The Maestro Myth: Great Conductors in Pursuit of Power.(Review)

The Maestro Myth: Great Conductors in Pursuit of Power By Norman Lebrecht, 1990

A substantial portion of the cost of a ticket to a classical music concert goes to pay the orchestra's music director or guest conductor. Top conductors are compensated lavishly. But in this highly entertaining book, British music critic Norman Lebrecht suggests few of them earn it.

Lebrecht is a fine writer who gives his readers humorous anecdotes and catty details about the lives of great conductors. For those of us who only know Arturo Toscanini or Eugene Ormandy as names on record labels, the insights are highly illuminating.

As Lebrecht points out, the art of conducting is "nebulous and indeterminate.... No one has ever explained how one man with a physical flourish can elicit an exhilarating response from an orchestra while another, with precisely the same motions and timing, produces a dull, unexceptional sound." Nonetheless, there's a certain something that explains why we still buy decades-old discs by Fritz Reiner, Sir John Barbirolli, or Bruno Walter.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, composers tended to conduct their own compositions. But Richard Wagner's complex scores were so difficult that conducting eventually became a specialty. The first modern conductor, Hans von Bulow (1830-94), spent 20 years of his career conducting Wagner's operas, many from memory. Wagner rewarded his disciple by seducing--and marrying--von Bulow's wife, Cosima (a daughter of Franz Liszt).

Von Bulow was the first of a long line of conductors who believed they had to make the lives of their musicians miserable in order to get the job done. Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) insisted on being absolute dictator of the Vienna Opera at the turn of the century. He controlled every aspect of the opera, including the costume department and stage design. Mahler cut off free tickets for journalists and demanded that late arriving audience members sit in an uncomfortable stall known as "the sin bin." He even defied Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Josef II. When the emperor asked him to perform a light opera by popular Hungarian composer Count Tichy, Mahler refused, claiming he was incapable of understanding such a frothy work. "A chestnut tree," Mahler grumbled, "cannot be expected to produce oranges."

The most important conductor after Mahler, Arturo Toscanini (1867-1957), also demanded absolute authority. Toscanini went into fits whenever anyone called him "Mr. Toscanini." Everyone--even cab drivers -- had to address him as "Maestro." Toscanini not only thought himself equal to the great composers, he routinely rewrote compositions he didn't like. His resistance to Italian Fascism--which led him, in 1931, to be beaten by Fascist thugs--came about not because Toscanini ...