Chapter 2

The Technique of Conducting

If conductors came to the rescue of the new symphonies and operas in the nineteenth century as artistic overseers, composers soon realized they could go even farther in imagining new and more complex music; a conductor would always be there to translate and make practical whatever they dreamed up. With each new requirement, conductors had to refine their technique to be able to organize and lead symphonic and operatic works, some of which lasted many hours and required huge forces.

Once Verdi had come to see the possibilities that went beyond someone who followed his metronome indications and could insist on fidelity to his written texts (with the understanding that certain changes in the vocal lines, called puntature, would be allowed), he added new elements to his notational lexicon that became part of the very structure of his music and not just a way of indicating the niceties of expression.

In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, symphonic music was generally performed in a fairly strict tempo. Excitement was created by escalating sequences of harmonies, and notes that would rise in pitch. Surprising chords could substitute for what your ear expected, and there was always the joy of a new melody to delight and please. And all of these pre-maestro developments could be achieved within a fixed tempo and without a conductor’s shaping the ebb and flow of the momentum. For some composer/conductors, like Felix Mendelssohn—the first, it is said, to use a baton, rather than a bow or a roll of paper—it was also a matter of good taste to stay in one tempo.

Gioachino Rossini was seen by many as the anti-Beethoven. He was the other side of the musical coin for those who found Beethoven’s music heavy and verging on incomprehensibility. This may be hard to imagine now, but I remember encountering Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis for the first time when I sang in the chorus at Tanglewood in 1971 and thinking, Beethoven was crazy! I simply could not understand how this music proceeded harmonically, melodically, and structurally from one point to another.

Unlike Beethoven, whose music more and more required a conductor, Rossini created operas, both serious and, more famously, comedic, that were always musically logical. The ear of the listener was never particularly confounded by the structure and direction of his far simpler musical language. And unlike Beethoven, who could occasionally write joyful music, Rossini could write funny music. A fundamental part of that humor was Rossini’s penchant for the long crescendo. Audiences in Vienna, Beethoven’s home—and for a while, Rossini’s, too—would come to expect this technique from “Signor Crescendo,” as he came to be known. They would get the giggles as one of his trademark jokes would start, usually in the finale to an act or a scene. All the characters would be onstage and express their individual feelings, whereupon an incessant motoric figure would begin very, very quietly. Gradually that figure would get louder and louder, with all the singers chattering away, until it would finally burst into a fortissimo of fulfillment that gave the public exactly what it wanted. But then the crafty Rossini would do something even more outrageous: he would do it a second time! A short transition would bring back the first section, and each character would start off once again telling us of his or her feelings, one at a time, like a shaggy-dog story. And sure enough, that motoric figure would come back pianissimo and the audience would be in on the joke. It was now our joke, linking us to the characters onstage. It thrilled the public. It still does.

The basic requirement of a Rossini crescendo is that it remain in a fixed tempo, and is compromised if it accelerates, for it is an excruciatingly long and masterfully told joke. It therefore could be performed with or without a conductor. But with the arrival of a conductor, new elements could be added to the vocabulary that were formerly unavailable to composers. Verdi was one of the first to make use of these new possibilities, one of which, unlike Rossini’s crescendos, was the accelerando (“accelerating”).

Verbal instructions added to the notational system, as I said, tell us a great deal about what was already happening. During Verdi’s so-called middle period, Rigoletto (1851) to Aida (1871), we begin to see words like stringendo (literally “squeezing”), accelerando, and affrettando (“hurrying up”). They are all gerundive forms that indicate a process rather than a sudden change, and they all require a conductor to achieve the effect, because an orchestra and a chorus cannot reliably speed up and slow down together. Verdi clearly wants these three ways of speeding up to feel different from one another. As Verdi understood the new possibilities, he was able to write into his scores what he knew was already possible. In one twenty-bar section of his Don Carlos (1867), the score has allegro giusto (“somewhat lively”), più animato (“more animated”), stringendo e crescendo (“speeding up and getting louder”), a corona (indicating a stop of indeterminate length), a tempo (“return to the first tempo”), rallentando (“slowing down”), and another a tempo.

Verdi remained, however, a classicist in his structures, using, as I said, metronome markings as a way of creating the time and space for his music to sound as he intended. In the prelude to his gran finale secondo from Aida, better known as the Triumphal Scene, Verdi explicitly tells the conductor to start at allegro maestoso—a “majestic” tempo in which the pulse is at a stately 100 beats per minute. The onstage trumpets sound, announcing something truly grand is about to take place. After four bars, the orchestra enters mezzo forte (“half loud”). This is a terrific dynamic, because it implies directionality. It is neither soft nor loud. It is potential energy. Eight bars later, Verdi writes crescendo e stringendo poco a poco—“getting louder and squeezing [time] little by little”—for the next twelve bars and leading up to the first entrance of the people of Egypt, who sing “Gloria all’Egitto” (“Glory to Egypt”). And at this precise moment, the music suddenly returns to the first tempo, the majestic allegro first announced by the onstage trumpets.

The ten bars of chorus, an onstage band, and the orchestra, marked at the loudest dynamic Verdi used in this score, fortissimo, ends with the indication pesante e stentato (“heavy and with force”) followed by complete silence for three beats. Once the air is cleared, and the audience’s auditory responses have adapted to this unexpected blast of silence, Verdi begins again, and (as Rossini did with his crescendo technique) the sequence is repeated, but this time with the chorus—the victorious populace—joining in, as the music gets louder and faster, leading up to a two-bar transition indicating the return to the principal tempo. This was a radical development to the Rossini model, because it is built on both a crescendo and an acceleration. It is quite the opposite of a comic finale. Rather than being numbingly motoric, it creates a sense of running to get to something big and important. It feels like, “Hurry up! Quick, let’s get to the parade! The king is going to be there…and elephants!”

From this example, for music that lasts a mere two minutes, it is easy to see just how complex it is to achieve what the music says. The conductor stands before an orchestra of at least sixty (usually closer to eighty) in the orchestra pit, with an onstage band of at least sixteen, and a chorus of at least eighty. The chorus is at a great distance upstage from the conductor, because there must be room for the soloists, the parading supernumeraries, and another chorus (the Ethiopians) who will shortly enter. The speed of light is instantaneous, but sound is surprisingly slow. The audience does not care about the physics of the perceived universe. It wants all the musical elements of Aida to be together, and if they aren’t, it’s the conductor’s fault.

In case you have just decided to play a recording of Aida, it should also be said that I have never heard one that adheres to what I have just described—what Verdi clearly wrote—even the one by Arturo Toscanini, who was known for his fidelity to the text, or by any of my contemporary colleagues. The introductory music to the Triumphal Scene is invariably conducted at a tempo significantly faster than Verdi’s 100 beats per minute (commonly at approximately 126 beats, which is “march tempo”), and without any accelerations. There are reasons for this, which we shall explore later.

The mental challenges of having an entire opera in our heads—even if we are reading the score—combined with the physical language of our gestures and the physical strain on our bodies, are demanding. Happily, conducting is one of the few professions in which getting older is viewed as getting better. (“Ja,” quipped the great Wagnerian bass-baritone Hans Hotter at a birthday party in San Francisco during rehearsals of Alban Berg’s Lulu in 1989, “provided you can hide the fact that you are completely deaf! We used to play tricks on old [Hans] Knappertsbusch [an important German conductor] at Bayreuth after the war. We’d open our mouths a bar or two early but not sing, and he would wave at us to stop singing!” In fact, despite the impairment Knappertsbusch could conduct brilliantly. Once again, we face an odd reality: a conductor whose job is to shape and lead massively complex sounds could do it brilliantly, and to the profound delight of his audience, with highly compromised hearing.

In order to control vast forces over long periods of time, we all have to develop certain muscles in our arms and shoulders as well as perfect a way to communicate without speaking. It is normal for a conductor to be waving his arms for six hours in a day, and sometimes as much as nine. In the case of Wagner’s Das Rheingold, it is two hours and forty-five minutes from the moment you give the upbeat for that first low-E-flat pedal tone to the entrance of the gods into Valhalla and the final curtain. Unlike every singer on the stage, and indeed every member of the orchestra, you never stop. (I did once manage a box of juice with a straw in it during the eight bars in which only the offstage anvils play, but it was risky.)

The gestural language is relatively easy to understand, but it has to be practiced. You cannot think about it, and when your mind plays tricks, it is the arm that is always right. This is very much like a ballet dancer’s muscle memory. The right hand beats time; that is, it sets the tempo or pulse of the music. It can hold a baton. The left hand turns pages, cues instrumentalists with an invitational or pointing gesture, and generally indicates the quality of the notes (percussive, smoothly linked, sustained, etc.). It does not matter if you are left-handed or right-handed, because both arms are equally important and must act independently of each other.

Of course there can be much more, depending on the athleticism and the balleticism of the conductor. Looking at films or pictures of the great conductors of the past reveals vast differences in their physicalities. Richard Strauss, for example, looks like a slightly annoyed businessman waiting for a late train to arrive. Toscanini appears wrapped up in a battle with an invisible demon, his mouth always open and his lips mouthing incomprehensible words. Wilhelm Furtwängler, a gangly and ungraceful man, shook his arms and head as if he had twice as many joints as the rest of us to lead the final bars of Brahms’s Symphony no. 4. All of them were clearly great and all completely different from one another, communicating without saying a word. An orchestra is sensitive to far more than finger pointing and passing eye contact. After all, most communication among humans is telepathic.

The planes of the body will express the conductor’s intention: eyes, heart (chest), full frontal address, arms (tight and closely held or open and embracing), hands (closed, open), facial expressions. Each of these signals a different meaning and affects the sound players make. If a conductor’s heart faces the violins and his face is tilted toward the solo trumpet, while an index finger of the left hand is warning the timpani about a cue, the orchestra will sound different than if that same conductor’s heart is turned toward the trumpet while he faces the timpanist and signals a warning to the violins. Not a word need be spoken.

Some conductors respond to the pulsing rhythms of music rather than the direction of the melodies or the internal colors of a piece. Those conductors (especially the younger ones) may seem to be dancing and may jump in the air at certain upbeats, while others remain strongly planted on the earth. All of this affects the sound an orchestra makes, as strange as that may seem. Orchestras are smart, and the more they think and feel together, the wiser they are.

Leonard Bernstein was a famous jumper. His gyrations were the classical-music equivalent of his young contemporary Elvis Presley. My brother once described Bernstein’s conducting of The Rite of Spring as “a man trying to get his fly up without using his hands.” Bernstein confessed that he hated the way he looked whenever he saw himself on film or videotape, “but when I do what I do, it creates the sound I want to hear.” Pierre Monteux, on the other hand, once scolded the young André Previn to stop all his frenetic movements: “I have yet to have it proven to me that jumping higher makes an orchestra play louder.”

In 1980, I had the occasion to sit in the wings just behind the last stand of first violins of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, led by their principal conductor, Carlo Maria Giulini. Giulini was one of the most profound and spiritual men I have ever met. That he had spent nine months living in a tunnel under the Roman home of his wife’s uncle, along with a Jewish family, during the final year of World War II—in order to avoid being shot by the Nazis—instilled a shadow of sadness and empathy in him. He had seen the worst of humanity and the unspeakable effects of war.

That night, Giulini was conducting Schubert’s Symphony no. 8, the “Unfinished.” Sitting behind the violins made me feel like I was under the spell of this great and pious man. At one point he turned to the violins, his sad eyes seemingly looking beyond them and his left hand reaching out, palm opened in a sign of abject humility, almost like a street beggar. I can still see it, because at that moment I directly experienced Schubert’s Catholic upbringing for the first time and understood this music as a struggle between the angelic and the demonic in each of us. Schubert may have left the symphony unfinished, but under Giulini it was not incomplete. It was a profound moment for me, experiencing the power of a conductor not only to translate, but also to transform and, above all, to illuminate.

In 1971, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s concertmaster, Joseph Silverstein, spoke to the conducting fellows at Tanglewood in one of the small sheds where students have classes. He was very clear about what orchestras want to know from a conductor. “Don’t talk to us about blue skies. Just tell us ‘longer-shorter,’ ‘faster-slower,’ ‘higher-lower.’ ” It was pretty shocking and coldblooded. Silverstein was clearly burned out from too many maestros giving poetic descriptions of how music should sound by using metaphors and similes. He was a great, generous, and creative musician, and I hear his voice in the back of my head any time I talk to an orchestra.

Western music is, of course, expressed through the length, speed, and pitch of its notes; but it is so much more. When Leopold Stokowski visited Yale in 1971, he rehearsed the two student orchestras. It was an opportunity to watch the eighty-nine-year-old maestro shape Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony and his own transcription of the Bach Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor. At one point, he said to the principal oboist, “Oboe—the first four measures are major, the second four minor; change your sound. Play it differently.” It wasn’t blue skies, but it was an important lesson to the young oboist to play with the understanding of his own melody and the accompaniment under him that went from major to minor. Stokowski did not tell the musician what that sound should be—and that is important—but, rather, encouraged his creativity to find it.

One of Toscanini’s musicians told me of a moment in a rehearsal when the sound the NBC Symphony was giving him was too heavy. The Italian maestro was never particularly fluent in English, though he certainly got his points across. In this case, without saying a word, he reached into his pocket and took out his silk handkerchief, tossed it into the air, and everyone watched it slowly glide to earth. After seeing that, the orchestra played the same passage exactly as Toscanini wanted.

We conductors can get our way—which is another manner of saying “get what we believe is correct”—by talking, developing a gestural vocabulary, or seemingly doing nothing at all but somehow insisting on it internally. In Herbert von Karajan’s case, it was about intensely listening to what the orchestra was already doing and, with his eyes closed, molding it like clay on a potter’s wheel. Fritz Reiner seemingly used only his eyes, looking menacingly at the orchestra and using the smallest arm gestures of any major conductor of his era. That he was one of Bernstein’s two principal teachers (Serge Koussevitzky was the other) shows how the apprentice must find his own way and cannot imitate the sorcerer—except to experience the sorcery firsthand. The “what” glows magically before the young person, but the “how” is discovered through a personal journey—if and only if the apprentice is worthy. No one would ever, on viewing them, think of Leonard Bernstein as a protégé of Fritz Reiner, but he was.

All these differences aside, any conductor could be dropped in front of any orchestra in the world and conduct a performance, whether or not he spoke the language of the musicians. That is because everyone in every orchestra understands the basic rules and meanings of our gestures.

As a young man, I had the opportunity to conduct the orchestra of Xalapa, Mexico, in a program that included Brahms’s Second Symphony. I said good morning to them, followed by “No hablo español” and then “Brahms.” I heard the composer’s name being passed among the players, adapting it into a two-syllable word with a guttural h in the middle. I looked at the cellos and basses, gave a gentle upbeat, and they began to play the symphony. After two beats I gave the next upbeat and looked at the first and second horns. They entered on the downbeat of the second measure and were playing the correct notes at the correct dynamic. For the next fifteen minutes, we were getting to know each other—I was judging the strengths and weaknesses of this orchestra and they were judging me.

As we got closer to the last pages of the first movement, I knew I had to say something, even if it was only to go on to the second movement or play the first movement again. I decided to repeat it. “Let’s try that again,” I said. A trumpet player stood up and said in a loud voice, “De nuevo, por favor,” and then, to my shock, I heard what sounded like Bulgarian from a violinist in the back. Everyone shook their heads in agreement and we restarted. I used words this time: English, Italian, German, French. Each time there were at least two translations. This orchestra was comprised of Mexicans, mostly in the woodwind section, American brass players from the University of Indiana, and a coterie of Bulgarians or Romanians (I never was sure) whose airplane, I assumed, had run out of gas in the mountains on their way to a concert years before and they had just stayed.

Soon one of the helpful Americans gave me a list of Spanish translations for things I was saying, like “We are not together!”—“No estamos juntos!” (I never learned the Bulgarian.) The fact is, we could have performed the symphony (though not very well) after that first encounter with each other, when no words were spoken, because the players understood what my arms, eyes, and body were telling them. Years of practicing the patterns, separating our left-hand gestures from our right, making bigger movements for the loud music, tightening our forearm to indicate resistance (which string players translate into more sustained pressure on their strings), breathing as if singing the melodic lines—all of this is normal and understood.

For nonmusicians, probably the most mysterious aspect of our technique has to do with our signaling the way music is going to sound just before it makes that sound. There are three “times” passing through a conductor’s brain—what just happened, what is happening, and what will happen—and we are constantly adjusting the third “time” based on the first two. This is not as amazing as it sounds; it is what drivers do when they get behind the wheel of a car, judging what to do next based on what just happened and what is happening. A cough, an extra breath from a soloist, a surprisingly beautiful solo—each requires a temporal readjustment.

Our gestures are always one beat ahead of the music. Think of a tennis player or a baseball hitter: the swing is preceded by what a conductor calls the preparation. When you hammer a nail into a block of wood, the preparation determines how the nail will enter the wood and predicts its outcome. The big preparation indicates thrust and power and the small one is for the delicate work. In this sense, conducting is very much like being a mime. However, the time of that preparation must be precisely the tempo one wishes to indicate. That is what the right hand does for thousands of strokes in a symphony.

Should a conductor use a baton? It is totally up to the individual. The function of a baton is to extend the reach of the arm and clarify the beat, provided the conductor puts the beat at the tip. It should be like the action of a fly fisherman, otherwise the beat is in the wrist and the orchestra just watches the wrist. It also spares the arm a tremendous amount of tension because of the many ways a baton can be held, allowing a conductor to direct an orchestra by using every aspect of the shoulder and arm, or merely a flip of the wrist. A properly balanced baton can float on an index finger, controlled by the thumb, with practically no stress at all. As conductors get older, these options become especially attractive.

The composer Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–1687), considered to be the first conductor per se, used a precursor of the baton—a long stick that he pounded on the floor. The tradition died, (1) because it was noisy, and (2) because Lully perished from gangrene after stabbing himself in the foot.

During the twentieth century one man dominated the no-baton school: Leopold Stokowski. It was part of his fame and his mystique. It is thought that the reason for his choice was physical: he first complained about discomfort in holding a baton early in his career. Eventually, his long fingers pragmatically created the alternate “look” and sound. A hand has the advantage of vast expressivity, but the disadvantage of limited reach. Because of that, a hand in an opera pit is dangerous, as Stokowski found out at his Metropolitan Opera debut in Turandot in 1961, when synchronization between the stage and the pit went occasionally awry.

Pierre Boulez also conducted without a baton, but in a very different manner. He used the side of his hand, like a martial-arts black belt, to precisely chop his way through music. It was very clear, but extremely limited—perfectly suited for complex music in which uneven bars and speeds create the expressivity, rather than the ebb and flow of melodic lines found in the “simpler” pre-avant-garde music of Europe. Stokowski, on the other hand, was a ballet master of the fingers, wrists, and arms. He created mystery and gave the impression of being a sorcerer who had no need of a magic wand, pulling the sounds out of the orchestra, urging them forward and back, stretching time so as to erase bar lines, and mesmerizing the public. Like all the great conductors I have known, he was unique.

Being free of the stick allows you to create three-dimensional shapes in the air. Certain music seems to thrive that way, especially music that is free of a repetitive beat. On the other hand, it does require more muscle and seems limited when leading large forces, especially in loud music. That is why I have conducted both with and without a baton.

It was Seiji Ozawa who first showed us another possibility. His arms moved toward and away from the orchestra, whereas most conductors live in a world of up and down, left and right. Those beating patterns, of course, can be infinitely subtle and varied, but Ozawa could control arm muscles to use his left arm, his hand in a fist, to indicate a crescendo and a diminuendo of incredible strength, while maintaining a right arm that was totally separate from the left side of his body. Many hours of practice allowed him this extraordinary expansion of the conductor’s technique.

On some occasions, the conductor will not indicate the beat. When music is well known to an orchestra (a Beethoven symphony, for example) the sound can be shaped without even the demarcation of downbeats. When orchestral music is meant to have one tempo (think of Ravel’s Bolero), a conductor can become redundant if he just keeps beating the same pattern for many bars. The orchestra simply stops looking. Conversely, when the orchestra is not playing together, the most powerful tool is to stop beating—while indicating, perhaps with a knowing look or a nod of the head, that the music is still meant to go on! The orchestra immediately pulls itself together by listening even more acutely. As New York Times music critic James R. Oestreich correctly pointed out, there is a “podium paradox” in that an attempt “to over-control often results in a loss of control,” because the orchestra begins to focus only on the conductor’s beat and not on the resultant sound they are making.

Anyone who saw Herbert von Karajan conduct is aware that his beat was sometimes nonexistent. Orchestras simply knew what he wanted. He encouraged a collective wisdom that he merely oversaw. This is not something anyone can try. At age sixty-eight, I achieved something like that with the Tokyo Philharmonic, when seemingly I was not conducting at all and they were absolutely glorious. If I had tried that when I was twenty-seven, they might have simply stopped playing altogether; the effect can be achieved only after years of experience. When the English National Opera (then Sadler’s Wells) asked the great opera coach Sir Reginald Goodall to conduct their production of Wagner’s Ring cycle in the early 1970s, it caused a sensation. Sir Reginald was a painstaking and profound teacher of the Wagnerian canon. His conducting technique was, however, rudimentary. With no baton, and his right hand in a fist, he mostly looked down at his score, regarding it like a large side of roast beef, which he “carved” in the air, as the British like to say. At one performance of Götterdämmerung he began moving in a vague and spiritual way, but the orchestra was unsure and merely waited. Sir Reginald turned to the concertmaster and famously said, “I have started, you know.”

Sometimes, an orchestra feels it knows something better than you and, out of a collective unwillingness, will not follow. “You should always be a little better than the orchestra you are conducting,” Georg Solti once said. If, however, the orchestra and the conductor really know a work, and there is mutual respect, there is a kind of ecstatic communion between them that makes a conductor feel as if he were not actually moving at all, and yet of course he is—simply with the use of his breath, a gesture of invitation, a bounce in the body, perhaps something in his eyes. These are great moments for us.