injuries (RMI). All of

these syndromes refer to painful or functionally

JCG Vol. 30 54

limiting problems that result from repeated or

continuous physical stress over time, resulting in

tissue damage. Specific types of CTDs that

conductors experience are: overuse syndrome;

sprains or strains; tendinitis or tenosynovitis,

particularly of the shoulder, elbow, and wrist;

ganglion cysts, typically at the wrist; nerve

entrapment syndromes, such as carpal tunnel

syndrome and thoracic outlet syndrome; and focal

dystonia. Each is described below.

Overuse Syndrome

Overuse syndrome in conductors is frequently

characterized by pain, weakness, and loss of

function in muscles and tendons of the upper

extremities. The affected areas include: shoulder

and upper back muscles such as the upper trapezius

(which elevates the shoulder), the rotator cuff

muscles (supraspinatus, infraspinatus, and teres

major/minor), and the deltoids (which extend the

upper arm outward); the forearm extensor and

flexors; and the intrinsic muscles of the hand

involved in gripping and moving the baton. It is

hypothesized that overuse syndrome results from

direct self-injury of muscles, generated through their

own vigorous and repeated contractions, resulting in

acute micro-tears in the muscle fibers. This in turn

can lead to tissue edema (swelling) and hemorrhage,

and a subsequent inflammatory response. Chronic

overuse may also result in deposits in the muscle

tissues of a fibrous protein called “fibrin.” In time,

fibrin can organize into a matrix, causing adhesions

of the muscular fibers and elastic tissue. Through

this process of fibrin deposition, organization and

adhesion, muscle mass can become fibrotic, leading

in some cases to loss of fine motor control.

The incidence of overuse syndrome is generally

associated with increases in the duration and

intensity of repetitive motions (such as conducting

brisk marcato or other strongly accentuated

passages of music), in weight-supportive postures

and movements (such as conducting adagio passages, but with weight and tension in the

movement), or a modification in technique which

almost invariably places an additional load on new,

unprepared muscles and other body structures. It

should be emphasized that the location and pattern

of overuse syndrome is frequently unique to each

style of conducting, so that a marching band director

using extensive elbow and shoulder movements to

conduct vigorous forte passages is likely to

experience a completely different location of pain

syndromes than would a choral conductor whose

technique features wrist and finger motions.

Dr. Hunter Fry, a plastic surgeon and pioneer in

research on the occupational injuries of musicians,

identified five grades of severity in overuse

syndrome, ranging from mild pain in only one

localized body area while performing a particular

occupational activity (grade 1) to severe and

continuous pain, with total loss of functional muscle

use (grade 5).13

Rehabilitation of musicians suffering from overuse

syndrome varies according to the severity and

location of the injury. The treatment of mild to

moderate grades of overuse injury (grades 1-3) may

require:

(1) “relative rest” or a significant reduction of

rehearsal and performance duration and intensity,

including increased length of rest periods; relative

rest also includes the reduction of conducting

activities to reduce the risk of reinjury;

(2) slight modification of conducting style to avoid

extremes of movements or positionings that

aggravate the condition. These may include a

reduction in the intensity of whip-like movements

that force the soft tissues of the shoulder, arm, elbow

and wrist to absorb the kinetic energy of conducting,

especially the use of excessively large or effortful

conducting gestures during strongly accented

musical phrases;

(3) body stretches and conditioning exercises to

stretch habitually contracted muscles, and to

strengthen and increase the endurance of the

unaffected muscles, especially those of the upper

body.

55 JCG Vol. 30

For more severe levels of injury (levels 3-5), the

rehabilitation will most probably be longer and more

involved, and include such strategies as:

(1) “complete rest” from even the non-conductingactivities of daily living that aggravate the condition,

such as twisting, turning or lifting movements;

(2) a regimen of monitored conducting exercises of

graduated difficulty – performed over an extended

period of time – undertaken in order to avoid too

rapid a return to full professional responsibilities;

(3) re-evaluation of the conducting style to modify

exaggerated joint flexion or extension, to reduce

overly forceful or intense postures and gestures,

even if these are executed for musical expression. If

over time serious injury occurs or reoccurs while

conducting, then clearly a change in one’s physical

conducting style may greatly increase career

longevity and reduce the chances of chronic

problems;

(4) supervised physical and occupational therapy to

reduce inflammation and increase range of motion,

strength and endurance of unaffected musculature

around the injury, as well as use of appropriate

modalities such as cryotherapy (application of

cooling agents to the inflamed area), ultrasound,

iontophoresis or phonophoresis (non-invasive

electrical methods to induce corticosteroid

medication into the affected area) for tendinitis,

deep tissue massage and stretching;

(5) psychological support from family, friends and

colleagues to avoid reactive depression associated

with cessation of professional activities;

(6) gradual return to professional activities with

regular alternation of work and rest cycles to avoid

over-stressing rehabilitated body areas;

(7) following full recovery, continued physical

conditioning exercises, especially in upper body and

back, to increase muscular endurance and avoid

reinjury due to lack of proper muscle tone and

strength.14

Sprains and Strains

The diagnosis of sprain refers to damage or tears of

ligaments (fibrous tissue that link bones), while a

strain is an injury or tear to muscle fibers or tendons,

which connect muscle to bone, or connect one

muscle to another. Sprains or strains can be mild

(grade 1), moderate (grade 2) or severe (grade 3).15

A “grade 1” sprain is caused by microscopic tearing

of the ligament, accompanied by pain or swelling

but no loss of function. Mild injuries, which

frequently result in tenderness or swelling, can be

treated with cryotherapy (cold compresses). In

moderate levels of sprains or strains (grade 2) a

partial disruption or stretching may result in

increased laxity or mobility of a joint or limb. In

these cases cryotherapy is often supplemented by

rest and support of limbs to reduce the risk of

complete tears. In “grade 3” sprains a complete tear

may result, producing joint or limb instability and

loss of function. Treatment for severe sprains or

strains may require surgical intervention, followed

by closely monitored post-operative physical or

occupational therapy. Sprains and strains in

conductors are usually associated with back-stage or

podium falls, or other traumatic occurrences which,

like all other physical ailments described here,

require the attention of a skilled performing arts

medical practitioner.

Tendinitis and Tenosynovitis

Tendinitis, according to Dr. Richard Lederman,

medical director of the Medical Center for

Performing Artists at the Cleveland Clinic

Foundation, refers to inflammation of the tendon

itself, while tenosynovitis involves the synovial or

lubricating sheath surrounding the tendon.16 Both

tendinitis and tenosynovitis are generally related to

a direct trauma to or the excessive use of the

affected musculotendinous units. In time the

synovial surface can become dry and fibrotic.

Subsequent motion of the tendon through its

non-lubricated sheath causes irritation, or, in severe

cases, can produce grating or clicking sounds

(crepitation).

JCG Vol. 30 56

Common sites for tendinitis among conductors are

the elbow, shoulder and wrist. The site of elbow

pain may beat the lateral epicondyle (outer point of

the elbow), often referred to as “tennis elbow,” or at

the medial epicondyle (inner point of the elbow),

sometimes called “golfer’s elbow.” Shoulder pain

can be the result of inflammation of the tendon of

the biceps, frequently resulting in discomfort in the

front part of the shoulder when trying to lift the arm

against resistance. Indications of tendinitis are pain,

swelling, weakness, or redness about the affected

area.

Severe forms of tendinitis include “de Quervain’s

Disease,” caused by inflammation of the thumb’s

extensor tendons, and “trigger finger,” which refers

to the formation of a nodule or swelling on the

tendon of a finger as it passes through a thickened or

constricted synovial sheath. The unfortunate trigger

action occurs when the afflicted performer attempts

to flex or extend the finger, causing the nodule

to suddenly escape from its restricted canal,

occasionally accompanied by an audible snap.

Enlarged tendons may no longer be able to pass

through the sheath, resulting in finger-locking in

some cases.

Mild or moderate levels of tendinitis can be relieved

with rest of the afflicted area, avoidance of irritating

movements, and application of cold compresses to

reduce inflammation. Deep tissue massage and

gentle or passive movements of the afflicted areas

may also be necessary to avoid adhesion formation

and to avoid muscle de-conditioning or even

atrophy. Severe cases may require temporary

splinting and rest until acute symptoms have

subsided, or even local injection of corticosteroids

around the affected areas.

Another set of tendon-related problems are ganglion

cysts, which are small, cystic or sac-like swellings

overlying a joint or tendon sheath. In many cases

the swelling is tender, tense to the touch, and fixed

to deep tissue rather than surface skin. Ganglions

are fluid-filled and frequently found on the wrist.

They are thought to be caused by a compromise of

the tendon sheath, which permits protrusion of

synovial tissue, creating the cystic swelling. As

with tendinitis, ganglion cysts are frequently

occupation-related, and are associated with extreme

wrist positioning and effortful finger gripping or

extension. Treatment consists of compressions

(which externally causes the cyst to rupture) or

aspiration of the cyst’s fluid. Surgical excision is a

course of last resort.

Nerve Entrapment Syndromes

(Carpal Tunnel Syndrome)

Nerve entrapment syndromes are associated with

compression of nerves, frequently where they pass

between relatively unyielding body structures such

as ligaments or bones, or close to body surfaces

where the nerves are susceptible to external

compression. Typical sites of nerve compression for

musicians include the hand, wrist, forearm, elbow,

shoulder and clavicle. Understandably, with so

many sites of possible compression, many examples

of nerve compression syndromes exist. They

include carpal tunnel syndrome (involving the

median nerve), cubital tunnel syndrome and

“Guyon’s Tunnel Syndrome” (involving the ulnar

nerve), radial nerve syndrome at the “Arcade of

Frohse” in the forearm, and thoracic outlet

syndrome which includes compression of not only

nerves but also veins and arteries as they pass

through the narrow space between the upper ribs and

clavicle. There are several symptoms common to

virtually all nerve compression syndromes: aching,

diffuse or poorly localized pain, numbness, tingling,

burning, “pins and needles” sensation, sensory hot

or cold, or weakness. One or more of these

symptoms will be experienced at the site of the

nerve compression.

In cases of carpal tunnel syndrome, the symptoms

are caused by compression of the median nerve

within its tunnel of transit between the bones of the

wrist and the relatively rigid volar carpal ligament or

flexor retinaculum along the underside of the wrist.

The compression may be due to medical situations,

such as polymyalgia rheumatica, hypothyroidism, or

hormonal factors in the case of pregnancy or the

menstrual cycle in women. Carpal tunnel syndrome

57 JCG Vol. 30

may also be related to swelling of the flexor tendons

in the wrist due to tenosynovitis, thus secondarily

causing medial nerve compression. In this case the

reduction of tendinitis-related swelling may lessen

the compression in the nerve, thereby relieving the

painful and limiting symptoms.

Other causes of carpal tunnel syndrome are stressful

occupational positions and movements. This is

particularly true if the wrist is held in a non-neutral

position, such as when the wrist is strongly

elevated or depressed (hyperflexion or dorsiflexion),

or when the wrist is laterally angled to one side or

the other (ulnar or radial deviation).

Treatment for carpal tunnel syndrome begins

with rest and avoidance of extreme, stressful

occupational activities. In moderate cases treatment

can consist of immobilizing and splinting of the

wrist, particularly at night when the sleeper may not

be aware of pressure on the hand or extreme wrist

angling while in fetal sleep positions. In severe

situations local injections of steroidal

anti-inflammatories may relieve the symptoms,

while chronic cases may require surgical release of

the transverse carpal ligament to relieve severe pain.

Thoracic outlet syndrome (TOS) among musicians

is a somewhat controversial diagnosis. This nerve

compression syndrome refers to the compression or

irritation of the brachial plexus (the large nerve that

branches out from the neck to innervate the

shoulder, arms, and hands) and the subclavian artery

as they pass over the top of the lung through the

costoclavicular space and the thoracic outlet

(between the clavicle or collarbone and the top of

the ribcage). Symptoms of thoracic outlet syndrome

include arm pain, paresthesia (usually along the

ulnar aspect of the forearm and hand) and motor

dysfunction of the arm, hand or fingers. Of interest

to conductors is the concept that aberrant arm

positioning and posture directly affect the

occurrence and severity of the symptoms. Dr.

Lederman reports that “a substantial percentage of

patients with symptomatic TOS have a characteristic

neck and upper trunk appearance which has been

called the ‘droopy shoulder’ configuration.

This consists of long, relatively thin neck and

shoulders which slope downward and forward at

rest,”17 indicating that the lowered clavicle can

compress the brachial plexus within the narrow

space of the thoracic outlet. Of course, not all who

have this posture have TOS symptoms, but it does

seem to be a predisposing trait. TOS symptoms can

be similar in some ways to the symptoms of other

injuries and illnesses, making an accurate diagnosis

a matter of considerable importance. Treatment is

similarly controversial. For musicians, it is

probably advisable to begin with conservative

treatment consisting primarily of posture

reeducation and exercise by physical therapists, all

designed to strengthen the shoulder elevators and

reduce sloping, i.e., a forward positioning of the

shoulders. In the unlikely situation that conservative

treatment is unsuccessful, surgical interventions are

available. It is however strongly advised that

conductors and other musicians who suspect the

presence of TOS symptoms seek the diagnosis and

advice of an experienced performing arts medical

professional.

Focal Dystonia or Occupational Cramp

Perhaps the most severe occupational illness that

could afflict any musician is focal dystonia, also

referred to as occupational cramp. Focal dystonia is

defined by Dr. Mark Hallett, one of the clinical

directors in the National Institutes of Health, as a

generally painless localized disturbance of fine

motor control, which is frequently accompanied by

involuntary twisting, flexing or extending

movements caused by muscle spasming or

cramping.18

The unfortunate aspect of focal dystonia among

musicians is that it is generally “task-specific:”

it occurs only when attempting to do a frequently

employed movement or posture, such as octave

playing in pianists, left finger placement in

violinists, etc. Musicians with focal dystonia report

experiencing feelings of loss of coordination,

stiffness, clumsiness or slowness of response, and

involuntary curling or extending of the fingers,

wrists, wind embouchure or other body area that

JCG Vol. 30 58

becomes active while playing their instruments or

conducting.

The origin of focal dystonia is not known precisely.

Some researchers believe it is primarily of

neurological origin, specifically as a brain lesion in

the basal ganglia or brain stem. Others identify

peripheral injury – such as physical trauma, or some

of the above-mentioned musculoskeletal or

neurological problems – as the possible cause or

“trigger” for the onset of focal dystonia. Various

forms of treatment may be useful. They include:

(1) retraining the musician’s postures and

movements to alter abnormal patterns and avoid the

use of the dysfunctional muscles;

(2) drug treatment centering on the use of

clonazepam, lorazepam and others; and

(3) the injection of a muscle relaxant (botullin toxin

or botox) into the affected muscle fibers to reduce

the severity of the undesired spasming. Dr. Frank

Wilson, medical director of the Health Program for

Performing Artists, University of California at San

Francisco, has reported examples of musicians with

focal dystonia who have regained some degree of

motion control through careful postural and

movement retraining.19

Postures and Movements of Conductors

The preceding description of the etiology and

treatment of the physical occupational problems

affecting musicians may be seen as a prelude to the

more important aspect of this article: how to prevent

these problems from occurring in the first place,

particularly among conductors. One of the ways to

reduce the incidence of occupational problems is to

examine the postures and movements of conductors,

and to suggest – where called for – more

biomechanically efficient and non-injurious

movements, without effecting a reduction in musical

effectiveness and expressivity. Some of the most

common problems of conductors – including voice

overuse – are described next.

Problem 1: Forward Lean of the Back and

Shoulders, with Forward Head. Some conductors

frequently lean forward from the waist, either to

emphasize their musical intentions to the orchestra

or chorus, or to observe the score more closely.

Unfortunately, the forward lean of the body – with

the upper torso and head cantilevered over the hips

and legs – places considerable strain on the back.

Tilting of the pelvis in the forward lean is also

frequently associated with the forward head, which

in many instances is forward to compensate for

increased thoracic kyphosis or rounded shoulders

and forward-set head can lead to strain in the neck,

thoracic (middle) back, and lumbar (lower) back.

If you, the reader, continue to find yourself “doing

the forward lean” while conducting, you must

consider possible musical reasons for this

over-involvement of the back. For example, are you

leaning forward to compensate for the ensemble’s

frequent tendency to play behind the beat, or play

without appropriate attention to your musical

directives? Or, are you leaning forward in an effort

to conduct excessively large beat patterns for musi-

cal effect? In such cases the solution may require

addressing these musical issues, along with the

responsiveness of the orchestra players or chorus

singers, during rehearsals. Once resolved, you may

then feel less inclined to break the alignment of the

back during performances.

The goal of postural retraining in this case is to

maintain upright alignment of head, neck, upper

back, lower back and pelvis, so as to place one’s

center of gravity in a straight line over the lower

extremities. A prime target during retraining is the

problem of shoulder tension, in which the shoulders

are held at a higher position than necessary. With

shoulder elevation, a “triangle of tension” of the

head, neck and shoulders is unfortunately created,

leading over time to severe upper-body muscle

spasming and pain.

To reduce shoulder, neck and back tension, it is very

useful to perform:

59 JCG Vol. 30

(1) full shoulder circles, both individually and

simultaneously;

(2) head and neck stretches, including head turns to

each side, head tilts to the right and left, and head

nods to stretch the upper back; and

(3) slow forward back-bends, with the hands

touching the waist, the knees, and finally the feet or

floor.

Problem 2: Side Twist. Another back-related

problem of conductors is turning to face one side of

the orchestra (first violins) or the other (cellos), but

leaving the lower body in a forward-facing position.

This can lead to considerable back, neck and

shoulder strain. If it is necessary to turn the entire

upper body towards a section of the orchestra, then

by all means turn with the whole body, and avoid a

rotational twist, which can result in upper back and

thoracic spine stress.

[Leon Barzin, recipient of the CG’s 1990 TheodoreThomas Award and renowned conducting peda-gogue, directs his students to make body turns onlyafter initiating the turn with a gesture of the arm.Through a natural hierarchy of movement, a rota-tion of the upper torso (shoulders/chest) would thenfollow and function as a reaction to the initiatingarm movement. In sequence, and depending on thedistance traveled by the rotating shoulders, a reac-tive pelvic rotation would occur, followed by a kneerotation of the leading leg and a knee flexation andraised heel of the trailing leg. At the moment ofmaximum upper-torso rotation most of the body’sweight will be carried by the leading leg, and forpurposes of balance and grace the ball of the trail-ing foot should remain in contact with the floor. Inthis manner each level of the body would avoid mus-cular strain, since at the point when strain mightbecome a factor, a lower area of the body releasesand joins the rotation process, thus protecting theimmediate higher area that had reached its individ-ual point of maximum stress-free rotation. Ed.]

Problem 3: Knee Locking. If you tend to be dou-

ble jointed, or experience “back-curving” of your

knees while standing, then you may be at risk for

tension in the legs, thighs and lower back. In this

case, it is important to release tension in the legs and

knees by periodically placing your feet shoulder-

width apart, then slightly bending knees two or three

times. As you do so, try to experience your lower

back elongating and your pelvis rotating to a more

backward position, thus placing your back into a

more straight, upright, balanced and aligned posi-

tion. This slight backward rotation of the lower

back and pelvis helps reduce lower back strain due

to swayback positioning or spinal lordosis, and

helps release knee and leg strain due to locked

knees.

Problem 4: Stool Tilt. The conductor’s stool is

generally a useful support and can help relieve the

stress of standing for long rehearsals, such as when

you are conducting the first act of Parsifal.However, one should avoid long periods of time

spent with one leg on the floor, the other wrapped

around the stool legs. This may result in pelvic

obliquity or lateral tilt of the pelvis, which in turn

can cause asymmetry in the lumbar spine, with

resultant sagittal disc nuclei protrusion of the lumbar

vertebrae, and back strain. Instead, try sitting com-

fortably on top of the stool, with both legs slightly

flexed and placed on a supporting rung. The result-

ing spinal alignment will not only help the back, but

also help avoid shoulder and neck pain due to side

leaning.

Problem 5: Elevated Shoulders. Another postural

problem of conductors relates to shoulder position-

ing. If the elbows are placed at an excessive dis-

tance from the body, or if the hands are continually

held higher than shoulder level, then the shoulders

are frequently elevated beyond their “comfort

zone,” leading to upper back and shoulder strain. In

this case, it is important, when possible, to place the

elbows at a lesser angle in relation to the body, and

become aware the instant the shoulders are exces-

sively elevated. High hand positions may require a

change in podium height to accommodate a more

comfortable hand and arm position. If the hands are

held high in an endeavor to command performers’

attention, then it may also be necessary to train the

JCG Vol. 30 60

ensemble to respond more quickly or effectively to

your beat patterns and expressive gestures.

Also to be avoided is one-sided shoulder elevation,

which can lead to left-or right-sided upper trapezius

(muscle which elevates the shoulder) spasming with

the resulting upward directional displacement of one

scapula over its neighbor. This most frequently hap-

pens when:

(1) the amplitude or vertical stroke of the baton arm

is particularly expansive or too large, possibly due to

using a table (lowest horizontal plane of the beat

pattern) level that is too high; and

(2) the conductor is using the right and left arms

independently but with excess tension while cuing,

changing dynamics, or conducting two different beat

patterns simultaneously.

Problem 6: Excessive Elbow Extension, Flexion

or Rotation. As with the wrist, the elbow serves

both as an arm joint and as a conduit through which

pass many important soft tissues of the body,

including the ulnar, medial and radial nerves, and

the venous and arterial systems. The elbow also

serves as an anchor for the origin and insertion of

muscles that move the forearm, hand and fingers.

Movements that particularly cause elbow distress

are those that forcefully carry the elbow into

extremes of positioning, either in rotation, flexion

or extension. Typically, these involve vigorous

movements of the hand and forearm that are abrupt-

ly stopped during staccato or strongly accentuated

passages, thus causing whip-like snapping of the

elbow at the extremes of extension, flexion, or rota-

tion.

Forceful gestures and staccato articulations are

obviously an important part of the conductor’s

repertoire. It should be kept in mind, however, that

the enormous kinetic energy built up in fast, strong

upper-extremity movements can cause self-injury if,

in order to absorb the shock, the movements are sud-

denly frozen by a stiffly held shoulder, elbow or

wrist. Instead – and regardless of the size of the

beat’s rebound – one should learn to quickly loosen

the joints immediately following the ictus of each

forceful beat. The rebound movement itself – no

matter how small or quick – then becomes a

momentary release of joint tension or muscle co-

contraction, even if one is only doing a light “click”

beat for staccato phrases.

[To minimize muscular damage that can occur whenmarcato conducting is undertaken, Leon Barzin rec-ommends that the muscles surrounding the opera-tional joint in question (usually the elbow) be calledinto use just prior to the acute change of forearmdirection needed to create the marcato effect, inorder to soften or reduce somewhat the shock ofkinetic energy to the affected joint. As to the kineticenergy that is produced, he feels that the wrist,upper arm, shoulder, clavicle and spine must act astransducers of the energy, thus diffusing the impactvia radiation to the adjoining joints and limbs. Inorder for this practice to be successful, all musclesand joints involved in the transduction process mustbe free of tension, or the damage avoided at onerelaxed point will simply transfer to the next point oftension. The most frequent and obvious example ofthis phenomenon is the creation of shoulder tensioninherited from actions of the wrist and elbow. Ed.]

Problem 7: Non-Neutral Wrist Angles. Some of

the most common but injurious malpositionings

among conductors occur in the wrist, where either

hyperflexion or dorsiflexion (wrist elevated or low-

ered excessively), or ulnar or radial deviation (twist-

ed toward the fifth finger or thumb, respectively)

may occur. Excessive or repeated bending of the

wrist can lead to frictional strain of the tendons

whenever they attempt to move back and forth

through the break in the wrist. These malposition-

ings can also cause excess strain on the muscles in

the forearm since those muscles must work harder to

drag the tendons through the angled tendon sheaths.

In addition, excessive wrist angling has been associ-

ated with nerve compression syndromes. Common

locations include the medial nerve where it passes

through the carpal tunnel, and the ulnar nerve where

it traverses the “Tunnel of Guyon” on the lateral side

of the wrist. Choral conductors, who frequently do

61 JCG Vol. 30

not use a baton, are particularly susceptible to the

strains of wrist hyper-angling and finger

extension/flexion, especially if the hand, wrist and

finger movements are executed with force, such as

in “cut-offs” which employ repeated forceful clo-

sures of the hand and fingers.

The least injurious wrist position is termed “position

of function” or neutral positioning. Neutral position

can be simulated in a very easy drop: drop your hand

at your side; the straight, flat position that your wrist

assumes as it hangs loosely at your side should be

the position you emulate with the hands raised. This

does not suggest that the wrist be held stiffly or

tensed to maintain straightness. Instead, the wrist is

meant to be an extension of the forearm, so that

movements involving the fingers and hand need to

include a slight degree of forearm “follow-through”

to avoid repetitive, whip-like or stressful bendings,

or continuous twistings of the wrist.

Problem 8: Excess Muscle Tension During

“Travel” of the Conductor’s Beat. The control of

travel, or the movement from ictus to ictus, is partic-

ularly important for communicating the desired style

of articulation, tone color, and other aspects of the

musical phrase.20 However, in long, sustained fortepassages, some conductors – in an effort to create a

powerful legato sound – retain such a high degree of

upper back, shoulder, upper arm, forearm, wrist and

hand/finger tension that muscle strain and spasming

occur.

To create the “long sustained line” in music, it is

indeed helpful if a conductor’s quality of movement

mirrors the quality and intensity of sound desired

from the ensemble. However, it may be useful for

the conductor to avoid internalizing the music’s

intensity to such a degree that the body becomes

overly tense and rigid, even if this is a strong aspect

of the music’s expressive power. The slowness and

smoothness of the travel may indeed be enough to

communicate the musical message, and one may not

literally have to emulate “the stretching of a strong

elastic band, or pulling strongly through a viscous

medium.” As with all postural and movement sug-

gestions, this one is not meant to deprive the music

of its expressive potential, but rather to look towards

efficiency and effectiveness of motion as an element

in occupational health and career longevity.

Problem 9: Excess Baton Gripping and Twisting.

This may be too obvious a problem to bring to the

attention of professional conductors. However, in

our work with younger musicians (and some more

experienced as well), we find that the use of the

baton is frequently associated with some pain syn-

dromes. The first concern may be the baton itself.

Too long or heavy a baton or handle should be

avoided; it can lead to excess hand and shoulder ten-

sion, particularly among students. The baton grip is

a very personal aspect of conducting, and the com-

parison of one style over another is beyond the

scope of this article. But, by way of general advice,

these suggestions may be useful:

(1) avoid excess arm pronation, with the palm of the

hand continuously facing downwards and outwards,

particularly in strongly articulated passages, or

while firmly gripping the baton. Excessive prona-

tion of the arm can lead in time to bicipital tendini-

tis or to pain syndromes of the rotator cuff muscles

in the shoulder;

(2) avoid stiffness or tension in the elbow, wrist and

fingers while holding the baton during strongly

accented passages. Allow some degree of flexibili-

ty in each joint of the arm to avoid excessive co-con-

traction of the agonist and antagonist muscles on

either side of the joint in question. This will help

reduce general arm and hand tension and increase

endurance during rehearsals and performances.

(3) Fingers that are not used to hold the baton should

be gently flexed and not held out in extension for

long periods of time. The continuous stretching out

of the fingers can lead to excessive hand and finger

strain.

(4) Avoid effortful wrist flexion and extension, or

excessive lateral wrist twisting. When conducting

primarily with the wrist, try to allow a slight degree

of forearm or arm follow-through during the

rebound of the beat, even when conducting smaller

JCG Vol. 30 62

beat patterns. This should help reduce wrist tendon

strain which can arise when the wrist is used

exclusively.

Problem 10: Vocal Overuse of Conductors.

Though this problem is not related to the back, arms

or hands, it is a problem that plagues many conduc-

tors, particularly those involved in teaching young

people. Vocal problems can occur for many reasons.

[For an article dealing at length with the diagnosisand treatment of vocal problems in musicians, see:“Medical Care of the Professional Voice: TheConductor’s Responsibility (Part 1)” written by Dr.Robert Sataloff, a leading otolaryngologist, whichappears on pp. 30-44 in the present JCG issue.]Frequently a conductor forces his voice to be heard

during rehearsals over the sound of talking, singing

or playing musicians. Excessive background noise

invites the Lombard Effect, the tendency to increase

the intensity of one’s voice in response to increased

background noise; over time this usually leads to

voice strain. Effortful, forceful speaking and

singing may also lead to misuse of the voice, often

manifested by excessive tension of the tongue, neck

or larynx, or inadequate abdominal support.21

Conducting may also require both singing and

speaking during rehearsals, with the conductor try-

ing to assist each musical line by singing it, even if

it means singing beyond one’s vocal range and

above the level of the ensemble. Other environmen-

tal problems may also lead to difficulties, especially

when the rehearsal environment is dusty, dry and

noisy. Humidity is a particular problem during the

winter months in some locations, since home,

school, and concert hall heating systems tend to

become quite dry without adequate humidification.

Symptoms of vocal overuse include: a change in

vocal quality, such as hoarseness or breathiness; a

change in vocal range, typically with loss of the

upper tessitura, indicating edema of the vocal folds;

pain in the various areas of the neck or the throat; or,

in severe cases, vocal nodules, hemorrhage, or con-

tact ulcers or granulomas. Treatment frequently

involves “relative rest” for the voice. Those who

suffer from chronic vocal overuse might consider

Punt’s advice: “Don’t say a single word for which

you are not paid.”22 This is particularly important

for the gregarious conductor, who may engage in

prolonged pre-rehearsal and post-concert discus-

sions in noisy, smoky “green rooms” adjacent to

concert halls. Steam inhalators can deliver moisture

and heat to vocal cords, and are frequently helpful.

If resistant respiratory tract infections occur, your

physician may prescribe erythromycin or tetracy-

cline for a full course of seven to ten days.23

Conductors with chronic vocal problems are strong-

ly urged to see an otolaryngologist, and to seek the

help of a speech and language pathologist familiar

with the problems of musicians.

In summary, what is clearly apparent to those in per-

forming arts medicine is that many of the occupa-

tional problems of conductors are to a large extent

preventable, if one can make appropriate changes in

behavior. Also apparent is the fact that performing

arts medicine has indeed begun to make significant

contributions to “the lively arts” by understanding

how to diagnose, treat and prevent occupational

problems in arts performers. But perhaps the most

positive contribution that medicine could make to

the arts is a more affirmative concept: that using

one’s body efficiently in the service of music can not

only avoid overstraining psyche and soma, but can

also enhance artistic performance and creativity.

*****

Dr. John J. Kella is Music Professor at St. George’sCollege and Ergonomics Specialist in OccupationalHealth at The New York Times. He was Coordinatorof the Music Rehabilitation Program at the MillerHealth Care Institute for Performing Artists in NewYork City and President of Performing Arts HealthInformation Services, Inc., also based in New York.

63 JCG Vol. 30

ENDNOTES

1 Oestreich, J.R., “Tanglewood Festival Opens Despite Weather and Illness,” in The New York Times, July 7, 1992, Sec. C,

p. 11.

2 Fishbein, M., Middlestadt, S.E., Ottati, V., Strauss, S., and Ellis, A., “Medical Problems among ICSOM musicians: Overview of

a national survey,” in Medical Problems of Performing Artists, Vol. 3, March, 1988, pp. 1-8.

3 “Longevity of symphony conductors,” in Statistical Bulletin, Vol. 61, Oct-Dec, 1980, pp. 2-4.

4 Guralnick, L., “Mortality by occupation and industry among men 20 to 64 years of age, United States, 1950,” in Vital Statistics– Special Reports, Vol. 53, National Vital Statistics Division, 1962, pp. 51-92.

5 Registrar General’s Decennial Supplement, England and Wales, 1970-72, Occupational Mortality. (London: HMSO, 1978).

6 “Longevity of prominent women,” in Statistical Bulletin, Vol. 60, Jan-Mar, 1979, pp. 2-9.

7 “Longevity of corporate executives,” In Statistical Bulletin, Vol. 55, Feb, 1974, pp. 2-4.

8 “Longevity of symphony conductors,” p. 4.

9 Chesterman, R., Conductors in Conversation (New York: Proscenium Publishers, Limelight Edition, 1992) p. 149.

10 Chesterman, p. 26

11 Private communication with Jonathan Sternberg, July, 1992.

12 Chesterman, p. 27

13 Fry, H.J.H., “Occupational maladies of musicians: Their cause and prevention,” in International Journal of Music Education,Vol. 2., 1986, pp. 63-66.

14 Kella, J.J., “A musician’s guide to performing arts medicine: Musculoskeletal, neurological, and dermal ailments of musicians,”

in International Musician, Vol. 87, No. 7, 1988, pp. 18-19.

15 Rothstein, J.M., Roy, S.H., and Wolf, S.L., The Rehabilitation Specialist’s Handbook (Philadelphia: F.A. Davis Co., 1991), p.

59.

16 Lederman, R.J., Calabrese, L.H., “Overuse syndrome in instrumentalists,” in Medical Problems of Performing Artists, Vol. 1,

1986, pp. 7-11.

17 Lederman, R.J., “Neurological problems of performing artists,” in Sataloff, R.T., Brandfonbrener, A.G., and Lederman, R.J.,

Textbook of Performing Arts Medicine (New York: Raven Press, 1991), p. 187.

18 Cole, R., Cohen, L.G., and Hallett, M., “Treatment of musician’s cramp with botulinum toxin,” in Medical Problems of

JCG Vol. 30 64

19 Wilson, F.R., “Acquisition and loss of skilled movement in musicians,” in Seminars in Neurology, Vol. 9, 1989, pp. 146-51.

20 Hunsberger, D., Ernst, R., The Art of Conducting (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983).

21 Bailey, N.J., Bailey, L.L., “Acute vocal cord hemorrhage in singers,” in Medical Problems of Performing Artists, Vol. 3, 1988,

pp. 66-68.

22 Punt, N.A., “Applied laryngology – singers and actors,” in Proc R Soc Med, Vol. 61, 1968, pp. 1152-56

23 Sataloff, R.T., “Care of the Professional Voice,” in Sataloff, et al., Textbook, pp. 229-86.

This is a story about a very old cello, a young boy named Richard,and his Uncle Sal

Dedicated to Salvatore Silipigni

Uncle Sal’s Cello(for Orchestra & Narrator)

byRichard Chiarappa

(listen and purchase at www.cmpub.com)

65 JCG Vol. 30

From Classroom to Podium:

Teaching All of the Craft(JCG Volume 13, No. 2, 1992)

By Jonathan D. Green

Introduction

Leading an ensemble through a successful con cert

performance is a conductor’s highest profile

responsibility. Perhaps an even greater task is

con vincing conducting students that the fundamental

duties and rewards of the conductor are outside of

the concert hall, i.e., either leading rehearsals or,

more mysteriously, in private study. For conduct ing

pedagogues it is imperative not only to inform

students of the entire spectrum of conductor

re sponsibilities, but also to instill in them a sense of

musical priorities as they prepare to lead their own

ensembles.

Although one accepted role for a director of

en sembles is as guarantor of the composer’s

intentions, the perennial issue of whether such

fidelity implies a strict adherence to the printed page

or permits some personal, interpretive reading

between the lines has become a well-worn argument.

Of course, each ap proach is valid, given the myriad

contexts available to modern music-making: surely

Josquin did not expect his music to be performed

without dynamic variety, nor should one consider

metronome mark ings in the music of Pierre Boulez

as careless sug gestions. Between such black-and-

white examples lies a vast spectrum of gray

compromises and artis tic decisions. Choices must

emanate from an in formed blend of stylistic

knowledge and score-read ing acuity.

Teachers of conducting should remember that their

primary goal is not to endow students with a

marketable skill, but rather to enumerate the skills

and knowledge that they must learn, and then to

pro vide them with the necessary tools and resources

to grasp and assimilate it all.

Developing musical literacy and instilling artis tic

values should serve as the foundation of

under graduate conducting classes. A fluency in

reading scores is absolutely necessary for the

competent ex ecution of the conductor’s duties.

Surely no one would argue this point, yet numerous

rudimentary conducting classes slight or entirely

neglect this as pect of the craft. Within many

curricula, the con ducting class may be the only academic forum for the study of performance

practice. Clearly it could serve as an ideal arena for

the logical integration of musical analysis and

performance. Unfortunately, many college and

university teachers do not avail themselves of this

opportunity.

The conducting class(es) within an un dergraduate

music curriculum could well function as the

capstone to the music major. No other course within

traditional music curricula so thoroughly com bines

the apparently diverse (to the student musi cian)

fields of music history, theory and ear-train ing.

Better ways to coordinate eye, ear and viscera are

certainly not legion.

My own undergraduate conducting classes were

taught as a segment of the music theory program.

The rationale for this arrangement was offered by

the chairman of the theory department. In his

opin ion, conducting was the ultimate stage of

ear-train ing study. His motto was, “Okay, you say

JCG Vol. 30 66

you can hear, now prove it.” Admittedly, it was a

wonderful concept; unfortunately, my conducting

sequence began in the fall of the freshman year.

Perhaps I could hear, but at that point I was

somewhat at a loss to apply terminology to what I

was hearing.

Like so many others, this curriculum never merged

the learning that occurred in other studies with

related activities on the podium. Please under stand

that my criticism is not sour grapes: the qual ity of

instruction was excellent. We all had sub stantial

podium time conducting good repertoire with

complete ensembles, and we had the luxury of four

to six semesters of study. Nevertheless, apart from a

few single-note transposition tests and an occasional

discussion of ensemble deportment, few of our

efforts deviated from making effective physical

gestures.

This format is representative of conducting courses

in many fine educational institutions. The benefit of

applying practical gestural skills before a live

ensemble is invaluable; however, all-too-often the

celebration of this activity unintentionally

eclipses other equally critical skills, the

introduc tion/instruction of which are also the

fundamental responsibility of the conductor/

educator.

The old adage, “only ten percent of a conductor’s

time is actually spent conducting,” possibly

consti tutes an exaggerated estimate. The bulk of

a conductor’s time is—or should be—spent

study ing scores, marking parts, doing research, and

with the day-to-day administration of his/her

ensemble’s activities. How many of these processes

are ever introduced into the conducting classroom?

Active conductors often bemoan the lack of

sufficient re hearsal time. Do conducting teachers

prepare stu dents for this inescapable condition by

demonstrat ing how to compensate for rehearsal

short-fall with proper and thorough preparation?

Within a school’s ensembles, students either play

under or attend con certs directed by faculty

conductors; perhaps students do recognize in

general terms the level and scope of a

faculty director’s preparedness. One must not

as sume, however, that they clearly understand the

pro cesses and procedures (and hard work) that got

the director to that point.

When one advances to graduate conducting

pro grams and professional workshops, score

analysis and performance practice play a significant

role in study and discussion. Nevertheless, it must be

un derstood that the majority of undergraduate

students who study conducting are preparing to

become mu sic teachers. Their most conspicuous

duty will be leading student ensembles. Normally,

most of these young conductor/teachers will not

have had the ben efit of such advanced training

opportunities before entering their own classrooms

and auditoriums. What is needed in their

undergraduate training, then, is sufficient exposure

to all aspects of the conductor’s art so they may

successfully grow in the early years of their first

teaching position.

Since many music schools currently require a

two-semester conducting sequence, the following

two-semester plan of undergraduate study is offered

for consideration. For programs that require more

than two semesters, the plan could easily be

ex panded and enriched commensurate with the

avail able time. In the opinion of this writer, music

schools that presently require only one semester of

con ducting are performing a serious disservice to

their students, especially the prospective music

educators whose success will depend on the

effective admin istration of their ensembles. Such

one-semester pro grams must allot more time to

conducting and re lated skills, especially if

conducting is viewed philo sophically as a capstone

course. Possible arrange ments that could expand

conducting instruction time might include

conducting in the final semester of theory, as

discussed earlier, or in conjunction with form-and-

analysis and orchestration courses.

This proposed curriculum would best serve the

students if vocalists and instrumentalists were not

separated. Each should have the opportunity to study

and conduct music for a variety of ensembles. All

67 JCG Vol. 30

musicians must sing, and isolating choral music

de prives instrumental students of a rich ensemble

reper toire. Likewise, vocalists, especially those who

wish to teach, should not be deprived of an

opportunity to become aware of performance styles

and tech niques indigenous to instrumental music.

Vocal stu dents should also be challenged with the

reading of transposed or C clef material and large

open scores. Moreover, since choral singers are

accustomed to reading and performing from a full or

condensed score, the coordination of an ensemble

that reads extracted individual parts will enhance

their under standing of the conductor’s role in such

ensemble integration.

The proposed two-semester course detailed be low

presents the course content in an organized

se quence. Following most of the topic discussions is

a list of representative texts that should provide

ap propriate source materials for that specific area of

study. These texts were judged and selected on the

basis of their content and relevance to the teaching

model. Unfortunately, a number of them are out of

print but remain readily available within academic

libraries.

First Semester

(Introduction Of Concepts)

History Of The Art

The course begins with an introduction to the

history of conducting that includes major treatises

and historical developments, as well as a survey of

the outstanding practitioners of the craft. This need

not be a dry and lengthy musicological pursuit; the

rise in the importance of the conductor and his

chang ing role in music clarifies many issues

surrounding the changing role of music in society. In

a seminar format, each student can be asked to

research one conductor and one significant

document on con ducting that could be distilled for

presentation to the class. Here, the history of

gestures can be presented and the current repertoire

of hand signals introduced.

Sources of relevant material

Bamberger, Carl. The Conductor’s Art. New York:

McGraw Hill, 1965.

Carse, Adam. Orchestral Conducting. London:

Augener.1935.

Galkin, Elliott. A History of Orchestral Conductingin Theory and Practice. Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon

Press, 1988.

Schoenberg, Harold. The Great Conductors. New

York: Simon and Schuster, 1967.

Instruments

The students proceed to a survey of instruments and

voices, exploring nomenclature, notational prac tices

and transpositions. Students can be tested

tra ditionally on this information. If a student scores

poorly on such a test, a make-up exam should be

administered until the crucial facts of this

compo nent are mastered.

Sources of relevant material

Carse, Adam. The History of Orchestration. New

York: Dover, 1964.

Del Mar, Norman. Anatomy of the Orchestra. New

York: Taplinger Books, 1985.

Forsyth, Cecil: Orchestration (2nd ed.). New York:

Macmillan, 1935.

Heffernan, Charles. Choral Music: Technique andArtistry. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1982.

Peinkofer, Karl and Fritz Tannigel (Kurt and Else

Stone, traps.).

Handbook of Percussion Instruments. New York: B.

Schött’s Sohne, 1969.

Piston, Walter. Orchestration. New York: W.W.

Norton, 1955.

JCG Vol. 30 68

Read, Gardner. Thesaurus of Orchestral Devices.London: Piman and Sons, 1951.

Sachs, Curt. The History of Musical Instruments.New York: W. W. Norton, 1940.

Bowing

Such a component should be a revelation for all

music students. It also can be informative for string

players, since ideally orchestral bowings are chosen

first for sound and second for ease of execution. As

an assignment, a student may be given string

ex cerpts to which he would apply bowings. Since

there will be some differences among the student

versions, comparisons may provide productive

discussion.

Sources of relevant material

Green, Elizabeth. Orchestral Bowings and Routines(11th ed.). Ann Arbor: American String Teachers

Association, 1991.

Rabin, Michael and Priscilla Smith. Guide toOrchestral Bowings through Musical Styles. Video

tape produced by the University of Wisconsin at

Madison, Department of Continuing Education in

the Arts, n.d.

Choral Technique

As unified string bowings help create a cohesive

sound within an orchestra, unified breathing and

diction do likewise within a choir. Good choral tone

is the result of synchronized breathing, pitch and

vowel production. General vocal technique and

is sues peculiar to vocal music should be

demonstrated and reinforced by class participation.

Here too, ex ercises for developing healthy vocal

production and consistent pronunciation should be

collected by the students. General concepts

regarding standard dic tion practices can

conveniently be presented here; however, those

students who expect to be leading performances of

works in languages with which they are unfamiliar

should be encouraged to enroll in a separate diction

class for singers.

The students should also be made aware of the need

to build sight-reading skills in the choirs they will be

directing. Sight reading is a valid concern for all

ensembles, but singers, who have no external

physical reference for pitch and often have less

train ing in reading music than their instrumentalist

class mates, must develop musical literacy on a

day-to -day basis.

Sources of relevant material

Boyd, Jack. Teaching Choral Sight Reading. West

Nyack, NY: Parker Publishing, 1975.

Cox, Richard. Singing in English, A Manual ofEnglish Dic tion for Singers and Choral Directors.Lawton, OK: American Choral Directors

Association Monograph Se ries, 1990.

Gordon, Lewis. Choral Director’s Rehearsal andPerformance Guide. Englewood Cliffs, NJ:

Prentice-Hall, 1989.

Haasemann, Frauke and James M. Jordan. GroupVocal Tech nique. Chapel Hill, NC: Hinshaw Music,

1990.

May, William V. and Craig Tolin. Pronunciation Guide for Choral Literature. Reston, VA: Music

Educators National Conference, 1987.

Sheil, Richard F. A Manual of Foreign LanguageDictions for Singers (3rd ed.). Fredonia, NY: Edacra

Press, 1984.

Swan, Howard (Charles Fowler, ed.). Conscience ofa Profes sion. Chapel Hill, NC: Hinshaw Music,

1987.

Yarbrough, Julie. Modern Languages for Musicians.Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1993.

Score Reading

At this point in the course, students should be ready

to undertake exercises in score reading. They could

begin with basic two-part and three-part exercises at

the keyboard that introduce a variety of clef

com binations. These could be followed by simple

trans positions exercises, to be presented at the

keyboard, and through solfeggio. Written

assignments include transposing excerpts of full

scores to all sounding pitches (C scores) and then to

completely transcribe full-score excerpts to closed

score. Work in clef and score reading can and should

continue throughout the remainder of the course.

Sources of relevant material

Bernstein, Martin. Score Reading. New York: M.

Witmark and Sons, 1947.

Dandelot, Georges. Manuel Practique pour l’etudedes clés de sol, fa et ut. Paris: Editions Max Eschig,

1928 (avail able through Theodore Presser Co., Bryn

Mawr, PA).

Fiske, Roger. Score Reading, 4 vols. London:

Oxford Uni versity Press, 1958.

Gal, Haas. Directions for Score Reading. Vienna:

Wiener Philharmonic Verlag, 1924.

Jacob, Gordon. How to Read a Score. London:

Boosey and Hawkes, 1944.

Melcher, Robert A. and Willard F. Warch. Music forScore Reading. Englewood Cliffs, NJ:

Prentice-Hall, 1971.

Morris, R. O. and Howard Ferguson. PreparatoryExercises in Score Reading. London: Oxford

University Press, 1931, reprint 1991.

Rood, Louise. How to Read a Score. New York:

Edwin Kalmus, 1948.

[Rarely does one encounter an undergraduate student with much––if any––fluency in C clef read-ing; it must be taught and drilled. However, duringthe teaching process, the instructor must be awarethat, left to their own devices, students invariablywill choose to identify a pitch on a newly introduced C clef by relating it to the already familiar treble orbass clef. The instructor can counter this inclina tionby starting a student’s clef study with GeorgesDandelot’s clef exercises, beginning with alto, tenor,etc. By refusing to allow the ‘relative’ approach totake hold, the instructor should be able to nurturesteady growth in clef and score reading. Ed.]

History Of Ensembles

The history of large ensembles (choir, orches tra, and

band) is often slighted in many academic music

programs but would certainly pertain to this class

and contribute to the development of an

un derstanding of style. For this reason the study of

performance practice should now be emphasized.

By integrating instrumental and vocal music,

musical style can effectively be studied from the

Middle Ages to the present.

Sources of relevant material

Carse, Adam. The Orchestra. New York:

Chanticleer Press, 1949.

Bekker, Paul. The Orchestra. New York: W.W.

Norton, 1936.

Fennell, Frederick. Time and Winds: A Short Historyof the Use of Wind Instruments in the Orchestra, theBand, and the Wind Ensemble. Kenosha, WI:

Leblanc Publications, 1964.

Terry, Charles Sanford. Bach’s Orchestra. London:

Oxford University Press, 1932.

Young, Percy. The Choral Tradition. New York:

W.W. Norton, 1971.

69 JCG Vol. 30

Second Semester

(Introduction Of Skills)

Gestures

Students practice basic gestures such as conduct ing

patterns, cues, cut-offs, etc. Such exercises may be

introduced, clarified and reflected as empirical,

abstract exercises without a specific musical

con text. Additionally, exercises in ‘psychological

con ducting’ may be explored. For example, students

could be asked to conduct a short phrase, known

only to them and the instructor, using hand gestures

to lead the ensemble (playing a unison pitch) to an

ac curate execution of the rhythm, dynamics and

ar ticulation. Such a process helps a student develop

the ability to convey to the ensemble what is in his

mind. It also helps improve the ensemble skills of

those who are interpreting these gestures in sound.

Sources of relevant material

Green Elizabeth. The Modern Conductor (5th ed.).

Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1991.

McElherhan, Brock. Conducting Technique forBeginners and Professionals (rev. ed.). London:

Oxford University Press, 1989.

Rudolf, Max. The Grammar of Conducting: APractical Guide to Baton and OrchestralInterpretation (3rd ed.). New York: Schirmer Books,

1992.

Analysis

Throughout the semester students should be

assigned for analysis a number of pieces of diverse

styles. The selections should be drawn from all

his toric periods and include instrumental and vocal

music. Throughout the term, students submit a

pre scribed analysis for each work which examines

the characteristics of melody, harmony, texture or

form, or the characteristics of a combination of these

ele ments. The goal of such exercises in analysis is

the development of memory skills (useful for all

musi cal pursuits) and the demonstration of an

intellec tual understanding of the score. Additional

assign ments may include essays that analyze

performance concerns and offer methods for

addressing them in rehearsal. Most analysis work

can be done outside of class, with a brief

consultation between student and instructor

scheduled on an as-needed basis.

Sources of relevant material

Cone, Edward T. Musical Form and MusicalPerformance. New York: W.W. Norton, 1968.

Goetschius, Percy. The Structure of Music.Philadelphia: Theodore Presser, 1934.

Green, Douglass. Form in Tonal Music: anIntroduction to Analysis. New York: Holt, Rinehart

and Winston,1965.

Score Marking

When students develop a richer sense of the

com ponents of each studied score the methods of

mark ing a score should be addressed. For decades

this subject has been a controversial one among

leading conductors and pedagogues, and ultimately

each stu dent will have to draw his or her conclusions

and develop a personal practice. In any case,

bowings and the placement of final consonants and

breaths should be preplanned and consistent. For the

stu dent conductor, making those decisions and

enter ing them into the score is a crucial process,

because it requires the development of informed

conclusions. Indications for cues and cut-offs,

demarcation of phrases, or labels for specific

musical events within scores are more an issue of

musical taste; however, for many, the process of

entering markings into the score constitutes an

effective part of the learning process. The impact of

the activity becomes greater than the value of the

product. For others, the pro cess may border on

gimmicky or intellectual indi gence. At the very

least, a number of approaches should be introduced

to conducting students; ulti mately they will draw

their own conclusions.

JCG Vol. 30 70

71 JCG Vol. 30

Sources of relevant material

Green, Elizabeth A. and Nikolai Malko. TheConductor and His Score. Englewood Cliffs, NJ:

Prentice-Hall, 1975.

Prausnitz, Frederik. Score and Podium: A CompleteGuide to Conducting. New York: W.W. Norton,

1983.

Rehearsal

Throughout the term, as works are studied, learned

and, where possible, memorized, they should be

rehearsed by the students on the podium, as is

the case in most traditional conducting courses. The

practical value of such sessions, which should ab sorb

the bulk of available class time in this semes ter, can

be greatly enhanced if the repertoire is sched uled by

genre or historic period, or both. Issues of rehearsal

techniques and performance practice can be

effectively discussed within the context of live

rehearsals. Elements of style and solutions to

per formance problems can be successfully presented

within the framework of actual execution. The use of

a Socratic approach to the issue of problem-solv ing

within the ensemble will help to strengthen the

students’ musical independence and wisdom.

By focusing on the production of quality rehears als,

the true test of the conductor’s art, effective re hearsal

techniques-and not merely elegant cheironomy-

become the key to podium success. In the teaching of

conducting, I find it easy to ne glect exploring ‘why,’

when showing ‘how’ is so much easier and quicker.

When students understand the underlying reasons

that solve a musical quan dary, they become better

equipped to address simi lar problems on their own.

Clear and effective ges tures are certainly a valuable

and important tool, but a profound musical

understanding and efficient co ordination of the

ensemble are the touchstones of good musical

leadership.

Sources of relevant material

Dart, Thurston. The Interpretation of Music. New

York: Harper and Rose, 1963.

Donington, Robert. Baroque Music: Style andPerformance, A Handbook. New York: W.W.

Norton, 1982.

____________The Interpretation of Early Music(rev. ed.). New York: W. W. Norton, 1992.

Rehearsal Procedures And Teaching Techniques

Each meeting in the second term could begin by

addressing a few specific rehearsal techniques which

may or may not apply to the works rehearsed that

day. If this course is indeed to be considered a

capstone for musicianship studies, rehearsal

proce dures may be culled from the entire conducting

fac ulty. Together with providing the students a

broader spectrum of musical perspectives, the aspect

of the program would create a healthy forum through

which a faculty may share pedagogical concepts

with each other as well as with the students. At every

stage of the program students should maintain a

portfolio of teaching and learning tools with which

to experiment.

Sources of relevant material

Holmes, Malcolm Haughton. Conducting anAmateur Orches tra. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1951.

Kohut, Daniel. Instrumental Music Pedagogy,Teaching Tech niques for School Band andOrchestra. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall,

1973.

Labuta, Joseph. Teaching Music in High SchoolBand. West Nyack, NY: Parker Publishing, 1972.

Simons, Harriet. Choral Conducting: A LeadershipThrough Teaching Approach. Champaign, IL: Mark

Foster Music Co., 1978.

JCG Vol. 30 72

Organization And Repertoire Selection

During the final term of conducting study (which

ideally could be beyond the second semester),

prac tical aspects of administration are discussed.

They should include: hiring musicians, writing

contracts, methods of purchasing and renting

performance materials, printing programs,

understanding copy right laws, creating a rehearsal

schedule (long-term and daily), selecting repertoire,

and compiling sources that list repertoire. Students

should be given––or helped to compile––a phone

and address list of music publishers and distributors.

Perhaps the most important skill is to develop a

time-line detail ing how far in advance of a concert

one should se cure the performance space, contract

the perform ers, acquire the music, mark and

distribute parts, print programs, et cetera. Although

not all of these is sues will apply to all of the

students’ real-life encoun ters, some or most of them

will. Needless to say, the importance of good

organization is pervasive in all professional

undertakings.

Sources of relevant material

Daniels, David. Orchestral Music; A Handbook(2nd ed.) Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1982.

Daugherty, F. Mark and Susan H. Simons, eds.

Secular Choral Music in Print, 2 vols. Philadelphia:

Musicdata,1987.

Eslinger, Gary S. and F. Mark Daugherty, eds.

Sacred Choral Music in Print, 2 vols. Philadelphia:

Musicdata, 1985.

Farish, Margaret. Orchestra Music in Print.Philadelphia: Musicdata, 1979.

Garretson, Robert L. Conducting Choral Music (7th ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall,

1993.

Grosbayne, Benjamin. Techniques of ModernOrchestral Conducting (2nd ed.). Cambridge, MA:

Harvard Univer sity Press, 1973.

Hawkins, Margaret. An Annotated Inventory ofDistinctive Choral Literature for Performance at theHigh School Level. Norman, OK: American Choral

Directors Asso ciation monograph series, 1976.

Kjelson, Lee and James McCray. The Conductor’sManual of Choral Music Literature. Melville, NY:

Belwin Music Corp., 1973.

Neidig, Kenneth. The Band Director’s Guide.Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964.

Wallace, David and Eugene Corporon. WindEnsemble/Band Repertoire. Greeley, CO: University

of Colorado School of Music, 1984.

White, J.P. Twentieth-Century Choral Music.Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1984.

Summary

The course outlined above could significantly

improve the relevance of the conducting offerings in

colleges and conservatories across the country,

because it prioritizes aspects of the conductor’s

work in a manner reflective of the actual task. The

premise of this teaching approach is to build a

foundation of musical independence and literacy for

life-long learn ing, so that students will be able to

continue profes sional growth while fulfilling the

conducting com ponent of their job description. As

collegiate cur ricula increasingly insist on courses

that unify ele ments drawn from the entire spectrum

of study, the course proposed here would do exactly

that by inte grating historical and theoretical studies

with the practical element of performance. Perhaps

most im portantly, it would allow students to gain a

realistic understanding of all elements of the craft of

conducting as it is or should be practiced.

*****

Dr. Jonathan D. Green is Provost of IllinoisWesleyan University (IL). He has held the positionof Dean of the College and Vice President ofAcademic Affairs at Sweet Briar College (VA). He isalso an ac tive composer and author.

73 JCG Vol. 30

Dimitri Mitropoulos: The Forgotten Giant(JCG Volume 15, No. 1, 1994)

By William R. Trotter

When Dimitri Mitropoulos died, on November 2,

1960, there were more than one hundred

Mitropoulos-led performances in the American

record catalogues; a decade later, only a dozen

remained.

At the time of his death, Mitropoulos was regarded,

both in America and Europe, as one of the most

important and influential interpretive musicians ever

to work in the United States. Yet seven years later,

when critic Harold C. Schonberg published his book

entitled The Great Conductors, Mitropoulos rated

two lukewarm paragraphs, no more.

And when the New York Philharmonic Orchestra

celebrated its 150th birthday in 1992, and every

newspaper and magazine in New York devoted lots

of ink to describing that orchestra’s long and

distinguished line of music directors, Mitropoulos

was mentioned – if indeed he was mentioned at

all – only as “Leonard Bernstein’s mentor.”

None of the many articles I read in 1992 mentioned

that in the early 1950’s Mitropoulos was regarded as

the savior of the Philharmonic, the perfect choice to

modernize its repertory and energize it from the

doldrums into which the orchestra had sunk during

the years following Toscanini’s departure.

Yet in 1957, tormented by chronic misbehavior on

the part of many Philharmonic musicians, excoriated

by an endless barrage of attacks by the critics, he

resigned, almost in a state of disgrace, and was

replaced by Leonard Bernstein. Bernstein had

idolized Mitropoulos in his youth, yet for several

years worked behind the scenes to get Mitropoulos

fired and himself instated as head of the

Philharmonic. With his heart broken, his health

ruined, Mitropoulos shifted the main focus of his

activities to Europe, where he died three years later

while rehearsing Mahler’s Third in Milan.

Thus it has come about, on the eve of the centennial

of Dimitri Mitropoulos’s birth, that he has been

almost totally forgotten, relegated to the status of a

footnote in the very land where he scored his

greatest triumphs, and whose musical life he

enriched beyond measure.

That is certainly not the case in Europe, where he is

remembered with the same awe as Toscanini and

Furtwängler, and where his memory has been

honored by the release of many splendid live

performances on compact disc.

To measure this fall from grace – a process that has

caused not only the man’s reputation but the very

record of his achievements to become only

the dimmest wisp of cultural memory – and to

understand how a man once spoken of as the

“next Toscanini” could suffer such a fate, it might be

best to briefly outline his American career.

He became music director of the Minneapolis

Symphony in 1937, following two sensational guest

appearances with the Boston Symphony Orchestra,

and remained in that post until 1949. He tranformed

a decent provincial orchestra into an ensemble that

ranked just below the first tier of American

symphonic organizations; and in the process – often

to the bewilderment of his good-natured but

basically conservative mid-western audiences – he

made Minneapolis an internationally recognized

center for contemporary music. John Sherman, the

JCG Vol. 30 74

Twin Cities’ best music critic and author of a very

fine history of the Minneapolis Symphony,

summarized the Mitropoulos era in these words:

More than any other conductor before him, he

regarded a concert performance as an act of faith

and a spiritual necessity, a high and holy rite

whereby the public was not so much entertained

as led to the mountain top.

And while some of the public, as time went on,

did not always want to climb the peak, being of

shorter wind than Mitropoulos and much less

eager for the heights he had charted, they were

acutely aware of musical experiences the like of

which they had never undergone. There was a

compulsion in this conductor’s music that could

be accepted or resisted, as the case might be, but

never, ever, ignored.1

From his very first season in Minneapolis,

Mitropoulos supported, not only morally but in

many cases, financially, dozens of musicians who

have since become major figures in their profession.

They included composer David Diamond and

conductor Leonard Bernstein, whose subsequent

professional efforts profoundly changed and

immeasurably enriched American musical culture.

For a decade, beginning in 1949, he was either

music director or principal conductor of the New

York Philharmonic, and was also, for several

seasons, the most important conductor to appear at

the Metropolitan Opera. He gave either the world or

the United States premieres of more than one

hundred works, some of them now regarded as

among the most significant of the century: Mahler’s

Sixth, Shostakovich’s Tenth, Samuel Barber’s

Vanessa, the symphony of Anton Webern; the list is

both long and distinguished.

Against monolithic inertia and occasional outright

hostility, he modernized the repertory of the New

York Philharmonic and made it, for the first time in

decades, an institution of immediate and powerful

relevance. And when he guest conducted in Boston

and Philadelphia, he not only electrified audiences

but also won the passionate devotion of the hard-to-

impress musicians in both orchestras. Indeed, for a

time the personnel of both the Philadelphia and

Boston orchestras wanted Mitropoulos for their next

music director, but maneuvers by Ormandy in

Philadelphia and Koussevitzsky and others in

Boston prevented any such appointment.

And so it was his fate to finish his American career

in New York, where the very qualities that made him

such a unique and radiant spirit – his stubborn

refusal to play the publicity games both

management and the public seemed to want the

Philharmonic’s conductor to play, his naïve belief in

his “mission” to champion difficult and neglected

music, no matter what the box office consequences

might be, his inability to secure disciplined behavior

and eventually even disciplined playing from the

long-suffering, truculent, unruly members of his

orchestra – were the very qualities that finally

caused his downfall. Yet those who plotted against

him, when interviewed about the matter many years

later, often admitted that, in the words of Isaac Stern,

“there was an immense scope to him that even his

enemies recognized.”2

Very well, then: what sort of a conductor wasDimitri Mitropoulos?

An intensely kinetic and physical one, to begin with.

Music historian Roland Gellatt described him this

way: “...he conducts with his entire body. When the

music soars, he is a bird in flight; when it droops, he

huddles as though broken in spirit.”3 This mirroring

of the music score and its changes by means of

constantly shifting physical analogies was,

for Mitropolous, spontaneous and natural, an

irrepressible function of the tremendous internal

dynamism that possessed him when he conducted.

On a strictly analytical level, though, Mitropoulos

candidly admitted that while “I wouldn’t

recommend that a conductor deliberately make his

gestures with an audience in mind, nevertheless it is

easier for the audience to understand the meaning of

the music if the conductor is a bit of an actor.”4

Until his doctor urged him to start using a baton,

after his first heart attack in 1954, as a means of

conserving energy, Mitropoulos always conducted

bare-handed. “The baton can achieve ensemble,” he

would say when interviewers questioned him about

the matter, “but it cannot be as expressive as the

hands and body.”5

75 JCG Vol. 30

forming an intensely personal physical response to

the information contained in the score. “Watch me

closely,” he said to the Boston Symphony players,

when he first rehearsed them in 1936, “and I will

give you everything.”8

After observing Mitropoulos during that rehearsal,

Boston Globe critic Rudolph Elie wrote:

He will live every part,

personally direct the

entrance of every voice,

shape and focus every

phrase, build up every

climax, underscore

every rhythm and blend

all elements of music

together in unanimity

and concord, using

every part of his body

from his head to his

feet, and everybody

who sees him knows

precisely what he

means.9

On the night of

his debut with

the Minneapolis

Symphony, January 29,

1937, the usually

phlegmatic Twin Cities

audience turned into

what one eyewitness

described as “an excited

mob.”

Here’s what critic John

Sherman wrote in his

morning-after review:

Mitropoulos appeared to be a fanatic who

had sold his soul to music and conducted the

orchestra like a man possessed. Bald, lithe, and

rawboned, he

exploded from the wings, walked to the rostrum

with the loose-limbed lope of a professional

hiker, spread his long arms and tapering fingers

in a mesmeric gesture.

With the first downbeat he started punching the

air barehanded, unleashing a weird repertoire of

frenzied gestures and scowls and grimaces that

registered every emotion from terror to ecstasy.

Reviewer after reviewer commented on his podium

style as being “odd,” “highly unorthodox,”

“disturbingly individual” or simply “strange.”6

What made it so was the involvement of

Mitropoulos’s entire body. Whereas the conductor

most like him in style, Leopold Stokowski, made it

a rule never to move from the waist down, focusing

all his powers

through his hands,

arms, and face,

Mitropoulos used

his head, eyes,

shoulders, fists,

legs, waist, every

part of himself,

to contribute

something to the

visual analogy he

was creating. For

listeners unused to

such an athletic

style, their first

sight of Mitropoulos

in action was

an occasion for

amazement. Many

of the verbal

descriptions tend

toward the comic

(“like a Greek

bartender frantically

shaking cocktails,”

wrote Winthrop

Sargent in The NewYorker7), or lapse

into caricature,

as though a

Mitropoulos performance were some sort of granmal seizure.

Nevertheless, when one was sitting in the orchestra,

or even today, watching Mitropoulos on archival

video footage, one could see the music passing

through his body as if by some process of

superconductivity; you could see his conception of

the music come into being, dynamic, organic,

recreative, flowing powerfully from his intellect and

Dimitri Mitropoulos rehearsing Krenek's Third Piano Concerto inMinneapolis, c. 1943

(photo from the collection of Oliver Daniel)

JCG Vol. 30 76

His quivering frame and flailing fists gave the

picture of a man quaking with a peculiarly vital

and rhythmic form of palsy. It was as if the

music were an electric current that passed

through his body to make it jerk and vibrate.

This was music so full of blood, muscle, and

nerves as to seem alive and sentient, and bearing

unmistakable overtones of great thought and

abiding spirit.10

Needless to say, this vibratory, sometimes wild style

took some getting used to, even by the most willing

of orchestral musicians. In a Minneapolis rehearsal

of one especially tricky and rhythmically complex

modern score, one of the players raised his hand and

said: “Maestro, tell me, at this point do we come in

on the fourth beat – is that an upbeat sign you’re

giving us or is it a sideways motion of your head?”11

Mitropoulos honestly couldn’t answer the question.

He scratched his head for a moment, then respond-

ed: “Look, never mind how my beat is. If you don’t

come in, it’s my fault, and you shouldn’t worry

about it. The conductor has to do it by telepathy, and

if that telepathy doesn’t work, then it’s the sender’s

fault, not the receiver’s.”12 Sometimes, he would

move beyond an especially troublesome passage by

saying: “Never mind – we’ll understand each other

when this time comes during the performance,”13

and more often than not, they did.

It must be admitted that for all the excitement of his

best concerts, there were times when Mitropoulos

over-conducted. Seldom was a piece of music,

however modest its scope or uncomplicated its

historical style, simply allowed to speak for itself.

Everything was focused through the lens of the

conductor’s personality – in Mitropoulos’s case,

through his very soul – and that could at times result

in performances that were so violently personal as to

prevent the original intention of the music from

coming through on its own terms. This was what

made him a superb conductor of modern and

late-Romantic music, a quirky, eccentric and often

inadequate conductor of Mozart and Brahms. But

then, the musical world is and always has been full

of sporadically interesting Brahms conductors, but

Mitropoulos virtues were much, much rarer and

more precious.

There was one additional attribute that distinguished

Mitropoulos from other conductors: he memorized

every score, not only before he led the performance,

but before the first rehearsal – whether it was the

200,000 notes in a Mozart symphony or the more

than one million notes of a Mahler symphony. This

self-imposed discipline required enormous extra

effort and time, and the cumulative strain of forcing

himself to do this undoubtedly contributed to his

declining health during his New York tenure.

To casual interviewers, Mitropoulos had a glib

answer as to why he did this: “You don’t expect an

actor to come on stage to play Hamlet while still

carrying the script.”14 Maybe so, but no one would

have thought twice about it when it came to works

of the length and complexity of Wozzeck or Elektra.The reason for this compulsion to memorize even

the most difficult scores came from some place deep

in the conductor’s psyche: when he led a successful

performance, he never spoke of the accomplishment

by saying simply, “Yes, that was a good

performance.” Instead, it was “a great moral

victory,” “a spiritual triumph,” or even “a gift from

God.”

Considering the staggering amount of time and

mental energy required to memorize a score such as

Wozzeck, one encounters in Mitropoulos a deep

current of self-abnegation, perhaps even of

masochism. It was not fun to memorize those

scores. But for him, the act of performing music

was not just a symbolic mountain climb, a simple act

of achievement. It could also be an act of expiation.

It seemed to those who knew him well that the more

difficult and demanding the score, the more

sleepless hours of study demanded of him to master

it, the greater the sacrifice required to do justice to

the music, the more satisfaction Dimitri derived

from the purging rite of actual performance. After

observing Mitropoulos for twelve years, both

personally and professionally, critic John Sherman

concluded that this entire memorization ritual

constituted a kind of willing self-immolation,

“a duty the gifted must assume, as payment for

being gifted, and as an example to the world around

them.”15

77 JCG Vol. 30

Dimitri did not, as was sometimes said, have

“a photographic memory” – it was simply a matter

of training his mind, over decades of struggle, the

way an athlete would train his body. Over and over

again, the composers interviewed for my book

remarked on the fact that, by the time Mitropoulos

began the first rehearsal of one of their

compositions, the conductor knew the score better

than they did. To understand how Mitropoulos

viewed the conducting profession and his role as a

successful conductor, it is necessary to refer to a

spiritual crisis that occurred during his adolescence.

The Mitropoulos family was intensely religious –

two of his uncles were respected prelates in the

Greek Orthodox hierarchy – and the young Dimitri

was the most devout pilgrim of the lot. As a youth,

he spent much time in retreat among the monastic

communities on Mt. Athos, he sought out hermits

and mystics, he even became the “pastor” of a group

of neighboring children, to whom he would give

impromptu sermons. He slept on stone floors, ate

course black bread with the monks and hermits, and

talked incessantly about spiritual matters.

Part of what made a monk’s life so appealing to him

was, in fact, these denials of creature comforts.

Mitropoulos was intensely – mystically – drawn

toward an early Christian ideal of self-sacrifice that

tended to embrace even the extremes of self-denial

and discomfort, a medieval proposition that one’s

spiritual strength grows greater in direct proportion

to one’s denial of the flesh. There is no question but

that this same impulse, when it manifested itself in

later decades, sometimes verged on outright

masochism. But for the adolescent pilgrim seeking

a purer existence and feeling himself inexorably

drawn toward a very personal vision of God, the

ideal of monastic life was quite romantic in its

appeal – especially in the setting of Athos, so

isolated from the outside world that it might as well

have been in an alternative universe.

So the young Mitropoulos was at a crossroads. In

one direction lay music, which fulfilled him as no

other human activity could; in the other direction lay

either the priesthood or the life of a monk. So before

wholly committing himself once more to the Athens

Conservatory, he attempted to find out if there were

not some way to combine the two callings.

At the climax of this internal crisis, Mitropoulos had

what must have been a truly Dostoyevskian dialogue

with a member of the Greek Orthodox hierarchy.

This person was not one of his uncles, or at least was

never identified by Mitropoulos as such, but he may

have well been a trusted spiritual advisor to whom

the uncles directed this young pilgrim. Mitropoulos

gave identical accounts of the event in dozens of

interviews:

He opened the dialogue by describing his love for

music and his belief in its spiritual power; yet he

also confessed that he was drawn, with equal

force, toward the ideal of monastic life. He

sought some assurance that this might not be an

either/or choice, that the Church might steer him

to a religious career that could accommodate

both of his passions.

No, said his advisor. Although the Greek

Orthodox Church has a heritage of vocal music

that is vast and glorious, it permits no musical

instruments in its services.

Surely the Church would not mind if he pursued

music on his own, in his free time, Mitropoulos

countered.

That, too, would not be possible, replied

the priest. The Church allows no musical

instruments on sacred ground.

Mitropoulos responded that he would be content

if he could just have a little harmonium in his

cell.

Not even a harmonium, said the priest.

“I knew then,” the conductor later recalled in

numerous interviews, “that I just could not do

it.”16

But he did find a way to combine these seemingly

contradictory choices. He brought to the podium

a sense of religious dedication, a fierce and

uncompromising zeal on behalf of music he deemed

unjustly neglected or that others deemed too

difficult; and over the years, as he strove to fulfill

this mission, he pared down his lifestyle to the

severe and essential, seldom partaking of the

JCG Vol. 30 78

comforts and perquisites his status and salary

entitled him to.

And if commentators or colleagues chose to refer to

him as “monkish,” he did not mind in the least.

During a trip to Rome in the summer of 1912,

Dimitri discovered his ideal and lifelong aspiration:

St. Francis of Assissi – perhaps the one man in the

history of Christianity who came close, for a time, to

turning the Christian ideal into a reality.

In the stories about the young Francis, who was a

minstrel, a party-goer and a rake before he got

religion, Dimitri recognized the same tension

between flesh and spirit that tormented himself.

Both men had a strong streak of carnality, which

both suppressed. This tension became the dynamo

that fueled Dimitri’s accomplishments: for most of

his adult life, he channeled everything into his

music-making, even as Francis learned to

subordinate everything to faith. Already, by

mid-adolescence, Mitropoulos had acquired a

bedrock Franciscan belief in the value of sacrifice

and the comparative worthlessness of worldly

goods, the same ideal of a dedicated and therefore

necessarily austere lifestyle. Dimitri gave himself to

music, allowed himself to become possessed by it,

in much the same way as Francis gave himself to

Christ. And there would be many occasions, when

he was fired with zeal to communicate the essence

of some new and difficult composition, that the

conductor must have envied St. Francis preaching to

the birds.

This conductor’s manner of working with an

orchestra also derived from his study of St. Francis,

particularly the eighth Franciscan precept set down

in 1215 in a “letter to the faithful,” and entitled:

“How Those Who Command Should be Humble.”

It reads, in part:

Anyone who has the right to give orders should

remember that “the greater should be as the

lesser;” he should be a servant to his brothers and

deal with them mercifully, as he would wish to be

treated if he were in their place. Nor should he

rage against a brother who sins, but patiently and

kindly counsel him and help him.17

In a 1956 interview, the conductor expounded on his

Franciscan creed:

I have always found peace of mind and soul – to

whatever extent we can achieve this state – by

likewise striving at all times as I would have

others strive, by acting as I would have others

act. Francis taught me that to cajole or threaten

is never as effective as to set an example

yourself.[18]

Neither Mitropoulos nor Francis was an especially

practical man, but Francis at least lived in an age

when such impracticality could be valued on its

own medieval terms. Dimitri, however, reached

maturity in an era in which true humility and open

spiritual commitment made some orchestral

personnel uneasy and drew from them scorn and

ridicule, especially from the hard-bitten and

frequently ill-used men of the New York

Philharmonic, who tended to take gross advantage

of any conductor who did not tyrannically threaten

and cajole them. It was easier to be God’s fool in

twelfth-century Umbria than in twentieth-century

Manhattan.

When young musicians asked Mitropoulos for

advice about how to become a conductor, his answer

was often not to their liking: by all means study

conducting, he would say, but only because it will

make you a more complete musician. If you are

consumed by ambition to become a famous

conductor, you are embarked on a quest for power,

rather than a quest for musical excellence, and that,

he said, could be “a devastating thing.”

“Not many conductors are needed, really,” he

admonished one young supplicant, “but good

musicians, on the other hand, are always needed.”19

The philosophical foundation from which the Greek

conductor operated, his very deepest principles,

precluded treating any orchestra, even the

Philharmonic at its surliest and most intractable, in a

tyrannical manner. For Mitropoulos, such a posture

would be patiently hypocritical, unsustainable, and

eventually would be recognized as such by his

musicians. For better or worse, he was trapped

within his own philosophical principles no less than

79 JCG Vol. 30

within the innate gentleness of his character. That

his beliefs and personality could leave him terribly

vulnerable was something he understood early in his

career and accepted without reservation.

Indeed, throughout

his professional life,

Mitropoulos carried two

quotations in his wallet.

One of course was from

St. Francis: “God grant

that I may seek rather to

comfort than to be

comforted, to understand

rather than to be

understood, and to love

rather than be loved.”

The other was from

Socrates: “If I must

choose between doing an

injustice and being

unjustly treated, I will

choose the latter.”

How this philosophy

related to the daily routine

of conducting a major

orchestra was addressed

by Mitropoulos in an

interview given soon after

he moved to New York in 1949:

A conductor does not stand alone on the podium

– he can move his listeners only if he has

previously comprehended each musician as an

individual human being, at the same time he

leads the orchestra as an entity. I believe he can

do this only if he steps down from the podium

and communicates to his musicians the feeling

that he is not a dictator but an apostle. A great

interpretation represents a communal effort, and

in no case does it move from the conductor’s

baton to a pack of subjugated slaves. Only when

the conductor makes an obeisance full of love to

every musician, only when he shows an open

hearted interest in each musician’s psychological

and personal situation, can he make the orchestra

the true medium for the composer’s message.

Only in this manner can he hope to carry the

audience along with him and establish

communication. In the history of music, there

are only two types of conductor: they tyrant and

the colleague. For myself, I choose to be the

second type.20

When Mitropoulos spoke

of “an obeisance full

of love to every

musician,” he was

venturing into metaphor

as well as metaphysics.

In numerous interviews,

Dimitri revealed the

repressed sensual side of

his nature in his often

startlingly explicit

references to the

sublimated sexuality of a

conductor’s relationship

with an orchestra – that

the leader and the

musicians engaged in a

form of intercourse,

which in effect produced

a “child,” in the form of

the musical performance

itself. Each must give to

the other, he would say;

like a skillful lover, the

conductor attempts to

draw forth the innermost

responses of the ensemble, and the players respond

with music-making that surpasses their ordinary

level of commitment. From the procreative heat of

this exchange springs a great interpretation.

By working with his orchestra from these moral and

philosophical bases, Dimitri believed he was not

only being true to his own nature but also that he

was furnishing an example of total commitment,

total devotion. He took it as a given that intelligent,

sensitive musicians would understand this and

respond in kind. For the most part in Minneapolis,

they did. In New York, even among the many

Philharmonic players who understood full well what

Mitropoulos was trying to do and why, the response

was often grudging and tainted with tough-guy

contempt.

Dimitri Mitropoulos backstage prior to a New YorkPhilharmonic concert, c. 1956 (photo by Aram Avakian)

JCG Vol. 30 80

Mitropoulos was never, ever, a hypocrite. In a

profession noted for the inflated egos of its

practitioners, Mitropoulos was capable of writing

these words to composer Leon Kirchner:

I wish you good luck in your new conducting

assignments and that you also get the delight of

that unusual and cowardly profession – to lead

other people to play for you and perform

compositions that are written by others. That is

why most people prefer to be conductors rather

than composers or instrumentalists. In spite of

everything that you may muster as an argument,

there will always remain this one thing: that with

a little personality and salesmanship, it is the

easier way out to be a conductor. I always

realized this fact. That is why I never denied my

embarrassment at being promoted by the fates or

destiny to follow this profession. One cannot be

humble enough before such a privilege of getting

glory and acclaim, not only from using someone

else’s emotions, but also from having someone

else to express them for you.21

Interestingly enough, however, there were times

when Mitropoulos spoke of his profession in the

most down-to-earth manner. In one interview, given

during the late 1940s, he remarked: “Well, the

conductor’s job is not really that much different

from a prostitute’s. It consists of performing to

make other people happy, no matter how you feel

yourself. . . .and then passing the hat.”22

Given the conductor’s philosophical stance, it

follows that many Mitropoulos concerts were

sometimes challenging for his listeners. “A concert

is not a place to relax,” he often said; “a good

audience listens hard.”23

In Minneapolis, the intense relationship between the

community and the conductor was so strong that

Mitropoulos was able to program numerous

challenging works in spite of opposition from some

members of the board and management. Except for

the truly calcified reactionaries, the Minneapolis

audience learned to accept the experience of hearing

new and challenging music. They took pride in their

city’s international reputation for being culturally

progressive, even if the price for that stimulation

was occasional bafflement or irritation. The

audience generally came to terms with the fact that

their conductor was a missionary, not an entertainer,

and most were agreeable to the situation because of

the high drama Mitropoulos brought to whatever he

conducted. But friction occurred on different nights

for different people. Mitropoulos was always “on,”

but there were nights when even the most tolerant of

listeners simply did not feel like following him to

the mountaintop, when even listeners with broad

taste and high intelligence just wanted to sit there

and be diverted, taken out of themselves for two

hours.

In New York, the friction between the conductor’s

compulsion to be a missionary on behalf of

neglected music ran head-on into the realities of the

box office and the impossible-to-please attitude of

an audience more spoiled and fickle than any on

earth. By the mid-1950s matters reached such a

point that patrons would approach the Carnegie Hall

box office and inquire about the length of the new or

novel composition on the program that evening. If

the piece were more than ten minutes long, most of

them turned away.

To assess just how fickle and hard-to-please the

Carnegie Hall audience truly was, or how

recalcitrant the Philharmonic could be, consider the

tale of Mitropoulos’s performance of Webern’s

Symphony, Op. 21, in January of 1950.

When word got out in the music community that

Mitropoulos was going to have the Philharmonic

learn the Webern piece, a large number of

composers and academics, John Cage included,

attended the open rehearsals as well as the

performance. According to Milton Babbitt, nearly

half the orchestra section of Carnegie Hall was full

of listeners at the start of the first rehearsal.

Everything went well until Mitropoulos started

working on the Webern piece. When asked to begin,

many of the players made faces and rude noises, and

some minutes into the score, the Philharmonic’s

cantankerous harpist picked up his part, walked

forward to the podium, flung the music angrily at the

conductor’s feet, then stalked off the stage.

In the icy silence that followed, Mitropoulos turned

to the dark auditorium, his shoulders slumped and an

81 JCG Vol. 30

expression of bewildered pain on his face. He

spread his hands imploringly and said: “What can I

do?”

The harpist was persuaded, for the good of the

orchestra, to put up with the Webern piece – all ten

minutes of it – and the performance went on as

scheduled. In a monumental exercise in bad

psychology, however, the author of the

Philharmonic program notes warned the audience

that it “probably has never been asked to listen to a

more exacting composition, in the whole 180-year

history of the Society.”24 Not surprisingly, there

was much fidgeting and grumbling in the audience

during the performance – one man yelled “No!” so

loudly that hundreds of heads turned in his direction.

At the end there were hisses and boos aplenty, which

only caused the more progressive pockets of

listeners to applaud more vigorously.

When this demonstration calmed down,

Mitropoulos came out and tried to clear everyone’s

palate with the lush melodies and billowing

climaxes of the Rachmaninoff Symphonic Dances.

After the final tam-tam crash that ends the work,

composer Milton Babbitt rushed backstage to

congratulate the conductor on his Webern

performance. Babbitt was startled to realize that the

applause for the Rachmaninoff was scarcely fuller

or more enthusiastic than that which had greeted the

Webern – exactly, and perversely, the opposite of the

effect he would have predicted. Backstage, he found

Mitropoulos in a state of icy rage, drawing

tight-lipped on his cigarette and gesturing furiously

in the direction of the audience.

“You see?” he cried to Babbitt, “They don’t even

like that s—!”25

There can be no doubt that, from time to time

and increasingly in New York as the years of

burdensome routine took their toll, the conductor’s

internal compass lost its bearings, and he offered

programs that amounted to ill-judged pot-pourris

rather than coherent concepts. A case in point was a

concert on October 29, 1953. The program’s second

half began with Schoenberg’s long, tumescent tone

poem Pelleas und Melisande – a work that needs all

the help a conductor can give it. Then, for some

unfathomable reason, Mitropoulos chose to segue

into some tacked-on excerpts from de Falla’s LaVida Breve! The effect was to dilute utterly the

impact of the Schoenberg by “throwing in” what

thoughtful listeners might have regarded as a quick,

cheap sop to the hoi polloi. The entire program,

which would have been perfectly proportionate if

Mitropoulos had just stopped with the Schoenberg

composition, was rendered unbalanced and

compromised.

On another occasion, he chose to preface a

performance of Mahler’s Sixth with Morton Gould’s

flashy and colorful Showpiece for Orchestra, and

the critics blasted him for it. Not only did Gould’s

frothy diversion get perceptually crushed by the

Mahler juggernaut, but by juxtaposing it against the

Austrian composer’s apocalyptic seriousness and

lofty metaphysical content, Mitropoulos unfairly

made a well-crafted piece of light music seem

incredibly tacky.

Part of the problem was that Mitropoulos seemed to

regard each composition as a discrete entity to be

performed and digested by the audience as a

“thing-unto-itself,” not necessarily related to what

came before or after it, either on the same evening or

within the context of a whole season. He did not sit

down and methodically plan a whole season around

a single theme, a single school, a single composer.

His programs could be didactic, lopsided, even

hectoring in their weight and juxtaposition. If three

obscure or neglected works happened to take his

fancy on a given week, then the audience would hear

all three, bim-bam-boom. If the majority of his

listeners happened to be on the same wavelength as

the conductor, so much the better. If not, too bad.

But there was a missionary’s purpose in this

scattergun approach, one which perhaps today we

can appreciate more than his contemporaries.

Mitropoulos was fighting against the “ghettoization”

of the new and the unfamiliar. He instinctively saw

where it could lead – where in fact it HAS led in

today’s boring, abysmal, self-defeating emphasis on

the tried and true – and he felt morally obligated to

oppose the phenomenon.

JCG Vol. 30 82

For all their eccentricity, his programs were driven

by a coherent purpose: to present a cross-section of

all the different musical styles of his time. Lacking

precognition as to which styles and individual works

would make the historical cut, and lacking the

arrogance that presumes one’s personal aesthetic

taste will coincide with the verdicts of history and

consensus, Mitropoulos knew that inevitably some

of the music he conducted would be marginal or

ephemeral. But at least it would have a hearing.Too many conductors and orchestra managers had

already adopted the circular, self-defeating attitude

that the public wants to hear only the proven canon

of masterpieces or the relatively small number of

contemporary works that had, through dint of

repetition, gained acceptance. An outgrowth of the

“Masterpieces Only” syndrome of Toscanini, this

attitude holds that if a piece of music is not already

listed in the circumscribed canon, it must not,

ipso facto, be any good, so therefore why waste time

and energy performing it? By the mid-1980s,

the arguments against Mitropoulos’ erratic but

enthusiastically open-armed programming

philosophy had triumphed, and the effects of the

“Masterpieces Only” syndrome were clear for all to

see: aging, dwindling concert audiences, and a

possible terminal decline, not only in the cultural

importance of the overplayed masterpieces, but in

the level of inspiration and vitality that characterized

their interpretation.

Ironically, today’s music lovers can only feel great

envy for the listeners in Minneapolis and New York.

What a contrast Mitropoulos provides to the bland,

predictable programs that are today’s norm! What a

contrast his zeal and advocacy pose to the music

directors who, whether through intellectual laziness

or capitulation to the know-nothingism of their local

boards, seem to have infinitely less knowledge of

accessible twentieth-century repertoire than does

any moderately experienced record collector.

What’s more, if Dimitri Mitropoulos gave his

audiences heavy doses of Krenek, Schoenberg,

Sessions and Boris Blacher, he also gave them new

and unfamiliar works by Vaughan-Williams,

Mahler, Gould, Diamond, Malipiero, Respighi,

Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Milhaud and a host of

other eminently listenable composers, music which

requires, when you come right down to it, no more

from an audience than the willingness to stretch

one’s taste buds, the same spirit of adventure that

makes Chinese restaurants so popular.

Can anyone today seriously maintain that Dimitri’s

programming philosophy, for all its fretful

asymmetry and restlessness, was not better for the

institution of music as a whole than today’s

suffocating emphasis on the same One Hundred

Masterpieces, with its gradual effect of debasing

both the masterpieces and the very act of

concert-going itself?

In the time allotted in this forum, I cannot cover

more than a few aspects of this fascinating man’s

tragic career. A full discussion of Mitropoulos

would have to expound on his incredible generosity

to others, his numberless and always private acts of

charity and support, his soaring post-war reputation

in Europe (ironically somewhat concomitant with

the deterioration of his situation in New York), the

venom and spite of many of the critics, his

strangely skewed and disappointing legacy of studio

recordings, and the torment and vulnerability he

endured because of his sexual orientation. For a full

discussion of those matters, as well as a season by

season chronicle of his triumphs and failures, I refer

you to my book, Priest of Music: The Life of DimitriMitropoulos, which will be published in October by

Amadeus Press.

Let me close, instead, by offering three snapshots

taken from the hundreds of hours of taped

interviews that formed the foundation for the

research.

To illustrate his missionary role at its finest, here is

violist Harry Zartzian’s description of how he com-

pelled the Philharmonic to understand a work that

virtually every player hated on first acquaintance.

The occasion was his triumphant 1951 concert per-

formance of Wozzeck.

He astonished everyone by showing up for the

first rehearsal with the whole thing memorized.

At that first rehearsal, I hated it. What sort of

piece was this? What was so great about it? How

83 JCG Vol. 30

can you tell if you’re playing the right notes? I

thought the score was crazy and I thought I was

going to go crazy trying to play it. My God, why

do we have to learn this stuff? And then, it

gradually began to happen. Dimitri began to

explain how it was all put together, what each

detail meant, just patiently untying the knots in

the score. By the third rehearsal, I was really

starting to understand it – and I could tell the

other players were going through the same

process. And by the time we actually performed

it, I thought Wozzeck was one of the greatest

pieces ever composed. Dimitri’s ability to

explicate and de-mystify these complex modern

scores was just unbelievable.26

Here is what soprano Frances Greer recalled about

one concert she sang under his leadership:

The first time I actually looked at Mitropoulos

during a performance, during a passage in which

I was not active, it was as though he had been

transformed. He wasn’t the same man I knew

socially or in rehearsals or backstage. His

demeanor, his aspect, all of him, was transcen-

dental. It seemed to me that he was exposing his

spirit, his very soul, and it was so compelling and

so personal that I could not continue to look at

him. It was like staring at the sun.27

And finally, after a concert in Minneapolis, an

elderly woman came backstage and grasped

Mitropoulos in a familiar hug as he was on his way

to his dressing room. After a moment’s hesitation,

the conductor returned her embrace with a smile of

recognition. It transpired that this woman was from

Greece and had been a longtime friend of the

Mitropoulos family.

“Dimitri,” she said happily, “you recognized me!”

Turning to the room-at-large, she gestured

expansively and announced: “I haven’t seen him

since the days of the priests! You know that as a

young man he went and lived on Mount Athos!”

Turning back to the conductor, she wagged her

finger remonstratively at him. “Look at you now!

And you were supposed to become a priest! What

happened?” Mitropoulos smiled broadly and pointed

to the podium: “Well, here I am, and there is my

pulpit.”28

William R. Trotter is a writer, editor and music critic.He has published 4 critically acclaimed novels: Winter Fire (E. P. Dutton, 1993), a novelbased on the life of Jean Sibelius, Sands of Pride

(2002), Fires of Pride (2003) and Warrener’s Beastie

(2006). His non-fiction works include Frozen Hell:

The Story of the Russo-Finnish War of 1939-1940

(Algonquin Books, 1991) and Priest of Music: The

Life of Dimitri Mitropoulos published in October,1995 by Amadeus Press.

ENDNOTES

1 Sherman, John, Music and Maestros: The Story of theMinneapolis Symphony Orchestra (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1953), p. 277.

2 Isaac Stern, tape-recorded interview by Oliver Daniel,

August 25, 1985.

3 Gelatt, Roland, Music Makers (New York, Alfred A. Knopf,

1953), p. 37.

4 Gelatt, p. 37.

5 Trotter, William R., Priest of Music: the Life of DimitriMitropoulos (Portland: Amadeus Press, 1995), p. 70.

6 Trotter, p. 71. Quotes excerpted from numerous reviews.

7 Sargent, Winthrop, Review, The New Yorker, Oct. 15, 1953.

8 Trotter, p. 78.

9 Elie, Rudolph, Review, Boston Globe, July 7, 1944.

10 Sherman, John, Review, Minneapolis Journal, January 8,

1938.

11 Sherman, John, Music and Maestros, p. 237.

12 Sherman, John, Music and Maestros, p. 237.

13 Trotter, p. 108.

14 Trotter, p. 112.

15 Sherman, John, Music and Maestros, p. 277.

16 Trotter, p. 29.

17 Trotter, p. 32.

18 Mitropoulos, Dimitri, “What I Believe,” Hi-Fi Music atHome, May-June 1956.*****

19 Mitropoulos, Dimitri, “The Making of a Conductor,” Etude, January, 1954.

20 Mitropoulos, Dimitri, quoted by Apostolios Kostios in “Der Dirigent Dimitri Mitropoulos,” Ph. D, thesis, University of Vienna, 1983.

21 Dimitri Mitropoulos to Leon Kirchner, October 31, 1955.

22 Sargent, Winthrop, “Dimitri Mitropoulos,” Life Magazine, February 2, 1946.

23 Sherman, John, Music and Maestros, p. 281.

24 Trotter, p. 293.

25 Milton Babbitt, interview by Oliver Daniel, March 18, 1985.

26 Harry Zaratzian, interview by Oliver Daniel, December 12, 1984.

27 Francis Greer, interview by Oliver Daniel, October 15, 1983.

28 Trotter, p. 171.

end of the first movement, an occurrence judged to

be quite appropriate, given the excellence of the

playing. Later, however, in the Post’s “Great

Moments in Music” segment of its annual Year inReview, the opening night audience of DerRosenkavalier was congratu lated for allowing the

first-act curtain to close com pletely before “breaking

the mood” with bravos. In a subsequent article about

the Lyric Opera of Chicago’s Ring cycle, the Postnoted that the Lyric Opera’s program book contained

the entreaty, “The audience is respectfully but

urgently requested not to interrupt the music with

applause.”3

Judging from the program book directive, it would

appear that the propensity to interrupt music with

applause is not unique to our nation’s capital.

Therefore, in order to shed some light on the history

of the applause phenomenon, the following article is

tendered. Hopefully, it will assist conductors in

coping with those unexpected or unsolicited

audi ence sounds and silences by expanding

conductor knowledge of when at least some of the

world’s great composers encouraged or discouraged

manifesta tions of audience approval. It is not the

intent of this survey to offer a solution to the

problem. Nev ertheless, in due course I will offer an

opinion re garding its source.

In the Classical era, rendering applause after each

movement of a symphony was a common practice

that has been copiously documented. Perhaps not so

well-known is the fact that at Haydn’s London

concerts, symphony movements were not only

ap plauded but even encored. The London Diary, as

cited by H. C. Robbins Landon, reported that at the

initial concert of the series, the second movement of

85 JCG Vol. 30

Are Our Audiences “Skeered to Clap”?:

A Brief Survey of Applause Practices

(JCG Volume 16, No. 2, 1995)

By Robert Ricks

About two years ago, a letter to The Washington Postsparked a public controversy that raged for more

than a year. The letter’s content attacked the

“boor ish” practice of Washington audiences who, it

seems, had developed a habit of applauding at

inappropri ate times during the course of a concert or

opera. The Post’s response to the letter, which

appeared on the editorial page, suggested that

concertgoers in side the Beltway should be granted

more freedom in deciding when to express their

appreciation of a well -rendered symphony or

concerto movement, opera aria, etc. The Post’srationale for this position de rived from its apparent

disdain of the tradition which obligated classical

audiences to “sit with hands folded...listening to

people cough.” The editorial went so far as to

suggest that Leonard Slatkin might consider

extending to the Kennedy Center faithful a

directorial dispensation from this antiquated

tradi tion by turning to the audience before a

particularly promising movement and announcing

“If you like this part, don’t sit on your hands.”1

As might be expected, the Post was deluged with

letters both praising and denouncing its position. A

pro-applause letter pointed out the unfairness of

“Domingo or Pavarotti...[getting] almost instant

gratification at the end of an aria while Perlman or

Brendel have to wait and wait for applause.”

An other letter accused the Post of promoting

“lowbrow yahooism.”2 Even after the letters had

stopped (or at least were no longer being published

by the news paper), echos of the debate continued in

the Post’s reviews and articles. In November of

1995, a Post review noted that a performance of a

violin concerto was “interrupted” by applause at the

JCG Vol. 30 86

Haydn’s Symphony No. 96 was encored; the third

movement “was vehemently demanded a second

time also, but the modesty of the composer prevailed

too strongly to admit a repetition.”4 Haydn,

nevert heless, was not so modest as to refrain from

writing forte chords at the conclusion of some of his

soft, slow movements to ensure applause, a practice

evi dent in Symphony No. 97.5 After the “middle

move ment” of Symphony No. 100 (presumably the

sec ond), shouts of “encore! encore! encore!

resounded from every seat: the Ladies themselves

could not forebear. ...”6

A decade earlier, Mozart’s “Paris” Symphony had

received applause from the Parisians after each

movement, but, as Mozart wrote his father, because

the applause that followed the second movement

was deemed insufficient, Wolfgang decided to

compose a new movement to appease Le Gros, the

concert manager. It should be noted that when

writing the original version of the symphony,

Mozart had an ticipated applause during the first and

last move ments and deliberately composed to allow

for it.

In the middle of the first allegro was a pas sage

which I knew could not fail to please. All in the

audience were charmed by it, and there was great

applause, but as I knew when I wrote it what an

effect it would make, I brought it round an extra

time at the end of the movement, with the same

result, and so got my applause da capo.7

As he had in the first movement, Mozart was

expected to begin the last movement with the

fa mous grand coup d’archet, that great stroke of the

bow on a unison figure that would clearly

demon strate the Parisian orchestra’s ability to

produce a clean attack. In the third movement,

however, Mozart began piano and delayed the tuttifor eight bars, at which point the audience broke into

delighted applause.8

In the Vienna of Beethoven’s day, applause was also

being heard during the playing of a movement. In a

performance of the Septet, for instance, Beethoven’s

friend, the violinist Ignaz Schuppan zigh, “played so

beautifully that he was often inter rupted by general

applause.”9 Especially ardent ap plause occurred

during the first performance of the Scherzo of the

Ninth Symphony, “presumably at the startling entry

of the timpani at the ritmo di tre battute,” where the

listeners “could scarcely restrain themselves, and it

seemed as if a repetition then and there would be

insisted upon.”10 According to Louis Spohr, who

played in the premiere performance of the Seventh

Symphony, the second movement of that work had

actually been encored after its first hearing.11

Applause after movements of a symphony was still

occurring in Brahms’s day. Conducting a

performance of the Brahms First at the Leipzig

Gewandhaus in 1882, Hans von Bülow noticed that

the third movement had received less applause than

had the two previous movements. Demonstrating

the impulsiveness for which he was well known, von

Bülow promptly repeated the third movement.12

Applause during the music was still common at the

beginning of this century, according to Joseph

Szigeti, who witnessed it in performances by such

players as Sarasate, Ysaye, and Jan Kubelik.

I can testify from personal experience that in

former days, before “music appreciation” reared

its unlovely head and made purists and pedants

out of too many music-lovers, the end of the

32nd-note variation in Beethoven’s “Kreutzer”

Sonata was invariably the signal for an outburst

of applause.13

Szigeti also wrote about one of his performances

with Richard Strauss:

At one playing of a Mozart concerto...the Master

and I exchanged happy glances at the conclusion

of the serenely joyous first move ment. Naturally

we expected a similarly happy reaction from our

audience and when we met with polite and stoney

silence instead, Strauss turned to me and

muttered in his thick Bavarian dialect:

“The so-and-so newspaper scribblers and

commentators! This is their work—making

people skeered to clap when I know they feel like

doing it.”14

87 JCG Vol. 30

In placing the blame for “skeered” audiences on

“newspaper scribblers,” one can almost hear the

trumpets of Heldenleben gearing up for yet another

battle between Strauss and his critics.

Nevertheless, some composers apparently pre ferred

that the applause for their works be postponed until

the end of the entire composition. The con nected

movements of Schumann and Mendelssohn are

surely designed to eliminate post-movement

ap plause, but audiences were not always

cooperative. As late as 1921, Sir Donald Francis

Tovey wrote that “untimely” applause so frequently

covered the transition between the first two

movements of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto

that he had never heard this remarkable passage

without it being vir tually obliterated by applause.15

Although he is re membered for his model program

notes, Tovey was no mere teacher of “music

appreciation,” to use Szi geti’s pejorative term. He

was the pianist for the Joachim quartet until

Joachim’s death, having per formed with “Uncle Jo”

since the age of eighteen.16 He also frequently

accompanied Casals, for whom he wrote a cello

concerto. Tovey’s piano concerto was first

conducted by Hans Richter.17 Known as an

orchestra builder, Tovey was the founder of the Reid

Orchestra in Edinburgh, of which he wrote in jest to

Sir George Henschel (first conductor of the Boston

Symphony): “We are making good progress. The

difficult passages go well, and even the easy ones

are beginning to sound quite decent.”18 Given his

musicianship, training and erudition, when Tovey

labelled the impulsive applause during the

Mendels sohn transition a “disaster,” and when he

told his Edinburgh audience of Mozart’s ploy to seek

his ap plause “da capo,” admonishing them not to

follow the lead of the Parisians, he was signalling

that the days of uninhibited appreciation were

almost over.

What musical personality could have been pow erful

enough to challenge the long-established tra dition of

spontaneous applause? An examination of opera’s

performance and response traditions, where singers,

via the encore, could receive instant gratifi cation

from the audience’s instant adulation, will be

instructive.

Mozart’s Figaro had been so well-received in

Vienna that many arias and other segments had

been “applauded and encored at the first

three perfor mances,” compelling the Emperor to

limit encores in subsequent performances to just

the arias.19 No such restrictions applied in

19th-century Paris, however, where audiences were

urged to applaud and encouraged to demand encores

by members of what Berlioz called the “Success

Bureau.”

This “Bureau,” of course, was a claque, a prac tice

which could trace its origins to the Emperor Nero,

who had set up a guild of men to applaud his

singing. Accordingly, Berlioz refers to the Parisian

claque as “Romans” and to its leader as the

“Em peror.” In his Evenings With the Orchestra,20

(which informs us that bored orchestra players

would talk freely amongst themselves during the

performance of second-rate operas), Berlioz

recounts a conversa tion between the self designated

“Emperor” and the theater’s manager. It reads:

[Emperor:] “Sir, you are at the head of a dra matic

concern of which I know the weak and strong

points. So far you have no one in charge of

Success: allow me to take it on. I offer you a cash

down-payment of twenty thousand francs and a

royalty of ten thou sand.”

[Manager:] “I want thirty thousand in cash”

(the usual manager’s reply).

[Emperor:] “Ten thousand shouldn’t spoil a

bargain between us. You’ll have it by to morrow.”

[A Musician:] “What are you talking about? It’s

the manager who is paid? I had always thought it

was the other way round.”

[Emperor:] “No indeed; those positions are

bought, just like seats on the stock ex change....”

Once an agreement was reached, the Emperor would

go forth and recruit his claque from among students

and the stage-struck. They would pay the Emperor a

small fee for tickets and in return, were trained to

JCG Vol. 30 88

applaud on cue. But how did the Emperor recover

the money he paid to the concert manager? A

per former who wanted to be “sustained” by the

claque would offer free tickets to the Emperor who

would respond, “you see, I don’t need any. What I

need tonight is men, and to get them I have to pay

them.” The hint was taken and the performer “would

ren der unto Caesar” five hundred francs.

The performer who ranks above the one who has

just let himself be bled, soon hears about this

generous deed, and the fear of not being “taken

care of ” according to his merit and relative to the

extraordinary care being lav ished upon his

inferior, induces him to offer the promoter of

success an unquestioned thousand-franc note,

sometimes more...and so on from the top to the

bottom of the whole theatrical personnel. You can

now under stand why and how the theatrical man-

ager is paid by the chief of the claque and how

eas ily an Emperor gets rich.

Berlioz goes on to relate how he originally be lieved

that his Mass of 1825 had been well received, but

was subsequently convinced by an Emperor that its

success had been less than it might have been.

[Emperor:] “Why the devil didn’t you let me

know? We’d have gone in a body.”

[Berlioz:] “I didn’t know you were so fond of

sacred music.”

[Emperor:] “We don’t like it at all, what an idea!

But we would have warmed up your audience to

the Queen’s taste.”

[Berlioz:] “How do you mean? You can’t applaud

in church.”

[Emperor:] “I know. But you can cough, blow

your nose, shift your chair, scrape your feet, hum

and lift your eyes to heaven—the whole bag of

tricks, don’t you know. We could have done a

sweet job for you and given you a real success,

just as we do for a fashionable preacher.”

Certainly, this is vintage Berlioz. He goes on to

define the applause from families of the performers

as “the claque which Nature supplies.” Who among

us has not benefitted from the applause of our

rela tives? Nevertheless, in such a scenario in Paris,

an Emperor would convince us that amateur

applause has a “poor attack,...no technique, no

ensemble, and hence no power.” Better to leave the

clapping to him who can rouse his “Roman troops”

with such signals as:

Brrrrr! ! when this sound comes from the lips

of the Emperor...it is a signal...that the

hand-clapping must be executed with great

speed and accompanied by stamping. It is the

order to “dent the lid.”

Caesar’s two hands, brought together in one

vigorous slap, then raised in the air for the space

of a second, give the order for a sud den burst of

laughter.

If the two hands remain in the air longer than

usual, the laughter is to be prolonged and

followed by a round of applause.

Hum! uttered in a particular way should stir

tender emotion in Caesar’s soldiers; on hear ing it

they are to melt, shed a few tears, and murmur

their approbation.

If the reader has not already equated the claque’sinducement of applause to television’s use of

“canned laughter,” we might point out that Berlioz

saw fit to confess that some performers sank “so low

that if the living could not be hired to applaud them,

they would make do with the applause of a set of

dum mies,” even of a clapping machine, for which

they would not be above turning the crank

themselves. (The only applause the performers

might disdain was that coming from a string player

tapping the back of his instrument with the wood of

the bow: in such cases, the singers could not be

certain whether the “applause” was prompted by

admiration or ridicule.)

It is not surprising to learn that Richard Wagner

(whose Die Meistersinger concluded with Hans

89 JCG Vol. 30

Sachs’s resounding praise of “Holy German Art”)

reacted to this Parisian excess. In 1876, when he

opened the Festspielhaus at Bayreuth, he attempted

to control the audience as thoroughly as he

controlled the musicians. Because it was Wagner

and because it was Bayreuth, I am reasonably

convinced that the manners imposed on the

Bayreuth audiences even tually became the accepted

behavior of all audiences, not just for opera but for

all classical music. The force needed to stem the tide

of audience spontaneity was now in place.

One of Wagner’s first innovations to ensure the quiet

attention of his audience was to have them sit in

darkness. Although a darkened house was not

revolutionary at the time of the founding of

Bayreuth, the idea was so unusual that it was noted

in newspa per accounts of the festival and by such

figures as Tchaikovsky (“darkness reigns in the

auditorium”), Edward Hanslick (“auditorium is

completely dark ened”), Felix Weingartner

(“impenetrable dark ness”), and Sir George Grove

(“dark theater”).21 Mark Twain, an astute opera

lover, wrote that in New York, patrons “sit in a glare

and wear their showiest harness: they hum airs, they

squeak fans, they titter, and they gabble all the

time.” Of the Bayreuth scene he wrote that the

listeners dress casually and “sit in the dark and

worship in silence.”22 Just so today. When the house

lights are lowered in our own halls, we take for

granted what that Perfect Wagnerite, George

Bernard Shaw, called the “Bayreuth hush.”23

Controlling the applause of the audience, how ever,

was not as simple a matter as turning off the house

lights. Shaw (who in his young days was a

professional music critic, writing under the

tongue- in-cheek nom de plume “Corno di Bassetto”)

noted that prior to Wagner, the separate numbers in

operas had been arranged to “catch the encores that

were then fashionable.”24 By abandoning the

sequence of independent, self-standing pieces and

replacing them with music that was constantly in the

process of “becoming,” Wagner, as he revealed to

Matilde Wesendonk, created a new musical form,

the secret of which was his “art of transition.”25

One section of music flows without break into the

next, leaving no place for the audience to applaud or

for encores to be inserted.

It appears, however, that Wagner’s Bayreuth

au dience had to be carefully trained to withhold its

ap plause. Edvard Grieg, who attended the first Ringas a correspondent for a Norwegian journal,

reported that applause had occurred during DasRheingold. However, before the next day’s Walküre,Wagner had “arranged for placards to be put up to

tell the audi ence not to interrupt the performance

with applause while it was still under way” because

it interfered with the continuity of the work.26

Because the re striction of applause was such a new

concept, Grieg wrote that “if Wagner had wanted no

applause dur ing the performance, he should have

sent out his ‘rules for conduct in the theater’ well

before it all started, for he must have known that

people would break in with their applause.”27

After the 1876 Ring, no performances were given at

Bayreuth until the premiere of Parsifal in 1882.

Once again, Wagner was faced with the task of

train ing an entirely new audience. Angelo Neumann,

a director of the Leipzig Opera who had already

taken the Ring on tour, reported that after the first

perfor mance of Parsifal, Wagner appeared on stage

and

... begged the public not to applaud again as they

had during the course of the perfor mance. So the

second performance passed with a calm and

reverent silence. This called for another speech

from the Master. He must explain, he said, that it

was only during the performance itself that he

objected to ap plause; but the appreciation due to

the sing ers at the fall of the curtain was quite a

dif ferent matter. So, at the next performances, the

people expressed their enthusiasm at the close of

each of the acts.28

After Wagner’s death in 1883, his wife, Cosima,

gradually but firmly assumed dictatorial powers at

Bayreuth, becoming what Shaw called “the chief

remembrancer” of Wagner’s staging and tempos.29

Lilli Lehman, the original Woglinde, who had

re turned to sing Brunnhilde in 1896, said that to get

her way, Cosima would say, “You remember,

JCG Vol. 30 90

Sieg fried, do you not, that it was done this way in

1876.” Siegfried, who had been just six years old at

the time, would dutifully respond, “I believe you are

right, mamma.”30

In addition to the Ring and Parsifal, other works by

Wagner were added to the Festival and performed in

such a “mood of solemnity and quasi-religious

sanctity”31 that Mark Twain called his trip to

Bay reuth a “pilgrimage” to the “Shrine of St.

Wagner.” 32 It goes without saying that the darkened

theater and deferred applause survived Wagner’s

death.

Such a radical change in audience behavior could

not have been sustained without a strong esthetic

premise: the longer applause is delayed, the more

intense it becomes when it is finally unleashed.

A fine description of this effect is given by Mark

Twain, who heard Tannhäuser, his favorite opera,

along with Tristan and Parsifal at Bayreuth in 1891.

To fully appreciate Twain’s assessment quoted

below, it should be remembered that, in addition to

being a great writer, as a popular figure on the

lecture cir cuit, he became a great performer as well,

with sub stantial first-hand audience experience.

I have seen all sorts of audiences...but none

which was the twin to the Wagner au dience at

Bayreuth for fixed and reverential attention.

Absolute attention and petrified retention to the

end of an act of the attitude assumed at the

beginning of it. You detect no movement in the

solid mass of heads and shoulders. You seem to

sit with the dead in the gloom of a tomb. You

know that they are being stirred to their

profoundest depth; that there are times when they

want to rise and wave their handkerchiefs and

shout their approbation, and times when tears are

run ning down their faces, and it would be a re lief

to free their pent emotions in sobs or screams;

yet, you hear not one utterance till the curtain

swings together and the closing strains have

slowly faded out and died, then the dead rise with

one impulse and shake the building with their

applause.33

Twain’s description makes it amply clear that at

Bayreuth, every note penned by the composer was

heard without interruption. Applause restrictions

caused the emotions of the audience to build like the

pressure within a pre-eruption volcano, to erupt only

at the end of an act in a spectacular explosion of

applause. We know from our own experience that

Wagner’s darkened house and deferred applause

were effective because they are the conditions under

which we usually work. But was this set of

con ditions imported from Bayreuth? Were the

produc tions at Bayreuth prestigious enough to

influence the rest of the musical world? Apparently

so.

By 1891, Festival tickets were being scalped at three

or four times their face value,34 and the audi ence had

become so international that, except from the stage,

hardly a word of German was to be heard there!35

In the words of today’s travel agents,

Bay reuth had become a major “destination” to be

vis ited by anyone of cultural inclinations or

pretensions.

Many Americans went to Bayreuth simply be cause

it had become the summer “in” thing to do. They

were derided as “Wagnerized Yankees” and were

thought to be mere “philistine poseurs.”36 Such

people could have been relied upon to brag of their

cultural achievements when they returned home and

may well have shown what Shaw called

“connois seurship” in the display of their Bayreuth

manners.

Despite the obvious social prestige that derived from

a Bayreuth visit, some people still came for musical

reasons. Although he is supposed to have joked that

“Wagner’s music is better than it sounds,” Mark

Twain had been an admirer of Tannhäuser for many

years, writing that it was “music to make one drunk

with pleasure, music to make one...beg his way

round the globe to hear.”37 In 1892 Shaw wrote that

an intermezzo in an opera by Bantock had been

encored, not because the audience had particularly

liked it, but because the frequently encored

inter mezzo in Cavalleria Rusticana had “put it into

its head that to recognize and encore an intermezzo

showed connoisseurship.”38 The crowd had found a

91 JCG Vol. 30

safe place to interject its applause and, in doing so,

they had shown that they were connoisseurs of the

new etiquette which allowed applause only at

‘ap propriate’ places. There are, of course, no

intermezzi in the Ring or Parsifal, but can we not

imagine that those who had made the pilgrimage to

Bayreuth and had learned the new rules of conduct

might have shown off their erudition back home by

stifling the applause of their churlish neighbors who

dared to applaud at the “wrong” time? Wouldn’t the

uniniti ated have become “skeered to clap?”

Professional musicians, of course, continued to

travel to Bayreuth, and, to continue our speculation,

they surely would have disseminated Wagner’s

con cert deportment. Henry (later Sir Henry) Wood

at tended the Festival many times and became

friendly with Felix Mottl, a name familiar today

from his notations in the Dover editions of some of

Wagner’s operas. After being assistant to Hans

Richter for the first Ring, Mottl eventually became a

prominent Bayreuth conductor, also conducting

Wagner in Lon don, where he caused Wood to be

named musical advisor for a series of Wagner

concerts.39 Wood be gan his famous Promenade

Concerts in 1895 and, as reported in this journal, he

allowed no applause be tween movements.40 And is it

not possible that such a practice by a conductor of

Wood’s stature could have caused Tovey (who

himself attended the Festi val in 1897) to call the

spontaneous applause that occurred after the first

movement of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto a

breach of concert manners?

Another assistant to Richter in 1876 was Anton

Seidl who later conducted at the Met and who was

to lead the New York Philharmonic in the premier of

Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony. Wagner had

praised Seidl to Angelo Neumann, and when

Neumann took the Ring on tour throughout

Germany, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, Hungary,

Austria, and Italy, Seidl was his conductor.41 From

Szigeti we learn that the Italian audiences, not yet

attuned to the new etiquette, invariably applauded

the Rhine Maidens. To Neumann, called by Szigeti

“an over- awed disciple of Wagner,” this was

“sacrilege.” But Seidl snorted in reply, “Sacrilege?

Just you wait and watch the old man’s eyes light up

when I tell him! Sacrilege indeed!”42

If this contradictory reaction between Neumann and

Seidl, both echt Wagnerians, is not confusing

enough, Robert Gutmann reports that during the

original run of Parsifal, the Flower Maidens were

received with clapping and bravos. This uncouth

behavior was angrily suppressed by the faithful who,

because of the darkened house, did not know that the

Philistine was Wagner himself.43 Felix Wein gartner

confirms this and writes that he had been warned of

it, given that Wagner was “accustomed” to showing

his approval at that point in the opera.44 Although

our own conventions of proper audience

comportment seem to have come from Bayreuth,

and despite Wagner’s “Rules for Conduct in the

Theater” and his detailed directives to the audience,

Wagner’s personal concert practices are of little use

when it comes to deciding when it is proper to

applaud.

Currently, faint reverberations of the exchange of

opinions concerning applause referred to at the

beginning of this article may still be read in the Post.Last July a review of Yo Yo Ma’s performance of the

Dvorak Cello Concerto said that he received

a “well-earned round of applause after the first

move ment.” This occurred at Wolf Trap Farm,

where the “refreshing spontaneity” of the outdoor

audience recalled “concerts of an earlier era.”45

In Novem ber, on the other hand, a review chided a

Kennedy Center audience for “an awful lot of

ill-timed and inappropriate applause” during a

performance of the Vaughan Williams SeaSymphony.46 Both the pro and con aspects of the

applause at these two con certs can be defended. The

end of the first move ment of the Dvorak is so

exciting that applause seems almost necessary, while

an outburst of applause does shatter the serenity of

the end of the Vaughan Will iams “On the Beach at

Night Alone.” Perhaps the most important thing to

note in these reviews is the mere fact that applause

was mentioned at all. Some consensus on the timing

of applause seems neces sary, but lacking Mozart’s

Emperor to decree it or Berlioz’s “Emperor” to

prompt it, our audiences re main confused. It was

stated earlier that this article would not presume to

JCG Vol. 30 92

solve the problem. It indeed has not, but hopefully it

has demonstrated that most of the pre-twentieth-

Century composers expected (can we say

“endorsed”?) more uninhibited applause than is

deemed proper today.

*****

Robert Ricks was Professor Emeritus at TheCatholic University of America (DC) and Con ductorEmeritus of the University Orchestra, which he conducted for over 2 decades in con certs at theKennedy Center, Philadelphia’s Acad emy of Musicand Carnegie Hall.

ENDNOTES

1 “Close to Home,” The Washington Post, 23 April 1995;

“Music and Manners,” 30 April 1995.

2 “Music and Manners,” The Washington Post, 15 May 1995.

3 “Music,” The Washington Post, 17 November 1995;

“Clas sical,” 31 December 1995; “Opera of the Big Shoulders,”

31 March 1996.

4 H. C. Robbins Landon, Haydn Symphonies (Seattle:

University of Washington Press, 1969), p. 50.

5 Robbins Landon, p. 51.

6 Robbins Landon, p. 59. The reviewer’s “middle movement

is, of course, confusing, but since the second movement ends

with such dynamic strength, my feeling is that it was at this

point that the Ladies lost their ability to forebear.”

7 Donald Francis Tovey, Essays in Musical Analysis, vol. 6,

“Supplementary Essays” (London: Oxford University Press,

1959), p. 22.

8 Tovey, “Supplementary Essays,” p. 23.

9 Donald W. MacArdle, “Beethoven and Schuppanzigh,” TheMusic Review, vol. 26 (1965), p. 9.

10 Alexander Wheelock Thayer, Life of Beethoven, ed. Elliot

Forties (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 908.

11 Louis Spohr, Autobiography (New York: Da Capo Press,

1969), p.187.

12 Johannes Brahms, The Herzogenberg Correspondence,trans. Hannah Bryant (New York: Da Capo Press, 1987), p.

150.

13 Joseph Szigeti, With Strings Attached (New York: Alfred A.

Knopf,1947), p.194.

14 Szigeti, p.195.

15 Donald Francis Tovey, Essays in Musical Analysis, vol. 3,

“Concertos” (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), p.178.

16 Mary Grierson, Donald Francis Tovey (London: Oxford

University Press, 1952) p. 31.

17 Grierson, p. 108. Tovey liked to repeat to soloists at re -

hearsal Richter’s remark to him at rehearsal: “Have you a vish?

Come on, I am not touchy!”

18 Grierson, p.186.

19 Stanley Sadie, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Music andMusicians (London: Macmillan, 1980), s.v. “Mozart,” by

Stanley Sadie.

20 Hector Berlioz, Evenings With the Orchestra, trans. Jacyues

Barzun (New York: Alfred A. Knopf), pp. 76-90, and 95-98.

N.B.: Quotes cited in the body of this article have been freely

paraphrased.

21 Robert Hartford, Bayreuth: The Early Years (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 54, 74, 129, and 139.

22 Hartford, p.154.

23 Hartford, p.162. Not everyone was ready to grant Wagner

full attention. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, who painted Wagner’s

portrait, writes, “The cries of the Valkyries are all right for a

bit, but when they last six hours at a stretch they are enough to

send you mad. I shall always remember the scandal I caused

when, at the end of my tether, I struck a match before I left the

hall.” [Edward Lockspeiser, Music and Painting (New York:

Harper and Row, 1973), p.161.]

24 George Bernard Shaw, Shaw on Music, ed. Eric Bentley

(Garden City: Doubleday & Co., 1955), p. 30.

25 Robert W. Gutmann, Richard Wagner (New York: Harcourt,

Brace & World, Inc., 1968), p. 381.

26 Hartford, p. 67.

27 Hartford, p. 68.

28 Hartford, p.129. Parsifal, of course, is a special case due to

its religious aspect and the custom gradually grew at Bayreuth

to allow applause only after the second and third acts. Robert

Gutmann writes that “many who applaud a Bach Passionmaintain an ecclesiastic silence throughout and after Parsifalout of a ‘naive sense of propriety.’ ” (Gutmann, p. 444.)

93 JCG Vol. 30

appears to have provoked the furious row between Wagner and

Cosima that led to his fatal heart attack.” (Barry Millington,

The Wagner Compendium (New York: Schirmer Books, 1992),

p.121.)

45 “Slatkin in Control,” The Washington Post, 29 July 1996.

46 “Oratorio Society’s Sea Symphony,” The Washington Post,12 November 1996.

29 Frederic Spotts, Bayreuth, A History of the Wagner Festi val(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), p.106.

30 Spotts, p.116.

31 Spotts, p. 99.

32 Hartford, p. 149.

33 Hartford, p. 154. The audience’s desire to wave their han-

kerchiefs in appreciation is not something that Twain just

imagined. Nineteenth-century audiences had apparently been

used to doing just that. At the first performance of Beethoven’s

Ninth, “either after the Scherzo or at the end of the Symphony,

while Beethoven was still gazing at his score, Fraülein Unger,

whose happiness can be imagined, plucked him by the sleeve

and directed his attention to the clapping hands and waving

hats and handkerchiefs.” (Thayer, p. 909.)

34 Spotts, p. 110.

35 Spotts, p.113.

36 Spotts, p. 25.

37 Hartford, p.153. Twain’s daughter, Clara, was a soprano

who gave recitals with her husband, pianist Ossip Gabrilowich,

conductor of the Detroit Symphony from 1919 to 1935.

38 Shaw, p. 170.

39 Eric Blom, ed., Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musi cians(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1954), s.v. “Wood, (Sir) Henry,”

by H. C. Colles.

40 Henry Bloch, “Books in Review,” Journal of the Conduc -tors Guild, vol. 15, no. 2, p.128.

41 Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner, vol. 6 (New

York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946), p. 683.

42 Szigeti, p.196. Szigeti had said that he wasn’t sure of the

conductor, suggesting that it might have been Richter. In ad -

dition to spontaneous applause, we note that in Italy (so that

the audience could follow the libretto) the house lights were

left on until Toscanini, a Bayreuth conductor, insisted other -

wise. (Marcello Conati & Mario Medici, traps. William

Weaver, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994),

p.106.

43 Gutmann, p. 444.

44 Hartford, p.131. Gutmann (p. 444) believes that Wagner

wanted to treat Act II as Italian opera, but Frau Wagner may

have had a different opinion regarding her husband’s breach of

his own rules. One of the Flower Maidens was the young

Carne Pringle with whom Wagner may have been having an

affair. “In any case, the announcement of a visit from her

Benjamin Britten’s WAR REQUIEM:

Notes on Conducting

(JCG Volume 23, 2002)

By Paul Vermel

The War Requiem was commissioned for the

consecration of the Cathedral of St. Michael in

Coventry, which took place on May 30, 1962. The

cathedral, the first to be built in England in many

years, was on the site of (but not directly upon) the

original medieval cathedral, which had been nearly

completely destroyed by bombs during World War

II. In the preface to the full orchestral score,

published by Boosey & Hawkes in their

Masterworks Series, Malcolm MacDonald says this

about the work:

Inspired by the acoustical space in which

the premiere was to take place, Britten conceived

the War Requiem for three spatially and

instrumentally differentiated groups, needing two

conductors. The Latin text is set for soprano,

chorus and orchestra; [Wilfred] Owen’s poetry is

set for tenor, baritone and a separate chamber

orchestra of 12 players; while a choir of boys’

voices sings Latin hymns with organ

accompaniment.

At the first performance of the War Requiem in the

Coventry Cathedral, Benjamin Britten conducted the

Chamber Orchestra and two male soloists, and

Meredith Davies conducted the full orchestra,

soprano soloist and chorus. Having two conductors

certainly makes life easier for each. The physical

setting in the Cathedral must have made this

arrangement feasible and practical; however, on a

normal concert stage using two conductors is neither

convenient nor visually or dramatically convincing.

One single conductor is less distracting, more

efficient and can work very well, but the technical

and gestural problems for a single conductor are

considerable. I hope that these notes that address the

various conducting problems in the War Requiem are

helpful.

In conducting this work I experimented with the

placement of the Chamber Orchestra, and settled on

a rectangular space to the left of the podium, with the

tenor and bass soloists in front of the podium.

Example 1

Conductor

This placement permits the use of the left hand for

warnings for the Chamber Orchestra to be ready,

given a certain number of measures before their

entrances. These warnings are given while

conducting the large forces with the right

hand/baton. The suggestion for dealing with

problems connected with conducting the boys’ choir,

particularly in the final movement, is given in the

Appendix.

1. REQUIEM AETERNAM (chorus seated)

I suggest beating the 5/4 measures in a four

pattern, with an extra beat in the center (Ex. 2). This

gesture shows only one downbeat per measure,

which is less confusing than conducting 3 + 2 or 2

+3.

The Boys’ Chorus stands two bars before 3, and it is

helpful to have the harmonium or organ, which

accompanies the boys add a “C” (Ex. 3) to the chord

Examples 2 and 3

Perc. Bass Horn Bsn. Ob. Vc. Vln II

Timp. Harp Cl. Fl. Vla. Vln I

Barit. Tenor

○ ○

□Chamber Orchestra

JCG Vol. 30 94

95 JCG Vol. 30

before 3 to help the boys hear their entering pitch in

the correct octave. Conduct quarter notes to begin

the boys’ music, and conduct quarter notes in the 3/4

measures. Conduct the 4/4 measures in 2. In the 6/4

bars combine patterns to communicate the music

accurately: dotted quarter in one gesture, followed

by quarter-half, as at the second part of the 5th

bar

after rehearsal 3. Conduct the 3/2 measures in 3, and

conduct the 5/4 measures in quarter notes, 3 + 2 (as

at 4 before rehearsal 7). The Boys’ Chorus director

could sit nearby, whether the boys are placed on

stage or off, and warn them of upcoming entrances,

particularly later in the work.

At four measures before rehearsal 9 warn the

Chamber Orchestra with the left hand, indicating the

passing measures with four fingers, then three, two

and one. Cue the Chamber Orchestra on the last beat

before 9. Cue the chimes, and release the Chorus on

beat two of rehearsal 9. Give a clear cut-off to the

orchestra at the second bar after 9, while conducting

the Chamber Orchestra with the left hand. The tenor

soloist stands on the downbeat of 9. In this section

conduct the 5/4 measures as before, in a four pattern,

with an extra beat in the center (see Ex. 2).

At 13 (always animated) conduct the 6/4 measures

in 2, the 3/4 in 1 the 5/4 in two (with division of 3 +

2 or 2 + 3, according to the needs of the music) and

the 3/2 measures in 3. The 7/4 bar before rehearsal

15 should be conducted in 3 (2 + 2 + 3). The 3/4 bar

before 16 should be conducted in quarter notes, with

slightest stretch of tempo with the diminuendo.

The Chorale at rehearsal 16 requires a subtle beat.

The gestures should not be a clear two or four, but a

smooth “tenuto” beat, like a broken beat that

simulates a subdivision of the half note which leads

each chord change separately but with a connecting

gesture. (It’s easier to demonstrate than to describe!)

A pause for latecomers to enter the hall could come

at the end of the first movement.

2. DIES IRAE (Chorus stands)

The fermata over a whole note equals

approximately 6 beats. Conduct the bar before 17

in 2 to set up the “as three” pattern for the 7/4

(2 + 2 + 3). This meter is difficult for everyone,

including the conductor. It requires small, sharp

beats and absolute metronomic precision. The

tendency for the chorus and orchestra is to rush the

three quarter notes (that usually fall at the end of the

measure) – there may be a subconscious leftover

feeling of a triplet. It is not necessary to dictate each

of the three quarter notes with equal emphasis,

as this can become too busy. Choose the most

appropriate gesture to fit the music and the text

(which are perfectly wedded)…some patterns will

be quarter-half, some half-quarter and some will be

in one. At two before 18 follow the text and beat 3 +

2 + 2. Be very clear and careful with this change!

Conduct three bars before 19 in 4, but one bar before

19 in 2, for the same reason as given for one before

17. Conduct two before 20 3 + 2 + 2 (same reason at

two before 18). At four measures after 20, cue the

contrabassoon, timpani, and bass drum on two, and

then show the diminuendo. Cut the brass on the

fourth beat (on the tied 8th

note), and then hold the

fermata. However, at 7 after 20, beat four through

the diminuendo, and cut off on the downbeat of the

2/4 bar. The situation with the fermatas is similar at

five before 21, but here you cut the brass on 4 and

stop your gesture on the downbeat of the 2/4

measure. Conduct one before 21 in 2.

At 21 the ensemble and precision are even more

difficult because of the tutti and the fortissimo

dynamic, therefore your gesture must be especially

rhythmic and clear. Beginning at three before 22,

conduct 3 + 2 + 2, for two measures, and then

resume the 2 + 2 + 3 pattern for one measure.

Conduct the 4/4 in 4, being sure to cue the

2nd trumpet at three after 22, then conduct 1 before

23 in 2, as a transition to the 7/4.

At four before 24 warn the Chamber Orchestra with

the same count-down of measures (4-3-2-1 fingers

of the left hand), being careful to maintain the 7/4

precisely and conducting 3 + 2 + 2. At the bar before

24 one may conduct as 2 + 2 + 3, which will enable

you to stretch the final three quarter notes, setting up

the slower tempo at 24. The Chorus should sit and

JCG Vol. 30 96

the baritone soloist stand on the second measure of

24.

Before 28 the oboe solo (eight bars before) and flute

solo (five before) should be slightly less lively than

the previous solos (at 24 and 25). At four before 28,

warn the large orchestra with the count-down

(4-3-2-1 with fingers of the left hand). The baritone

soloist sits at 1 before 28, and the soprano soloist

(sitting with the chorus) stands on the fermata– it is

important dramatically that these two soloists do not

move together.

At 30 the semi-chorus sings while seated. The tempo

can move forward ever so slightly, and return atempo with the soprano’s return at 31. The same

tempo fluctuation can be employed when the chorus

enters at 5 after 31.

Four measures before 33 warn the chamber

orchestra with the same count-down with the left

hand. The soprano soloist sits at 1 before 33. The

baritone and tenor soloists stand two or three

measures after 33.

At four before 39 warn the four trumpets in the large

orchestra with the count-down gesture with the left

hand (be sure to let them know that you are going to

do this!). The soloists sit after 39, and the entire

chorus stands on the fifth measure.

At 43 move ahead a little bit, relaxing the tempo at

two bars before 44. At four before 45 there should be

a poco ritard. At 45 beat in a quick, precise five

(as before: a four pattern with an extra beat in the

center). At four before 49 warn the chamber

orchestra with the usual count-down with the left

hand, but at one bar before 49 beat a four pattern,

indicating three quarter notes and a lengthened

(half note) fourth beat, which establishes the half

note beat of the meter at 49 (Ex. 4).

Example 4

At five after 49 and one before 50 cue the trumpets

but do not conduct them. This is less confusing for

the rest of the orchestra, so simply sustain and

control the diminuendo. However, at five bars after

50 it may be necessary to conduct the trumpets

(unless they can play together by themselves). If you

do conduct the trumpets, hold the tutti with the

baton, and conduct the trumpets, with the left hand,

as four measures of 2/4. Do warn the rest of the

orchestra of this system.

At one before 51 cue the 1st trumpet but don’t

conduct. At five after 51, cue trumpet 2, but don’t

conduct. At four before 52 warn the four trumpets

with the count down gesture (4-3-2-1) with the left

hand.

The transition at rehearsal 52 is a tricky maneuver.

For the horns, trumpet, timpani, bass drum, and

piano, I choose to conduct the first two measures 4,

4, 3, as if it were three measures. The final beat of

the 3 (last beat of the 7/4 measure) is the cue for the

Tutti (full orchestra) and chorus at 3 after 52. The

chamber orchestra should maintain their slower

tempo at 52 and therefore they should release after 8

beats of the conductor. Note that in the score the

release of the chamber orchestra is not aligned with

that beat! The tempo, quarter note = 160, given by

Britten at the beginning of the Dies irae, and

repeated here, should be carefully adhered to. The

utmost clarity and precision in the 7/4 is required.

The basic division of the 7/4 is 2 + 2 + 3, except

where the music and text change, requiring 3 + 2 +

2, as at the ninth and tenth bar after 52 and the three

bars before 53. At 53, return to 2 + 2 + 3. At two

measures before 54, clearly beat the last three

quarter notes of the 7/4 to set up the brass.

The soprano stands on the fermata before 54. In this

slower passage, clearly beat all the quarter notes of

the 7/4, using a subdivided 3/2 pattern (Ex.5).

Example 5

97 JCG Vol. 30

At four measures before 56, warn the chamber

orchestra with the count-down with the left hand,

and calando. The tenor soloist stands on the

downbeat of 56 (his fermata) – there is plenty of

time for him to stand, and it works well visually and

dramatically. Standing earlier would spoil the drama

inherent in the ritard and diminuendo of the previous

few measures.

In the tenor recitative, simply cue the chord changes

on each downbeat. At three before 57 warn the full

orchestra and chorus with three fingers of the left

hand (the count-down), and be sure to cue the harp

at one before 57.

At three measures after 57, relax the last quarter

notes a bit, and cue the chamber orchestra on the last

beat. At three before 58, warn the full orchestra and

chorus (the count-down maneuver with the left

hand). At one before 60 cue the chimes after the

tenor soloist’s text “at all.”

The Chorale at 60, as the first one at 16, requires a

subtle beat. For details, see the description at 16.

Since the work is without intermission, one should

take a brief pause before the Offertorium (this also

could be a late seating spot).

3. OFFERTORIUM (boys’ chorus stands)

I personally choose not to conduct the boys. If the

choir is seated on stage their own director can be

seated unobtrusively and help them, both here, and

most especially at 77, where they must be

coordinated with the soloists and orchestra. Better

yet is placing the boys’ chorus in a balcony with a

portative organ or harmonium, where their director

can lead them.

Before 63, alert the chorus and full orchestra

visually with the right hand/baton. The chorus

should stand two measures before 63, and, if on

stage and visible, the boys’ chorus sits on the

downbeat of 63.

At rehearsal 64, conduct dotted quarter notes (6/8 in

two, 9/8 in three). At four before 69, warn the

chamber orchestra with the count-down with the left

hand, as before. The baritone and tenor soloists stand

at two before 69, and the choir sits at 69. The new

section beginning at 69 is l’istesso tempo (Ex.6), i.e.

the measures are conducted in two and the quarter

note in the orchestra gets the beat. Note the change

of tempo at 72. This must be very deliberate at first,

but at five bars after 72, move the tempo ahead a bit.

The tempo change to half-note = 88 at 73 is subito.

Example 6

At two before 74, beat the 5/4 measure with four

clear beats, the half note in one beat followed by

three quarters, followed by a regular 4/4 (Ex. 7).

Example 7

74 is a slow recitative, but the first orchestra

measure should not be too slow, with the first part of

it beaten in 3/4, then holding each whole note with a

downbeat, single gesture. The two soloists should

not be conducted, and you simply conduct the

orchestra in the 3/4 part of each measure, holding the

whole notes with a downbeat 1. Give a clear cue to

the harp at 77.

Rehearsal 77 begins a difficult section of ensemble

with the boys’ chorus. I can only suggest my

solution to the problem and what I did in my

performances. There may be other ways. [For acomplete discussion of the problems and the techniques I used in dealing with the boys’ choir, seethe Appendix.]

I cue the organist to start on the 2nd beat of the

second measure after 77 (as aligned in the score).

The conductor must listen carefully to the organ,

JCG Vol. 30 98

especially the C#s in the left hand. There should be

perhaps three or four C#s heard (over the empty,

fermata measures in the orchestra) before cuing the

chamber orchestra at 7 bars after 77 (I disregard the

footnote, and I count the orchestra fermatas as one

measure, for there is no bar line at the change of

page). Listen carefully to the boys’ chorus line, and

follow it for all successive entries of the chamber

orchestra and soloists.

Warn the full orchestra (bassoons, celli, basses)

visually for their entrance at 79. The chorus stands at

79, and the soloists and boys sit after the orchestra

begins.

4. SANCTUS (soprano solo stands, chorus remains

standing)

The measures are free at the beginning of the

Sanctus. I had success with a slightly slower tempo

at measure 5 (quarter note = 92 rather than 108),

with which our soprano soloist was more

comfortable. I suggest that all conductors

experiment.

Conduct rehearsal 85 in one. In this cleverly

confused (confusing) passage, the conductor’s

challenge is not to get lost! I decided to group the

measures as follows: 3-2-3-4-3-86-4-4-

fermata. This aids in cuing the entrances of the

sections of the chorus; however, they also can be

counted in groups of four bars!

Score errata: in the parts, at six bars after 87 inhorns 1 & 2, the second beat is an A; it should bea B. The score is correct.

At three bars before 91 the phrase is very long for

the soprano soloist. Should an extra breath be

necessary, I suggest this (with an optional text

addition, which may or may not be desired) (Ex. 8).

At nine and eleven bars after 91 conduct the 5/4 as

before – a four gesture with an extra beat in the

center (Ex. 2). Beginning at three before 92 relax the

tempo a bit. The soprano sits after 92.

At four bars before rehearsal 93 warn the chamber

orchestra as before with the count-down with the left

hand. At 93 Britten, in his excellent recording, waits

about 10 beats (quarter note of preceding

section = 69) on this fermata. The new tempo is very

slow, eighth note = 69. At three after 93, conduct a

subdivided four (8/8, with eighth note = 88-92) for

the flute and clarinet, and use same tempo each time

this passage occurs. At one before 94, conduct a

subdivided 2/4. Follow Britten’s tempo indications

exactly, so that the half note at 94 equals the

preceding eighth note. At the end of the Sanctus, the

baritone and chorus sit.

5. AGNUS DEI (tenor soloist stands, chorus sings

seated)

This section must be flowing, with each sixteenth

note conducted, using the four pattern with an extra

beat in the center (see Ex. 2).

At four bars before rehearsal 99, move the tempo a

bit, and return to tempo at 99. Calando near the end.

The tenor’s last phrase, “Dona nobis pacem,” slows

down and is quite flexible, and you should not

conduct him. Coordinate with the soloist, and cut off

together with the chorus. The tenor sits and the

chorus stands at the end of the movement.

6. LIBERA ME (chorus stands)

This movement, above all the others, requires of the

conductor a very firm hand, an unimpeachable sense

of pulse, and great rhythmic precision. From the

beginning of the movement to rehearsal 116 there

needs to be a carefully controlled, very gradual

accelerando. The composer gives tempo indications

(metronome markings) at the beginning of each

major section, which aid in your planning and study.

Begin at quarter note = 63. At four or three bars

before 103, move slightly toward quarter note = 72,

reaching that tempo at 103. At 104, begin to move

the tempo again, reaching quarter note = 84 at

rehearsal 105. This tempo is maintained until seven

bars after 107, where the tempo pushes ahead slight-

ly, reaching quarter note = 88 at 108.

Example 8

The soprano soloist stands at the sixth bar after 107. Note, beginning at 105, the different meters for the

orchestra and the soloist and chorus. Conduct the section beginning at 108 in four bar phrases (subtly, with

one beat per 3/4 bar in the orchestra) unless the chorus needs to see these four beats per (their) measure.

Should the soprano decide against singing the high C at 110, the following change to the melodic line could

be made, which would involve a slight re-orchestration in the flute, oboe and clarinet (Ex. 9).

Example 9

110 is marked “very lively” with a tempo of 92 per beat unit. The conductor continues to beat the clear

four-bar phrases (actually four beat measures for the chorus and soprano), which helps the performers with

accurate counting and also will help you in giving the right cues. Five and six bars after 111 is a two bar

phrase—you could consider the first six measures of 111 as a phrase of 3 whole notes,

subdivided.

The three measures before 113 could be beaten as a large three pattern, to support the crescendo and to set up

and clarify the tempo in the new and very challenging section, with its irregular meters. Do not slacken the

gradual accelerando, so that you arrive at half note = 96 at 113.

99 JCG Vol. 30

The section beginning at rehearsal 113 is extremely

difficult for the chorus and soprano. Conduct the 2/2

bars in 2, of course. The 3/4 measures require three

small, clear precise beats—do not fall into the

temptation of conducting these triple-meter measures

in one! This section, between 113 and 115, consists

of clearly defined phrases, each phrase beginning

with the sopranos of the chorus. The first two

phrases (“Dies illa” and “dies irae”) are each four

measures long. The next phrase (“calamitatis”)

is five measures long. At 114, the phrase

(“et miseriae”) is six measures long, and the

following phrase (“dies magna”) is four measures

long. The ten measures of 115-116 are really two

connected phrases, the first in 3/4 and the second

beginning with three 2/2 bars and the huge climax of

two 3/4 bars. At five before 116, I do not go back to

conducting in 2, but continue to beat the quarter

notes in four, to better control the stretch into (and

within) the final 3/4 measures.

116 is the sonic climax of the piece, and also is very

difficult for the chorus. The tempo is a broad 4/4

(in the orchestra) with quarter note = 63. This means

that each measure of the chorus equals one beat in

the orchestra. The chorus needs a very clear gesture

to sing their entrances accurately. Because this

section needs as much vocal volume as possible I

suggest that you have all the women sing all soprano

and alto entrances through four before 117, and have

all men sing the first bass entrance (10 chorus

measures after 116), with tenors jumping up to their

entrance that follows in the next bar. Beginning at

two before 117 the singers return to singing only

their own parts.

For the orchestra, give a very strong cue to the

percussion and organ at 116. Bring out the horn

color with the crescendo and decrescendo, with the

maximum volume at four orchestral measures after

116, and again at six after 116. The trumpets peak at

three and five bars after 116. Make a long

diminuendo and calando down to 118. And at four

(orchestra) measures before 118, warn the chamber

orchestra with the left-hand countdown as before.

At this point there is a major decision to be made by

the conductor and the chorus master: should the

chorus remain standing through to the end or sit, and

if they should sit, when? My personal feeling is that

it is very taxing for the chorus to stand for such a

long time. But more importantly, I feel it is totally

contrary to the drama of the piece to have so many

“witnesses” present during the unfolding of the story

between the two soldiers. If the chorus sits at 118,

even quietly and gracefully, it is visually very

disturbing after the long quietening of the dynamics,

the lightening of the texture, and the slowing of the

tempo. The tenor and bass soloists should be left

totally alone at 118!

Because of this concern about the drama, I made the

decision that the chorus should sit down by section,

when they are finished singing their last part:

sopranos sit at six chorus bars after 117, altos at

fourteen chorus bars after 117, basses at seventeen

chorus bars after 117 and tenors two chorus bars

before 118. This can imply that the chorus will sing

the Epilogue (“In Paradisum,” at 131) while seated,

which, to me is perfectly acceptable musically and

dramatically.

At 118, there is a long-breathed, rhythmically

flexible tenor recitative. Give one downbeat for each

orchestral measure. Give the chord changes, being

sure to connect with the tenor soloist precisely. At

119, the composer begins to show metrical

subdivisions of the larger measures by the use of

dotted bar lines for various instruments in the

chamber orchestra. This is first apparent in the

strings, where you should conduct the small

crescendi with the left hand, using a 2/4 pattern,

while holding the rest of the orchestra with the baton.

The baritone soloist stands at rehearsal 120, and you

conduct the three measures in a slow four, with

quarter note = 60. At one before 121 and at 121, beat

four with the baton for the entire chamber orchestra.

Then return to marking each measure in one. Do not

conduct the solos of the oboe, bassoon, or harp

(unless they absolutely need it, then do it with small,

subtle gestures of the left hand). It is best to spend

JCG Vol. 30 100

the balcony or off stage), then he/she can clearly lead

the young singers throughout this passage. It is

otherwise impossible to coordinate the sections the

boys sing that are in a different tempo than the other

forces.

At one before 127, release the strings on the final

eighth note, but send the point of the baton up as if

you were on the second beat (Ex. 10). From this

position only a downbeat is necessary and sufficient.

The tenor soloist and the boys stand just after the

orchestral music begins.

Example 10

At 127, the orchestral music, with the tenor and bass

soloists, is in two four-bar phrases. Cue the organ at

128, and stop conducting at the orchestral fermata,

but continue to count five beats of the boys’ music.

You will resume the beat on the downbeat

(eighth note rest in chamber orchestra),

coordinating with the end of the boys’-choir

passage, and beat the seven bars, holding on the

fermata of the eighth bar. When the boys’ choir

reaches the final syllable of their first passage

(“An-ge-li”), their director starts counting eight beats

(“li” = beat one), while watching the conductor.

Their release should be on the tied quarter note, the

third beat. On the eighth counted beat (five beats into

129) the director cues the boys.

At six measures after 129, stop on the downbeat,

count three beats, and on the third beat, cue the

double basses. The chamber orchestra and soloists

have a six-measure phrase that goes to 130, followed

by a diminuendo and release on the eighth rest at the

end of two after 130. Count five beats of the boys’

music, cueing the clarinet, harp, and double bass on

the fifth beat.

While this has been going on, the boys have sung

through the text “Martyres.” The director counts

eight beats, starting on the syllable ”res,”

time coaching these players separately, so they play

these passages unaided.

However, at two before 123 one needs to conduct

with the left hand, due to the faster tempo and the

ensemble problems in the next bar. This passage is

quite metrically complicated, and one needs to pay

strict attention to the composer’s use of the dotted

bar lines. At two before 123, conduct in four with

flexible rubato. At one before 123, beat four plus

two. At two after 123 conduct, with the left hand,

3 + 4 + 3 (again as clearly indicated in by the dotted

bar lines). And at four after 123, conduct in two

(following the composer’s dotted lines), followed by

two measures in three and the fermata.

At three and one before 124, do not conduct the

clarinet and flute solos. As you will have done with

the brass players and their solo material in the

Dies irae, you should work out how these kinds of

passages are to be played in a private session with

your wind players well in advance of the first

rehearsal.

Conduct quarter notes throughout the section that

begins at 124, subdividing the 3/2 and conducting the

5/4 in the four pattern with an extra beat in the

center (see Ex.2). Follow the subtle changes of

tempo carefully, for they are vital to the piece. At one

before 126, the tempo should be quarter note = 80.

Conduct this large bar in 2/4 + 2/4 + 4/4 with a

fermata on the final half note, with diminuendo. The

preparatory beat for the winds and bass comes on the

baritone’s word “from” (in this bar), which is also the

release for the strings and flute. At five after 126, the

fermata should be very long before “I am the enemy

you killed, my friend,” for the drama requires the

long silence. At two before 127, subtly warn the

chorus, boys’ choir, and their director visually with

eyes or a raised finger.

At 127 the Epilogue begins, a most incredible,

emotional, and deeply moving ending to this

masterpiece. And it provides the conductor with one

last challenge in terms of precision, ensemble,

coordination, and mood! If the boys’ choir director is

sitting in front of them (or leading them if they are in

101 JCG Vol. 30

releasing the boys on the third beat (which is the tied

quarter note). The eighth beat is the preparatory beat

for their next entrance.

From the chamber orchestra entrance after 130 there

are seven measures: a four-bar phrase and a three-bar

phrase. At three measures before 131, warn orchestra

and chorus basses with the left hand countdown.

Give a clear cue one beat before 131.

During this, the boys’ choir has reached the text

“Jerusalem.” The director starts counting fourteen

beats at the syllable “lem,” releasing the choir on

the third beat (tied quarter note). Give a preparatory

beat on the fourteenth count for the organ

and a downbeat for the boys’ next entrance

(“Chorus Angelorum. . . ”).

At three after 131, cue the chorus altos, flute 2, and

especially second violins! From eight before 132,

there are two four bar phrases. The boys’ choir

director counts six beats, starting on the measure

following their release of. . . “suscipiat,” and cues

the organ and boys on the sixth beat, which is the

beat before rehearsal 132.

From 132, I suggest the following phrase structure:

▪ five measures

▪ six measures (the soprano soloist stands

ad libitum)

▪ four measures (soprano soloist enters on

the third measure of this phrase, at 133)

▪ four measures (with entrance of

trombones)

▪ four measures

▪ five measures, to 134

▪ five measures

▪ five measures, to release of the Tutti at

one after five measures, to release of the Tutti

at one after 135

The organ must be cued at one bar before 135, with

a clear cue to the chimes on the second beat.

The boys’ choir director should conduct these final

two measures (“Requiem aeternam dona eis

Domine”) in a subdivided 3/2. I suggest that the

choir enter a little late, after the Tutti release, in case

the acoustical resonance blurs their first note. Their

final pitch should be held over the bar line, to

connect with the following chorus entrance.

Clearly cue the chorus and orchestra after 135. Do

not forget to cue the last entrance of the chimes. The

final release of each ensemble must be exact: the

chamber orchestra on the last eighth note and the full

orchestra after they hear the final bells entrance. Let

the bells vibrate.

Conduct the final Chorale with the same style of

gesture as at 16 and 60. Give the final release of the

“n” of “Amen” gently, with the arms staying up, to

prevent premature applause. Let your arms down

slowly.

APPENDIX

In this discussion of the conducting problems

associated with the boys’ choir, I shall refer to their

conductor as “director” and to the conductor of the

large forces as “conductor.” The following are

suggestions for both conductors to help assure

synchronization of the boys with the rest of the

forces. The director of the boys’ choir should have

the opportunity to read this entire article.

Rehearsal 77: The conductor will cue the organ on

the second beat of the second orchestral measure,

and the boys should stand on that chord. The

organist will adopt the tempo quarter note = 60

(I suggest checking that with a pocket metronome,

even at the performance). The director should count

seven measures of the organ introduction and then

cue the boys on the eighth measure, maintaining the

tempo strictly. The boys sit at 79 (after the organ

finishes and the orchestra begins).

Rehearsal 127, the boys’ chorus stands after the

chamber orchestra begins. Whether the boys are seat-

ed on stage or located in a balcony, it is

imperative that the director should be able to follow

the conductor’s beat, either by a direct line of sight or

use of video monitor. The conductor will cue the

organ at 128. If the organist cannot see the

JCG Vol. 30 102

103 JCG Vol. 30

conductor, then the director will give this cue and

will conduct the boys in absolutely strict tempo,

following the tempos established by the conductor

(quarter note = 60, I hope!).

On the last syllable “li” of “Angeli” the director

starts counting eight beats (while watching the

conductor), release the boys and the organ on the

third beat (tied quarter note). On the eighth beat

(which is the fifth beat after 129), cue the boys and

the organ (If retaining pitch is a problem, the

organist could play a C# on the beat before the

entrance, as in Ex. 11).

Four orchestral bars before 130, on the last syllable

“res” of “Martyres,” start counting eight beats;

release the boys on the third beat (tied quarter note).

The eighth beat that you are counting is the

preparatory beat for the next boys’ choir entrance.

Example 11

On the last syllable “lem” of “Jerusalem,” start

counting fourteen beats, releasing the boys and

organ on the third beat (tied quarter note). The

fourteenth beat is the preparatory beat for the organ,

and the organ entrance is the preparatory beat for the

boys’ “Chorus Angelorum.” On the measure

following the boys’ release of “suscipiat,” the

director begins counting six beats, and cues the

organ and the boys on the sixth beat (one beat before

132).

One measure before 135, the organ should be cued

by the conductor. I suggest that the boys’ choir

entrance at one after 135 be a little late, in case

acoustical resonance might blur the first note. This

“Requiem aeternam” can be conducted in a

subdivided 3/2. The final note of this passage should

be held over the bar line, to connect with the

following full chorus entrance.

The boys’ entrance, “et lux perpetua,” one measure

after 136, should be similarly a little late, again

conducted in a subdivided 3/2 with a slight stretch

before the last note, which again should not be

released before the full chorus enters.

Placement of the boys’ chorus: The composer

indicates that the sound of the boys choir should be

“distant.” An ideal solution is to seat the choir in a

balcony, with a portative organ or harmonium with

them (or even an electric keyboard that has an

acceptable organ sound, with adjustable volume).

The director should be able to see both the organist

and the conductor clearly.

Should the boys’ choir have to be seated on the

stage, the director can sit in front of them (at the

back of the orchestra), in an unobtrusive location,

where she/he can clearly see the conductor.

*****

Paul Vermel is Music Director and Conductor ofthe Northwest Symphony in Illinois, and a facultymember of the Conductors Institute at the Universityof South Carolina. He is Professor of Music,Emeritus, of the University of Illinois, ConductorLaureate of the Portland (ME) Symphony and alsoserved as Director of the Conducting Program at theAspen Music Festival. He is the 2009 recipient of the Max Rudolf Award from the Conductors Guild. This award is given biennially in recognition of outstanding achievement as a conductor and peda-gogue, and significant service to the profession inthe realms of scholarship and ensemble building. Heis only the 7th recipient of this important honor.

For information on how to obtain his recent DVD

entitled Conducting with Clarity and Musicality:The Teaching of Paul Vermel, visit his website at

www.maestronotes.com.

JCG Vol. 30 104

Changes in the public perception of performing

artists make for fascinating study. There once was a

time when the Three Tenors were considered mere

mortals. And there once was a time when a

conductor, Arturo Toscanini, was considered the

living embodiment of the composers whose music

he performed. Largely through the efforts of the

press and the National Broadcasting Company,

Toscanini came to be known as the only musician

with the integrity and modesty to perform a

composition exactly as it was notated in the musical

score. Thanks to the existence of recorded

performances, as well as the reminiscences of some

of his colleagues, many people now realize that

Toscanini’s reputation for absolutely literal fidelity

to the printed score was largely a media creation.

Still, for a segment of the music-loving public the

name Arturo Toscanini continues to call to mind the

lofty pursuit of textual fidelity.

Toscanini seldom discussed his musical philosophy

publicly, preferring instead to rely on spokesmen of

often-dubious credibility. Rather than refuting the

legends that sprang up around him, he carried on his

work seemingly oblivious to the spread of the

textual-fidelity myth. And yet there was a time, early

in his career, when the question of exactly what was

written in the score assumed great importance.

In 1898 the thirty-one-year-old Arturo Toscanini

conducted the first Italian performance of Giuseppe

Verdi’s Quattro pezzi sacri. While studying the score

of the Te Deum, Toscanini had been troubled by a

passage in which he felt that a rallentando was

necessary, despite the lack of any overt indication in

the score. When he performed the piece at the piano

for Verdi himself, Toscanini added the rallentando at

the appropriate point. Rather than correcting him,

Verdi praised Toscanini’s musical insight, explaining

that if he had written the word rallentando over the

phrase in question, an insensitive conductor might

have overcompensated, slowing the passage

unnecessarily. Instead, Verdi relied on the instinct of

the true musician to recognize the need for a subtle

relaxation of tempo.

Some fifty years later the critic Olin Downes

reported that when Toscanini re-told this familiar

story, he acknowledged that his behavior had

contradicted the gospel of textual fidelity.

Nonetheless, the conductor continued, the

interpreter’s taste and intuition ultimately control the

outcome of a performance. If true, Downes’s

revealing anecdote fails to account for the

possibility that, for Toscanini, Verdi’s unwritten

rallentando might well have been part of “the letter

of the music.” Although the word does not appear at

the critical point in the score, to a sensitive

conductor versed in Verdian performance practice,

those notations that do appear – the melodic shape,

the harmonic progression, the phrase structure –

indicate a slowing down of tempo almost as surely

as a verbal indication. Nonetheless, Downes’s story

represents a grudging admission that the printed

score, in and of itself, may not have been Toscanini’s

sole concern.

It is not news that Toscanini’s reputation for absolute

fidelity to the printed score was little more than a

public relations myth; this has already been asserted

by numerous critics, scholars, and performers, based

on both personal experience and the inexact

Toscanini and the Myth of Textual Fidelity(JCG Volume 24, 2003)

By Linda B. Fairtile

105 JCG Vol. 30

evidence of recordings. Now that Toscanini’s

annotated scores are available for study at The New

York Public Library for the Performing Arts, it is

possible to investigate exactly which elements of

which compositions he altered, and, perhaps more

importantly, to come closer to understanding the

musical philosophy that permits a performer to

impose significant alterations on the works in his

repertoire and still maintain that he is at the service

of the composer.

The dissemination of the textual fidelity myth was

first and foremost an American phenomenon, which

reached its apex in the early 1950s. Like many

myths, however, this one had roots in the reality of a

distant place and time: the Italian opera scene at the

turn of the twentieth century, as Arturo Toscanini,

the thirty-one-year-old artistic head of Milan’s

Teatro alla Scala, fought with every ounce of his

considerable will against what he perceived to be

low musical standards and arbitrary traditions. To

those who questioned his right to toss aside decades

of accumulated performance customs he offered the

musical score as the final authority.

Criticism of Toscanini’s earliest performances at La

Scala tended to focus on his perceived inflexibility

in matters of tempo as well as his opposition to both

encores and traditional cuts. Each of these issues, of

course, relates directly to the topic of textual

fidelity, but it was apparently not the intention of

Toscanini’s early critics to discuss that issue

explicitly. Rather, their concern was preservation of

the status quo, a tradition in which the performer’s

authority often trumped the composer’s. An

exceptional journalistic employment of the phrase

“the composer’s intentions” appears in an 1899

review of Toscanini’s first performance of Verdi’s

Falstaff. Significantly, the phrase is employed to

argue against Toscanini’s interpretation. In the words

of Alfredo Colombani,

I know that performing at such accelerated

tempos is approved by him [Toscanini, who is]

more capable than all others of expressing the

composer’s intentions. But this assurance does

not convince me, because the detail upon which I

believe I must insist seems to me to be precisely

one, which is less easily realized by the

composer of an opera and by a collaborator who

knows it well.1

In other words, Colombani believed that neither the

composer nor the conscientious conductor was the

final authority on certain matters of performance

practice.

In the early years of Toscanini’s career his

celebrated appeals to the letter of the score were a

weapon against what he perceived to be sloppy and

self-indulgent interpretation. As both his artistry and

his celebrity grew, the concept of musical literalism

took on a life of its own, becoming a trademark by

which he was known even to those who were

unaware of the campaign that he had had to wage in

earlier years. What had begun as a means to an end

within a specific performing tradition eventually

ossified, with the help of the press, into all-purpose

dogma. Regardless of what he actually did,

Toscanini became known as the only conductor

selfless enough to perform exactly what was written

in the score, no more and no less.

Even as he arrived at the Metropolitan Opera in

1908, Toscanini’s reputation was established in the

American press, thanks in large measure to the

journalist Max Smith. Typically, Smith saw textual

fidelity as the principal feature that distinguished his

idol from other conductors, writing that Toscanini:

has no sympathy with the trend of modern

conducting, as exemplified by Nikisch, who not

only shapes his readings to suit his individual

taste, but actually presumes to change the

orchestration set down by the composer. His

[Toscanini’s] all-absorbing ambition is to

reproduce music in a way absolutely true not only

to the letter, but to the spirit of the creating

mind.2

Implicit in Smith’s statement are both a

condemnation of those performers who tamper with

aspects of a musical composition and a

corresponding endorsement of literal fidelity to the

score. According to this journalistic simplification, it

is textual fidelity, or its lack, that determines which

of two fundamentally irreconcilable musical

JCG Vol. 30 106

interpretations – the composer’s or the conductor’s –

emerges in performance.

Samuel Chotzinoff, an accompanist turned music

critic who would later become NBC’s Music

Director, described Toscanini’s faithfulness to the

score in terms of both mathematical precision and

almost supernatural personal affinity:

Mr. Toscanini is literally a slave to the composer,

carrying out his every intention, measuring his

scale of the gradations of sound with a ruler on

the score. What makes Toscanini the greatest

conductor alive is that he follows the composer

from the marks on the score back into the realm

of ideas which gave them birth…The “Eroica”

and the grandiose Fifth Symphony of Beethoven

were subjected last night to a treatment which

included a strict adherence to the printed scores,

a divination of the exact ideas in the composer’s

mind represented by them, and Toscanini’s genius

for orchestral analysis and co-ordination.3

Once again, Toscanini is declared musically – and

perhaps even morally – superior to his colleagues by

virtue of his compulsion not simply to observe the

composer’s written instructions, but to follow them

back to the very moment of artistic creation. In

Arturo Toscanini (New York, 1929), biographer

Tobia Nicotra pursued this concept to the point of

absurdity, claiming that Toscanini “steeps himself in

the composition – breathes the very air that

Beethoven breathed, thinks the very thoughts that

Beethoven thought.”

In 1937 Toscanini assumed the direction of the NBC

Symphony, a new radio orchestra assembled to rival

CBS’s broadcast concerts by the New York

Philharmonic. As Joseph Horowitz notes in

Understanding Toscanini (New York, 1987), in the

years prior to the NBC Symphony’s creation,

broadcasters had been engaged in an ongoing debate

over nothing less than the very purpose of radio

programming, a controversy that pitted the interests

of entertainment against those of mass education.

One result of this debate was the marriage of

recreation and instruction in radio programs that pro-

vided guidance in the understanding of fine

literature and music. NBC’s “Music Appreciation

Hour,” hosted by conductor Walter Damrosch from

1927 through 1942, was one such effort. Complete

with accompanying workbooks and written tests, the

“Music Appreciation Hour” sought to teach children

about the composers and works that make up the

musical canon. Other radio programs aimed at adult

listeners pursued similar goals.

Although the NBC Symphony’s broadcast concerts

were not as overtly pedagogical as the “Music

Appreciation Hour,” they nonetheless embodied

RCA president David Sarnoff’s philosophy of radio

as a vehicle for self-improvement. Toscanini’s

leadership of the NBC Symphony, and his reputation

for textual fidelity in particular, were put to good use

by the popular education movement. According to

Joseph Horowitz, the textual fidelity issue was a use-

ful tool in the service of music appreciation. By

anointing a single, “correct” performance of each

musical work, chosen by virtue of its faithfulness to

the printed score, the champions of music

appreciation transformed complex works of art into

neatly packaged commodities that listeners could

acquire for their intellectual trophy cases.

Toscanini’s public image suited this purpose, since

he was believed to be the only performer both

willing and able to provide a literal translation of the

composer’s notation into idealized sound.

Like most celebrities, Toscanini received a great deal

of mail from his admirers. Many of these letters

illustrate that listeners to the NBC Symphony

broadcasts wholeheartedly identified him with the

ideal of textual fidelity. One young New Jersey fan,

clearly influenced by what he had heard and read,

praised Toscanini for being one of the few

conductors to perform compositions exactly as they

are written; in the next sentence, this ardent fan

admitted that he knew next to nothing about music.

So strong was the public’s belief in Toscanini’s

reputation for literalism that when confronted with

evidence to the contrary some were inclined to doubt

the musical text itself rather than the

interpreter. A fan from Delaware asked Toscanini

about what he believed to be a misprint in his own

score of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. What other

explanation, the fan reasoned, could there have been

107 JCG Vol. 30

for a divergence between Toscanini’s performance

and the printed music?

In Reflections on Toscanini (New York, 1991),

Harvey Sachs notes that the conductor’s

interpretations of individual compositions often

changed over time, an understandable circumstance

considering the extraordinary length of his

professional career, but also a sign that his ideas

about any given musical work were not fixed and

absolute. For those who never heard a live Toscanini

concert, recordings are the chief means of

acquaintance with his art. Although dozens of

Toscanini’s performances are available on disc, most

were made during the final third of his

sixty-eight-year career, and their sound quality is

sometimes compromised by the original recording

technology. Fortunately, another means exists to

examine Toscanini’s performing habits, and the

textual fidelity question in particular, since his

personal library of musical scores is available for

study in the Toscanini Legacy, a collection in the

Music Division of The New York Public Library

for the Performing Arts (an inventory of

these scores can be consulted online at

http://www.nypl.org/ead/2603#id2305926).

In a 1926 concert review Olin Downes wrote that

Toscanini’s scores contained no conductor’s

markings, but this statement, made by a devoted

admirer, is not supported by the evidence. Of the

approximately 1,500 orchestral scores in the

Toscanini Legacy, over a third contain annotations in

the conductor’s hand. Many are routine

clarifications of the printed instructions or technical

notes pertaining to the act of orchestral direction.

Other markings, however, directly contradict

Toscanini’s reputation for strict adherence to the

printed score.

For the purpose of this study, I have divided the

annotations found in Toscanini’s scores into three

categories of increasing musical significance; these

categories are based on the four levels of

modifications identified by Gabriele Dotto in his

study “Opera Four Hands: Collaborative Alterations

in Puccini’s Fanciulla.”4 In my analysis, I identify

type-1 annotations as any modifications of

dynamics, articulation, bowing, phrasing, and

tempo. These sorts of changes, in many cases, would

probably pass unnoticed in performance for all but

the most perceptive and informed listeners. Type-2

annotations include orchestrational adjustments that

either reinforce or thin existing instrumental

textures, or transpose individual instrumental

passages into a different octave. These changes,

often obvious in performance, nonetheless draw

upon material that is already present in the score.

Type-3 modifications, which are the most radical

changes, involve the introduction of foreign

material into a composition, either by inserting a

completely new instrumental figure into the

orchestral fabric, by substantially rewriting an

existing melody, or by adding entire musical

passages of the conductor’s own invention.

Deletions from the score that affect its phrase

structure or harmonic character also qualify as

type-3 annotations.

In general, many of the markings in Toscanini’s

scores seem to reflect historical or stylistic

considerations. Compositions from the 18th century

—for example, Haydn’s 88th Symphony and

Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante in E flat—tend to

contain type-1 annotations only, suggesting that for

works from the Classical period, Toscanini felt that

slight adjustments of the printed dynamics,

articulation, tempo, and bowing were the only

changes necessary. More recent compositions that

show a certain affinity with the Classical style, such

as Mendelssohn’s Overture to A Midsummer Night’sDream, also reveal annotations exclusively of the

type-1 variety.

Type-2 annotations, especially those that augment or

reduce the existing orchestration, are most evident in

works from the 19th century. Often Toscanini seems

to have considered the gradual improvement in

instrumental technique between that time and his

own. It is not uncommon to find an expanded viola

part, for example, in the scores of Beethoven and

Brahms. Passages in which the violas had originally

been playing in unison with other string instruments,

only to drop out when the part’s technical demands

JCG Vol. 30 108

increased, now contain Toscanini’s instructions to

play continuously, suggesting a belief that these

composers had been forced to compromise based on

the insufficient ability of their performers.

Technological advances in instrument construction

also seem to have played a part in Toscanini’s

artistic decisions. Solos that were originally divided

between two different woodwind instruments,

ostensibly owing to one instrument’s weakness in

certain registers, can become in Toscanini’s scores

duets for both instruments playing simultaneously,

sometimes producing surprising timbral effects.

Finally, parts for trumpets and horns are greatly

expanded in Toscanini’s annotated scores of

early 19th-century compositions, reflecting

improvements in valved brass instruments. None of

these annotations is likely to shock a musician today,

but they certainly contradict the way that Toscanini’s

interpretations were typically represented in the

press.

Other type-2 changes in Toscanini’s scores have

more obscure motivations. In many instances, he

appears to have brightened the overall orchestral

sound by adding flutes, piccolos, or other

higher-pitched instruments to the existing texture.

Scores as diverse as Brahms’s Hungarian Dances,

Mendelssohn’s “Italian” Symphony, and Ravel’s

second Daphnis et Chloe suite contain such

annotations. At the other extreme, he also thickened

the orchestration of certain passages by adding

mid-range and lower-pitched instruments. Again, a

variety of compositions exhibit this type of

modification, for example, Brahms’s Third

Symphony, Liszt’s Les Preludes, Schubert’s “Great”

C major Symphony, and Respighi’s The Pines ofRome. An interesting annotation almost completely

erased from Toscanini’s score of Beethoven’s Fifth

Symphony sheds some light on this activity. At

rehearsal letter C in the fourth movement’s

development section Toscanini wrote in his score

“Mengelberg makes the third trombone play with the

contrabasses. Why? It is evident that Beethoven did

not want it.” Toscanini himself rarely supplemented

the bass instruments in Beethoven’s scores. To him,

Mengelberg’s apparently unmotivated addition of

the trombone, an instrument whose construction

remains basically unchanged since Beethoven’s

time, seemed not only unnecessary, but also contrary

to the composer’s wishes.

Type-3 changes – extreme modifications of melody,

harmony, and structure – are relatively uncommon in

Toscanini’s annotated scores, but when they do

appear their purpose is seldom clear. One such

instance occurs in the final movement of

Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (Example 1). As the

development section moves to a close, Beethoven

assigns a variant of the movement’s primary theme

to the woodwinds and brass, over a dominant pedal.

An ascending triplet motive in the piccolo

complements this melody. While Beethoven

employs the piccolo triplet twice, Toscanini adds a

third statement that ascends to a high B. It is

unlikely that practical concerns prevented

Beethoven from adding this third triplet himself,

since he gave the piccolo numerous repeated and

sustained high Bs over the next several measures.

While the composer believed that the symmetry of

two piccolo triplets was sufficient, Toscanini

apparently disagreed.

Toscanini seems to have brought a unique approach

to 20th Century compositions, of which there were

more in his repertoire than some critics are willing to

acknowledge. In many cases he was personally

acquainted with the composer, who was often young

enough to have been his son, or occasionally even

his grandson. These conditions seemed to foster a

less than reverent attitude towards the composer’s

intentions. For example, in a score of Bernard

Wagenaar’s Second Symphony, a piece that begins

in C major and ends in D-flat major, Toscanini not

only inserted a transposition that forces a C-major

conclusion on the work, but he also instructed the

composer to make the change permanent. It could be

that as he passed into old age Toscanini felt a respon-

sibility not only as a performer, but also, to an

extent, as a guardian of Western musical tradition.

Such an attitude, coupled with a feeling that some

modern composers were following the wrong path,

might have emboldened him to carry out musical

109 JCG Vol. 30

JCG Vol. 30 110

alterations more extreme than those that he hadmade as a younger man.

Further insight can be gained from a detailed look at Toscanini’s written modifications in the scores of two compositions, one that was central to his repertoire, Beethoven’s N inth Symphony, andanother that lay on the periphery, George Gershwin’sAn American in Paris. Beethoven was one of thecomposers with whom Toscanini identified mostfirmly. Over the course of his career, he performedBeethoven’s music hundreds of times, often in concerts devoted exclusively to his works. Forty-twoBeethoven compositions are represented in theToscanini Legacy by over one hundred individual scores, and the N inth Symphony aloneexists in six different annotated copies. It is in theworks of Beethoven, then, that we can readilyobserve Toscanini’s performance aesthetic in action.Only a fraction of the Toscanini Legacy’s scorescontain dates or other indications of when theymight have been used. It is virtually impossible,therefore, to match these scores of Beethoven’sN inth with the dozens of performances thatToscanini gave the work between 1902 and 1952. Inaddition, the well-known fact that he rehearsed andconducted from memory means that what was heardin performance may have sometimes depended lesson the markings in a particular score than on hispowers of recollection or on spontaneous decisionsmade in rehearsal. Still, he continued to acquire andannotate scores of compositions that he had alreadyperformed on numerous occasions, indicating thatfor Toscanini the act of studying and thinking abouta musical work remained essential to the re-creativeprocess.

Of the Toscanini Legacy’s six annotated scores ofBeethoven’s N inth Symphony, three are full-sizedand three are miniature scores. Given Toscanini’snotoriously poor eyesight, it is tempting to assumethat he used the miniature scores in the earlier part ofhis career; indeed, one of these is dated October 11,1902, six months after his first performance of thework. In general, the miniature scores contain farfewer annotations than their full-sized counterparts.This statistic is misleading, however, since it is

harder to write anything of substance on the miniature scores’ tiny musical staves.

My assessment of Toscanini’s approach toBeethoven’s N inth Symphony, is confined to thefirst movement, as it appears in a single miniaturescore dated October 1902, and in two of the full-sized annotated scores, identified in theToscanini Legacy as items A41 and A42. All three ofthese scores contain numerous type-1 annotations,and the full-sized scores have quite a few type-2changes as well. Most of these appear in the movement’s exposition and recapitulation, which isnot surprising, since the woodwinds and brass playalmost continuously throughout the developmentsection, leaving little opportunity for Toscanini’sorchestrational additions. The score identified asA42 is by far the most heavily marked. On severaloccasions, Toscanini fills gaps in the horn parts withmaterial borrowed from the trumpets, and then fillsgaps in the trumpets with material from the horns.The overall effect is an intensified brass sound, witha reinforcement of the pitches typically assigned tothese instruments, usually components of the tonictriad. This score also exhibits an expanded violapart, in some cases doubling the first violins, and inothers, the cellos. At one point Toscanini redistributes the violin and viola material so that themelody is featured more prominently (Examples 2aand 2b). The cellos twice venture into viola territory, and on one occasion in the exposition theyreinforce an arpeggiated figure in the bassoons.

Other significant type-2 annotations are found in theclosing group in both of the full-sized scores.Although the flute and oboe play a countermelody inoctaves in measure 142, Beethoven is briefly forcedto disrupt the symmetry out of concern for the flute’slimited range, so that the melodic fragment in theoboes

Example 3a

becomes

Example 3b

111 JCG Vol. 30

in the flutes. Toscanini’s annotations in each of thefull-sized scores offer a different solution, bothdesigned to avoid the flute’s awkward melodic skips.In score A41 he rewrote the flute line so that once itdrops down to the lower B-flat, it stays in thatoctave, continuing in unison with the oboe.

Example 3c

In score A42 he simply gave the flute the high G andB-flat that it probably would have had if the instruments in Beethoven’s day had been capable ofproducing the latter pitch.

Example 3d

The miniature score dated 1902 is comparativelyfree of markings, perhaps owing to its size, or to thefact that Toscanini apparently used it early in hiscareer. A few octave doublings of the first trumpetpart by the second trumpet are the only notable type-2 annotations in this score. Taken as a whole,Toscanini’s modifications to the first movement ofBeethoven’s N inth Symphony are largely concernedwith supplying musical fragments that the composerhimself might have demanded had his performersbeen capable of playing them.

Toscanini’s modifications in his score of GeorgeGershwin’s An American in Paris reveal a differentapproach. With the N BC Symphony Orchestra heperformed this work in 1943, and again two yearslater; a recording of the 1945 performance is available commercially. Many of the markings inToscanini’s score of this composition probablyreflect two specific conditions, namely, the composer’s reputed inexperience as an orchestratorand the conductor’s relative unfamiliarity with ajazz-influenced musical idiom. The score contains

numerous markings in Toscanini’s hand. In additionto the usual type-1 modifications of dynamics, articulation, and the like, his annotations reflectnumerous reinforcements of existing string andwoodwind lines, in other words, type-2 changes. Thepercussion section, a critical part of Gershwin’sorchestra, also attracted Toscanini’s attention: morethan once, he gave the snare drum the task ofstrengthening an important rhythmic figure. Thefinal 16 measures of An American in Paris havebeen completely reorchestrated; by redistributingboth melody and harmony Toscanini achieved abrighter instrumental sound than is manifest in the original ending. Perhaps to reinforce this transformation, he changed Gershwin’s expressiveindication of grandioso to the more objective tempoindication Largo ma non troppo. The overall effectof Toscanini’s alterations to An American in Parisbrightens and homogenizes Gershwin’s variegatedorchestral sound.

The most surprising and musically significant ofToscanini’s annotations occurs in the final six measures, where a series of orchestrational substitutions produces an alteration of the existingharmony. Over the concluding F-major triad is hearda final statement of one of the work’s most prominent melodic motives. In Gershwin’s own set-ting, a countermelody played by the third alto saxophone and first trombone adds an E flat to the harmony – in essence, producing a dominant-seventh chord on F that resolves irregular-ly through E natural to F.

Example 4a, Gershwin, An American in Paris: original orchestration

JCG Vol. 30 112

Example 4b, Gershwin, An American in Paris,

Toscanini’s modifications

Toscanini’s reorchestration eliminates this colorfulharmonic effect altogether: the third alto saxophonesimply plays the main melody while the first trombone participates in the F-major triad. Theirregularly resolved seventh simply disappears fromboth Toscanini’s annotated score and his 1945recording of the piece. It is tempting to imagine thatToscanini, ever vigilant, could not tolerate so blatantan appearance of an improperly resolved seventhchord.

Contrary to his American reputation for literal adher-ence to the printed score, Toscanini actually modi-fied details both large and small in many of the com-positions that he performed. Can it be that he wasreally just as willful and ego-driven as those conduc-tors to whom he was so often judged superior? How would Toscanini reconcile the evidence of his annotated scores with his identity asthe humble servant of the composer? The answer tothese questions may lie in a particular combinationof Italian and German performance practice symptomatic of Toscanini’s aesthetic blend of thesetwo cultures.

The popular conception of the performer’s task,clouded as it is by the textual fidelity issue, conditions an audience to assume that an orchestralconductor simply translates the printed score intophysical gestures that are “read” by the musiciansunder his or her control. N othing more is expected,much less required. In reality, the performing tradition from which Toscanini emerged had quite adifferent concept of the conductor’s responsibilities.When he led his first performance in 1886, the ideaof a baton-wielding conductor at the head of an

opera orchestra was a relatively recent innovation.As late as the 1870s, some Italian ensembles stilladhered to the time-honored tradition of divideddirection, whereby the first-chair violinist led theperformance only after the maestro, usually a keyboard player, had made all the musical decisionsin rehearsal. This clear separation of the two roles-time-beater versus interpreter—is reflected in theterms used to describe their respective duties: theItalian word direzione, meaning “direction,” wasapplied to the first violinist’s work, while the wordconcertazione, a complicated term indicating the actof preparing a performance, referred to the maestro’sresponsibility. When both roles were assumed by a single person—the conductor—these two functions became part of his job description. And itmust be remembered that composers, often conductors themselves, were well aware of the situation.

While the conductor’s time-beating responsibilitiesare easy to comprehend, the preparation of a performance—the activity expressed by the Italianword concertazione—is somewhat enigmatic. Italianmusic dictionaries offer a variety of definitions for this term, from the Dizionario artistico-scientifico of 1872, which simply statesthat it is a synonym for “rehearsal,” to the detailed explanation offered one hundred years later by theRicordi-Rizzoli Enciclopedia della musica:

Concertazione is the work of gradual study during rehearsals for the purpose of preparing a performance. It essentially consists of controllingthe precision of the textual reading, the suitability of technical solutions for the requesteddynamic and timbral effects, the equilibriumbetween sounds or between the various parts orvoices, their coordination or subordination in anagogic unity and, the most valuable goal, making individuals aware… of the reciprocal functionality of their actions the attainment, thatis, of that spontaneous understanding that iscalled harmony. N o limits are placed on the methods and objectives employed in the pursuitof one of these optimum performance plans.5

During a conference held in 1967 to commemoratethe 100th anniversary of Toscanini’s birth, the

113 JCG Vol. 30

eminent conductor and scholar Gianandrea

Gavazzeni gave an example of the modern,

colloquial use of the term concertazione with regard

to Toscanini’s subtle modification of a passage from

Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera. His statement

succinctly illustrates this second, often

misunderstood responsibility of the conductor:

Consider the case of the four unison horns in

[Act III of] Un ballo in maschera, something

which has become such a part of tradition that

even though that modification is not inserted into

the performance materials, today when one

prepares [quando si concerta] the opera it is

enough just to glance at the horns and they

already understand that they are to play the

bassoons’ and cellos’ figure in unison at the

moment when the lots are drawn. Toscanini

correctly considered this moment [in its original

orchestration] to be weak, while the four horns in

unison lend a dramatic timbre that otherwise

could not be obtained.6

It may be that Toscanini himself contributed by his

example to the flexible, modern definition of the

term concertazione.

Given this historical context, and perhaps even

justification, for Toscanini’s alteration of many of

the scores in his library, it remains to determine why

he made the types of changes that he did. Certainly,

as others have conjectured, the acoustics of the

spaces in which he performed may have induced him

to implement certain orchestrational changes. The

possibility of such a practice is suggested by Olin

Downes’s review of a Toscanini concert at the old

Metropolitan Opera House:

Particularly grateful, under the acoustical

conditions, was the Latin genius for clarity and

beauty of tone and for exact sonorous

proportions. It has been remarked more than

once in these columns that the Metropolitan

Opera House does not and is not expected to

furnish the ideal environment for an orchestral

concert. The tone, when the orchestra is on the

stage, loses a measure of its resonance, richness,

and glow. The different choirs of instruments

become clear-cut strands of sound in place of the

fusion and shimmer that usually arise from the

fortunate combination of instruments. Climaxes

are likely to lose in roundness and splendor. The

remarkable thing last night was the beauty and

the body of tone that Mr. Toscanini achieved.7

Later in life Toscanini’s acoustical ideals seem to

have undergone a transformation. His well-known

preference for the notoriously dry NBC Studio 8H,

site of most of the NBC Symphony’s concerts, has

mystified many critics. It may be that some of the

orchestrational changes in Toscanini’s scores result

from his association with this performing venue.

While acoustical conditions may have convinced

Toscanini that orchestrational modifications were

needed in certain compositions, they do not explain

in a comprehensive way why a conductor who

allegedly put the composer’s interests first would

believe that he had the authority to overrule that

same composer’s own notations. Considering the

types of annotations that he made, as well as his

recollection of the influences on his early career, it

seems likely that the theories of Richard Wagner

were the basis of Toscanini’s interpretive practice.

Wagner wrote two treatises that are of special

interest to conductors. The first, On Conducting,

appeared in 1869, while the second, On the

Performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, was

published in 1873, after Wagner conducted that work

to celebrate the laying of the cornerstone at the

Bayreuth Festspielhaus. Both essays systematically

explain Wagner’s goals as a conductor and offer

examples from the literature to illustrate how those

goals might be attained.

It may seem unlikely that Wagner, a colossus of

German music, would have had such a strong

influence on a fiercely patriotic Italian conductor,

particularly since that conductor had pursued his

musical training at a time when his country was

experiencing an anti-Wagnerian backlash. Wagner’s

theories, however, provided Toscanini with answers

to the artistic problems that had been plaguing his

first efforts as a conductor. Andrea della Corte, a

music critic who knew Toscanini during his tenure at

La Scala, has written of a conversation that he had

with the conductor in 1924. According to della

Corte, at the onset of his career Toscanini endured

years of frustrating on-the-job training, as he

JCG Vol. 30 114

struggled to achieve in practice what he could only

imagine while studying musical scores. Although the

young Toscanini clearly recognized the failings of

other conductors who vacillated among imprecise

tempos, beating time with neither authority nor

sensitivity, he could not find a viable alternative. For

a time he believed that the composer-conductor

Giuseppe Martucci, an advocate of metronomically

rigid tempos, might be the mentor who could show

him the way. In the words of della Corte,

Toscanini listened to Martucci, he studied him, he

followed him, but he did not succeed in

feeling like him. An overpowering desire for

freedom, for relativity, for warmth disturbed him.

Certain pages, certain passages, especially by

Beethoven—these he would have wanted more

intense, more animated, more supple. He studied,

thought, and rethought.8

Della Corte goes on to report that it was Wagner’s

essay, On Conducting, that gave Toscanini

consolation and the courage to pursue his ideals.

Like Toscanini, Wagner had rebelled against routine

musical interpretations. The passion and vitality that

he had found while studying orchestral scores

seemed strangely absent from most of the

performances that he attended. In his own work as a

conductor, Wagner adopted a number of practices

that enlivened his own interpretations. One of the

fundamental tenets of Wagner’s conducting

philosophy was to allow the melos—the melody—to

determine the tempo, shape, and pacing of a

performance. He clearly admired the Italian

approach to music. Indeed, Wagner’s praise of

instrumentalists trained in the Italian tradition, for

whom “playing an instrument well means making it

sing,”9 later found its parallel in Toscanini’s own

mantra, “cantare, cantare.”

Critical assessments of Toscanini’s Wagner

interpretations, in particular, focus precisely on their

melodic character. Unlike the sometimes-

meandering readings of Wilhelm Furtwängler,

perhaps his chief musical rival, Toscanini’s

performances exhibit a concern for the melodic

phrase as a whole—its shape, its direction, and its

place in larger units—an approach that sometimes

led him to adopt unusually quick tempos.

But it was not simply in matters of musical pacing

that Wagner had an impact on Toscanini’s

performance aesthetic. Wagner’s concern with the

orchestral sound itself—its clarity, balance, and elas-

ticity—was intimately bound with his

emphasis on the melody. Here, too, Wagner’s

experiences made an impression on the young

Toscanini, who put his recommendations to the test.

Again, in the words of della Corte,

This attempt made use of technical research that

Wagner, too, had found indispensable, since in

order to sing well one must first refine the sound,

render it beautiful, malleable, sure, one must

know how to weigh and to measure out . . .

It is in Wagner’s essay, On the Performance ofBeethoven’s Ninth Symphony, that we find direct

evidence of his influence on Toscanini. Wagner’s

practical knowledge of “how to weigh and to

measure out” shines through every page of this

treatise. Among his recommendations for the

performance of this difficult symphony are specific

restorations of trumpets and horns that had dropped

out of the musical texture for apparently technical

reasons, instrumental reinforcements of certain

inaudible melodies, and rewritten melodies that

Beethoven seems to have been compelled to distort

for reasons of limited instrumental range. Toscanini

adopted each of these suggestions, and several more

concerning the vocal parts in the final movement, for

his own performances of the symphony. While other

conductors, such as Gustav Mahler and Felix

Weingartner, created their own reorchestrations of

the Ninth Symphony, Toscanini preferred to follow

Wagner’s advice.

Wagner’s justification for the many changes that he

imposed on Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony can be

summed up in his rationale for ordering melodic

doubling in the Scherzo:

115 JCG Vol. 30

In deciding such matters the point at issue is

whether one is willing to put up with

performances in which the composer’s intentions

are temporarily obscured or prefers to take the

steps most likely to do them justice.

In short, Wagner felt that Beethoven was the victim

of circumstances, both internal and external, that

prevented the ideal realization of his musical

conception. There seems little doubt that this

assumption was behind the majority of Toscanini’s

alterations to the works in his repertoire. Perhaps it

was Wagner’s dual identity as a composer and a

conductor that gave him the authority, in Toscanini’s

eyes, to sanction the necessary alteration of other

composer’s scores.

How, then, are we to judge Toscanini’s

modifications of the musical text? As any performer

can attest, absolutely literal fidelity to the printed

score is impossible, simply because musical notation

is inadequate to capture every nuance of a living,

breathing composition, and is unable to anticipate

every condition under which a performance might

take place. Certainly, it makes sense to look at

Toscanini’s annotations in light of their overall

musical significance. Sacrificing the scrupulous

observation of printed dynamic markings in order to

make a particular passage “work” is hardly a major

artistic distortion. Similarly, reinforcing the orches-

tration of an important melody so that it does not get

lost in the overall texture is not necessarily a crime

against the composer. About wholesale additions or

deletions of material we might be less forgiving, but

these types of changes are comparatively rare in

Toscanini’s scores.

Perhaps what ultimately mattered was Toscanini’s

motivation. The combination of his Italian musical

heritage and Wagnerian aesthetic convinced him that

the highest service that a conductor could render

was to impose certain types of musical changes

whenever he sensed that a composer’s artistic

conception was threatened. In his mind, there was

neither egotism nor hypocrisy in his actions. The

textual fidelity myth, while it lasted, helped to

forestall questions about the fluid relationship

between composer and interpreter. Now that it has

been dispelled, the true and significantly more

complex record of Toscanini’s achievements is free

to emerge.

*****

Linda B. Fairtile is the Music Librarian at theUniversity of Richmond (Virginia). She is the authorof Giacomo Puccini: A Guide to Research, as well asarticles on various aspects of Italian opera. Whileworking for The New York Public Library, sheprocessed the personal papers of Arturo Toscanini,Jacob Druckman, and other noted musicians.

ENDNOTES

1 Corriere della sera, 12-13 March 1899.

2 Century Magazine, March 1913.

3 New York World, 2 February 1927.

4 Journal of the American Musicological Society 42/3 (Fall

1989).

5 Franco Melotti, “Concertazione,” Ricordi-RizzoliEnciclopedia della musica (Milan, 1972).

6 Fedele D’Amico and Rosa Paumgartner, eds. La lezione diToscanini (Florence, 1970).

7 Olin Downes, Music: Arturo Toscanini Conducts, The NewYork Times, 2 February 1927.

8Toscanini visto da un critico (Turin, 1958).

9 On Conducting, translated by Robert L. Jacobs in ThreeWagner Essays (London, 1979).

JCG Vol. 30 116

Conducting Cannot Be Taught (CCBT)

(JCG Volume 27, 2007)

By Harold Farberman

It’s time to redefine our conducting profession, to rid

ourselves of a 19th century pattern hangover and to

demand that conducting teachers address the need

for a new kind of baton movement. The time for a

clear-headed examination of the art of conducting is

now.

1. The earth is flat.

2. The sun revolves around the earth.

3. Man will never fly.

Intelligent, dedicated scholars endorsed and actively

propagated those views.

Examples of the prevalence of CCBT:

“Conducting cannot be taught”-Michael Jimbo,

Director of the Monteaux School-Conductors Guild

Conference Panel––New York 2002

“Conducting cannot be taught”––Jonathon

Sternberg, esteemed colleague, former Professor of

Conducting, Temple University––Conductor Guild

Conference Panel––New York, 2006

A musically literate population, which has included

Artruro Toscanini, Richard Strauss and Erich

Leinsdorf, continues to support the notion that

conducting cannot be taught. It took time, counted

in centuries, to reveal the shape of the earth’s place

in the solar system. The concept of manned flight

and its validation took even longer. Conducting as a

profession is barely a few hundred years old, still

evolving, so perhaps it is not surprising that the

idea of the conductor continues to be bathed in

self-serving mystery, a condition that promotes

misrepresentation and misunderstanding.

Can CCBT be taken at face value? There are

numerous conducting programs in conservatories,

universities and music schools throughout the world.

Summer programs specifically designed to teach

conducting have proliferated. Private tutors are

ready and willing to initiate young hopefuls into a

perilous profession. The idea of conducting as an art

and a business can, and is, being taught.

What sort of conducting is unteachable? What kind

of conductor is under discussion? Maestri Jimbo and

Sternberg, who teach, will speak for themselves and

I have already explored this same issue briefly albeit

under another name: the born conductor (––footnote,

“The Cambridge Companion to Conducting” a

Cambridge University Press publication.)

If unteachable conducting exists how do we

acknowledge and recognize its results?

Performance–as–proof remains the core of those

who support the CCBT theory. They cite various

performances as, “incredibly moving,” “fantastic,”

“other-worldly” or, “a once in a lifetime musical

experience.” Advocates are quick to point out that

conservatories cannot teach music-making of such

magnitude, nor can professors pass creative gifts to

a student. Achieving such extraordinary levels of

conducting cannot be taught, and those conductors

who produce such performances must be regarded as

self-taught, naturally intuitive performers. We are

117 JCG Vol. 30

to believe that they are recipients of extravagant

genetic musical gifts and are pre-destined to become

great conductors.

CCBT is a specious and dangerous elitist argument;

a template specifically created for imaginary

super-conductors. The idea is also deeply disturbing

because, when fully considered, it is a view that

promotes the notion that training conductors is

unnecessary. In the oddly convoluted world of

CCBT, conductors who undergo rigorous training

are automatically relegated to a lesser performing

level because they are devoid of the intuitive gifts

that produce natural conductors.

Let’s examine the real world.

Conductors come in various shapes, sizes, genders

and talents. There are a small number of highly

gifted conductors and a much larger number of

conductors whose gifts are less obvious. When

orchestras advertise for a conductor, they generally

receive some 300 applications. At least 280

applicants will quickly be classified as not qualified,

about 93% of the applicant pool. Six of the

remaining 20 applicants will be chosen as guest

conductors. That is 1.8% of the original 300.

I would guess that gifted conductors are no different

percentage-wise than gifted pianists, violinists,

painters, surgeons, lawyers or potential astronauts.

Many want to be; few will be.

I can say without hesitation that after 30 years of

teaching and observing a large number of hopeful

conductors, I have never yet met a natural

conductor. There have been a number of truly gifted

young musicians, many excellent ones, and a large

number of dedicated but less talented musicians. It

should be easy to predict who will be successful but

in fact it is quite difficult. The process of becoming

a conductor of quality is a diverse and complex

long-term commitment, very different from

mastering a single instrument. Immensely gifted,

passionate students often fail, generally because they

expect success quickly. Less gifted musicians

unexpectedly succeed as conductors because they

understand the long journey to be undertaken.

Specific schooling, instrumental skills, composition,

extra-musical knowledge, languages, an understand-

ing of three centuries of past musical

currents and most importantly, opportunities for

on-the-podium failures are essential ingredients for a

career. It would be stretching credulity to believe

any of the above necessities are organically

intuitive. Finally, a probing intellect and one’s own

innate musicality comes into play and form the

beginnings of a conductor, a specially trained

musician who, after experience, will be uniquely

qualified to bring a composer’s creation to life.

Are there natural musical performers? The answer

must be yes.

Throughout musical history we have read about, and

witnessed in our own time, the emergence of

pre-teen instrumentalists whose accomplishments

are extraordinary. These very young violinists and

pianists defy classification. They astonish, generally

for technical achievements rather than for probing

musical reasons. Conversely pre-teen natural

conductors are extremely rare, if they exist at all.

But because the act of conducting is a collective

enterprise, it is entirely possible for a bright ten year

old to stand in front of an orchestra, beat patterns and

as if by magic, conduct a performance of a Mozart

symphony. That is possible because orchestras are

giant computers. They retain performance history.

Press a key (beat a pattern) and basic musical

information appears. In contrast a violin cannot play

itself. It makes no sound until it

is held and bowed and at that moment of first

contact the sounds produced will not be

fully formed. In contrast our unschooled

conductor–beginner can produce a compact

coordinated sonority. The difference in sound

production is shocking. The magic is not the

conductor, but the orchestra/computer. It is a living

sensitive instrument that can produce sound without

the guidance of a professional conductor. Like

steroids for athletes, orchestras often enhance a

conductor’s performance and inadvertently help

keep the CCBT proposition alive.

JCG Vol. 30 118

Many non–musical professions that rely on statistics

can easily identify individuals as natural. Baseball’s

Hank Aaron hit 744 home runs. No one else has

done that. His historic performance identifies him as

a born, natural hitter. As has been noted,

performance is the heart of the CCBT belief.

However unlike the game of baseball which

produces concrete statistics based on performance,

performing music is an abstract art which defies

categorization. Depending on who is listening, the

same performance may be perceived as a home run

(“fantastic”), a single (“OK”) or even an out

(“not worth hearing.”) In contrast, a home run in

baseball is a home run for everyone, forever. There

is no mystery, no debate.

For many, there is an air of mystery firmly in place

around extraordinary performances credited to

natural conductors. But if one rehearses and

performs daily with the worlds’ leading conductors,

and with a great orchestra that features a signature

sonority cultivated over decades, the idea of

performance as an event cloaked–in–mystery cannot

be taken seriously. Conductors of substance are a

complex composite of learned craft, accumulated

skills and deep emotional attachments to the music

they bring to the public. When a conductor of

quality produces an extraordinary musical

experience it is a disservice to call his labor the

result of some mythical, natural intuition, the kind of

conducting that cannot be taught. An experienced

observer of conductor/orchestra interaction would

know better. He would presume that an excellent

conductor brought a musical concept to the podium

that gained the respect of an excellent orchestra.

There is nothing mysterious about great orchestral

performances. They are a combination of multiple

skills, shared knowledge and hard work. With those

essentials in place an unexpected revelation may, or

may not, occur. The same conductor with different

orchestras, or the same orchestra with different

conductors might not be able to repeat an

exceptional performance.

Why do we continue to discuss CCBT and natural

conductors? The answer lies in the 19th century.

Despite the presence of a large number of musicians

who called themselves conductors, conducting was

not a profession and conducting teachers did not

exist. Music conservatories were well established in

Paris, Milan, Naples, Prague, Vienna, Brussels,

Leipzig and London. In the United States, Peabody,

Oberlin and the New England Conservatory were

the first major conservatories. When Mendelssohn

(reputedly a fine conductor) designed his Leipzig

Conservatory in 1843, he did not include a

conducting department. When Wagner, mentor to

Bülow, Seidl, Richter and Levi designed a music

school for Munich, he did not think it was necessary

to include a conducting department.

A story often repeated tells of a young student who

asked Liszt for piano lessons. Liszt replied that

when the student became technically proficient he

would consider teaching him music. Now imagine

19th century orchestral performances featuring the

music of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Brahms,

Berlioz, Wagner, Schumann, Dvorak or Liszt,

conducted by the composers. If, as Liszt indicated,

the end game is a comprehensive knowledge of the

music then who could possibly know the music

better then the composer? As a result, 19th century

composers were expected to conduct their new

compositions, but without technical training.

Describing the music verbally was the norm, and a

public appearance by a composer as a time–keeper

(conductor) was an on–the–job learning

experience. The CCBT and natural conductor model

was born.

What methods were used to conduct a group of

players in the 19th century?

Despite Louis Spohr’s disputed account of

introducing the silent wooden baton for the first time

on April 10, 1820 in London, conducting with a

baton was not the normal 19th century procedure.

Berlioz describes a performance he attended at the

San Carlo Opera in 1831:

The noise made by the conductor tapping his

desk bothered me greatly. I was gravely assured,

however, that without this support the musicians

could not possibly keep in time.

119 JCG Vol. 30

In 1832, the violin section leaders in a London

orchestra objected to Mendelssohn using a baton,

insisting he conduct while sitting at the piano. The

silent baton was finally accepted by mid 19th

century, although pockets of resistance could be

found throughout Europe.

The only technical tool available to 19th century

time keepers were the 18th century two, three and

four beat pattern designs formalized by Thomas

Janowka in 1701. And because 19th century

orchestras regularly performed new music, it was

the right tool at the right time. Can you imagine a

group of musicians reading a Beethoven symphony

in manuscript for the first time without some

recognizable patterns from maestro Beethoven? It

would have been an almost impossible task. Beat

patterns were a fundamental and essential element in

the early development of orchestral performance.

Patterns continue to be useful, especially in mixed

meter music. Think of Pierre Monteaux in Paris in

1911 rehearsing Stravinky’s Rite of Spring for the

first time. He needed twenty plus rehearsals to instill

a technical baton language based on irregular pattern

combinations to be able to conduct the Rite of

Spring.

But by the 21st century, all the components that

helped create those historic first performances in the

19th century had changed:

• The new music of the 19th century is now 200

years old. We now know a great deal about the lives

of the composers, and the performance practices of

their periods.

• Unlike 19th century musicians, today’s gifted

orchestra musicians perform Beethoven, Brahms,

and Berlioz with great skill.

• Hard to read hand–written manuscript parts have

been replaced by easy to read printed music.

• Brass, wind and percussion instruments have been

improved. Bows and strings have changed.

Here is another then–and–now comparison. It would

have taken a span of 24 years to attend the premieres

of all of Beethoven’s nine symphonies. Today his

symphonies can be heard in nine hours, at home,

with enough time for lunch and a dinner. After 200

years, Beethoven’s music is as familiar as our

morning newspaper.

Today, professional conductors have replaced the

composer/conductor model.

One thing has not changed. Present day

professional conductors stubbornly cling to

yesterday’s beat patterns. The rationale for pattern

use in the 19th century was necessary and

acceptable. But those new music conditions no

longer exist for today’s podium occupants. Present

day orchestras know the 19th century repertoire well

enough to play entire symphonies without a single

baton stroke from a conductor.

However, conducting teachers are stuck in the 19th

century. They continue to teach music first—an

excellent idea that no one can object to—but neglect

to put in place a physical delivery system to make

the music they teach coherent, or teach technique.

Music can be learned from a variety of sources in

many ways, and most young students I encounter

have interesting and wonderful ideas about all kinds

of music. Music is everywhere, but a teacher of

conducting is the only source for conducting

technique. A new kind of conducting technique, a

physical art form that moves beyond patterns, must

take hold and be taught.

Learning 200–year–old formulas should take about

fifteen minutes. Is that conducting technique? That

notion is insulting to all composers and every young

conductor who realizes he cannot make an orchestra

respond to his wishes. Teachers tied to

pattern–as–technique fail to realize that they rob

young students of the ability to think creatively

about the physical aspects of conducting. There is

little or no information in the pattern because a

pattern has no musical value. It is simply a time

keeping device.

JCG Vol. 30 120

The lack of creative physical movement is a 19th

century hangover. Natural conductors and CCBT

theories are an attempt to hide the problem and it is

a shameful indictment of our profession that

intelligent musicians support those mystical notions.

A score has all the information a gifted musical

mind needs to construct a meaningful physical

replica of the music. Conducting technique is

extracted from the score, changing as the music

changes. It is not a formula that is blindly imposed

upon all music.

I recently revisited “The Art of Conducting: Volume

1,” a video. However, I watched it silently with the

volume turned off. I encourage every student

conductor to do the same. Look for the amount of

musical and technical information given to the

orchestra by the conductor. Then turn the sound on

and decide if the orchestra’s generally excellent

performances reflect the conductor’s information. In

many cases the orchestra’s performances far surpass

the information supplied. All the conductors shared

common traits: intense commitment to the music,

immense knowledge of the scores they were

conducting and great orchestras to decipher limited

physical directions. So the question must be asked

and answered: If the performances were accepted as

successful, why change a formula that works?

The answer to that important question cannot be

given unless another question is asked: What kind of

conductor do we want to become? There are two

choices.

The first choice is the old model, very well

represented in the video. It shows very strong

musicality, relying on formula time beating for

orchestral togetherness, and expecting the orchestra

to reproduce all articulations not indicated by the

conductor. It worked because historically (19th

century onwards), orchestras supplied all the

missing ingredients, and in the process became

self–sustaining entities. Performances without a

unified musical point of view were, and still are

common, and create a climate in which conductors

often receive credit for performances largely created

by the orchestra.

The second option would be called the new model

conductor. He or she would be very strong

musically and equally strong technically, embracing

creative baton movement not tied to rigid formula

patterns. As a result the orchestra would become a

willing partner in reproducing the musical/technical

information supplied by the conductor. Depending

on the knowledge and passion of the conductor, the

result, for better or worse, would be a unified

presentation of the composer’s intent.

The answer to the question of why change a

working model, is that the conditions that created

that formula have changed dramatically, and so we

must change as well. As orchestra–driven

performances fill our concert halls the conductor is

in jeopardy of becoming a deified relic, present but

not fully in charge. We can continue to dumb–down

our profession while all others improve, or we can

begin the process of replacing the old formula.

Our profession has undergone significant changes.

As rehearsals have become more expensive,

rehearsal periods have been reduced. The

relationship between conductor and orchestra has

been reconfigured. Musicians unions have leveled

the playing field. Conductors can no longer act like

lords of the manor. I am reminded of a Toscanini

cassette tape that was widely circulated in the 1950s.

It was a recording of an NBC Symphony rehearsal

of the cello–bass recitative in the last movement of

Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The Maestro was on

his game. He rehearsed those several measures over

and over and over again. Shouting, singing and

yelling his instructions he continued to rehearse the

same passage yet again and again. At every abrupt

interruption his anger and frustration seemed to

grow. He was not satisfied and still shouting at the

players when the cassette ran out after some 20

minutes.

Such behavior is no longer tolerated, but if we step

beyond the histrionics, a serious question needs an

answer. Why was Toscanini, regarded by many as

the greatest conductor of the 20th century, so angry

and frustrated? The NBC Symphony was a hand-

picked orchestra, a stage full of great musicians who

121 JCG Vol. 30

could play anything. Is it possible they could not

read the recitative correctly? The answer to that

question is a definite no. If we had a video of the

rehearsal, it would be easy to determine the cause,

but even in the absence of a video it was surely

Toscanini who created the musical damage. He

knew what he wanted, but he couldn’t make his

musical intentions clear with a baton. He resorted to

what every 19th century conductor did: they

verbalized the music, which is exactly what

Toscanini was forced to do, but in his own

inimitable manner. Ultimately the old formula

worked, but can the formula be improved or should

it be replaced? Should Richard Strauss be

considered a great conductor? Based on the video

performance of his own Til Eulenspeigel, I would

say that Strauss was a great musician and a modest

time beating machine, certainly not my idea of a

conductor. He is not alone.

Change is necessary because the impressive

technical abilities of orchestras continued to grow

throughout the 20th century while conductors have

remained stagnant. Orchestras have become better

than conductors. Many orchestras have reached

impressive performing plateaus and most sound

alike because conductors do not have the technical

skills to make them sound better and different from

one another. It is no longer necessary to teach a good

orchestra how to play Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony,

nor do players want to listen to lectures about the

music and about how to play the music. No longer

should we expect it to be business–as–usual:

orchestras helping well–meaning, intelligent, gifted

musicians with no conducting skills succeed as

conductors. The message should be clear to all

aspiring conductors. Change is necessary.

Some progress has already been made. A small

number of teachers believe physical motions other

than up–down, side–to–side can be considered tools

for valid technical/musical use. Within the next few

decades the physical image of the conductor and

conducting will continue to change. A new kind of

baton technique will allow conductors the flexibility

and freedom to control all elements of the music

while allowing the orchestra to perform with little

interference from the conductor when or if desired.

The orchestra will cease to be an expert note

producing machine and become an equal partner to

the conductor in producing a true reflection of the

mind, heart and will of the conductor.

Technique

Prerequisites for the use of these twelve technical

considerations are that the conducting student is

musical, dedicated to learning and believe that

physical movement can be dictated by the music.

1. Baton: Control of the tip of the baton is essential

for carrying sound and creating orchestral weight.

Changing the speed of the movement of the tip of

the baton will create color, line and phrase.

2. Wrist: The wrist is the most important part of the

conducting arm. It is the closest movable part of the

conducting arm to the tip of the baton, and its

movement is capable of creating every dynamic and

all articulations.

3. Articulations A: The conducting arm has three

movable units (wrist, forearm, shoulder) and each

unit has a different strength and function in creating

and delivering a variety of baton strokes containing

a variety of articulations. B: A combination of wrist

and forearm movement (never together) can cover

every technical and expressive marking in a score

with precision. Vertical, horizontal, clicks, flicks,

staccato, legato, sfz’s, circular and half circular

strokes can be used forcefully or expressively in all

dynamic ranges.

4. Body: Beyond a proper and comfortable stance,

crouching, dancing, etc. it is important to realize that

the body is not a baton. Music passes through our

bodies as we breathe and create sonority, and the

body acting as a conduit for movement to the tip of

the baton. The baton must always be the primary

visual element for the orchestra. The body certainly

helps, but if the body shakes, rattles and rolls, the

baton is nullified.

JCG Vol. 30 122

5. Registration: A technique in which the baton

follows the flow of a line as it moves upwards or

downwards and breaks pattern. Registration works

best in slow to moderate moving music and is

excellent for gaining p to pp sound structures but

only with wrist movement. Baton Registration is

learned by practicing scale movement (sing the

scales): up, down, side–to–side, using all

articulations.

6. Score Study: Add visual score study for baton

placement to traditional score study.

7. Conductor’s Space: The entire area around the

podium to the furthest reaches of the conductor’s

arms is the conductor’s working area. Visual score

study identifies the areas in the conductors space for

baton placement, based on the needs of the score.

Identifying the need for specific strokes

(articulations) in specific areas may mean breaking

patterns.

8. Hands: The use of both hands in various areas of

the conductor’s space, independent of each other, is

essential for the fullest realization of the text. The

old idea of beating time with the right hand in one

area, and emoting with the left hand (usually

shaking it at the first violins) should be retired.

9. Topography: The placement of either hand in the

conductors working space is a result of the

composer’s topography. Examine a page of music

(visual score study). It will contain all the

information a conductor needs to make reasoned

baton movement decisions. Pages will differ from

one another in density of notes, orchestration and

rhythmic ideas. Every bit of print on the page should

impact the choice of stroke. As music changes, the

strokes will change. This approach to baton

movement (technique) is very different than simply

repeating the same formula pattern measure after

measure.

10. Orchestration: Use the composer’s orchestration

as a guide to orchestrate your hand movements,

using either hand as primary music–makers. Move

from hand to hand if the orchestration allows it, e.g.

left side to right side or winds to harp, etc. Give up

pulse when the composer suspends active motion.

Conducting through an entire work with the right

hand beating every pulse is probably the least viable

option in recreating a composer’s music. No

composition can possibly be as dull as a repeated

pattern, and no professional orchestra needs

constant time keeping.

11. Score: Every component in the score dictates the

conductor’s physical response. Imagination and

knowledge must influence decision–making, and

conductors will differ on the meaning of the music,

but the score is the only roadmap to public

performance.

12. Music: Music creates its own technique, which

must be an energy–driven physical replica of the

composer’s mind and heart.

If conducting technique is created by the music, the

physical act of conducting cannot be a codified set

of motions applied to every kind of music.

Conducting has its own unique technique, divorced

from patterns. Conducting can be, and is, an art

form.

*****

Harold Farberman, founding President of theConductors Guild, is the Founder, Director andProfessor of Orchestral Conducting at theConductors' Institute at Bard (NY). He also serveson the Advisory Council and Mentoring Committeeof the Conductors Guild.

ENDNOTE

Teachers of conducting finally appeared in the

20th century with the emergence of

non-composer conductor professionals in the last

quarter of the 19th century. In 1905, the

Conservatoire de Musique in Paris hired Vincent

D’Indy, followed by the Vienna Hochschule in 1909

(Franz Schalk), and the Royal College, London in

1919 (Sir Adrian Boult).

123 JCG Vol. 30

Chamber Orchestra & Ensemble Repertoire

A Catalog of Modern Music

by

Dirk Meyer

This catalog, of nearly 4,000 compositions, provides complete

performance information on a variety of repertoire for smaller

ensembles. The extensive appendix allows you to search the

entries according to features like instrumentation and duration,

and is completed with a list of publishers and resources.

Foreword by David Daniels.

“This extremely comprehensive and user-friendly guide

significantly serves the interests of adventurous spirits

performing and programming 20th and 21st century repertoire.”

Paul Moravek

“Thorough, intelligent and incredibly well organized!”

Vadim Gluzman

“A Must!” – Ludovic Morlot

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