Chapter 4

How Do You Learn to Be a Conductor?

The house lights go to half. The concertmaster signals to the principal oboist to sound an A-natural, from which the orchestra tunes. It is their North Star of intonation for the concert, and all the musicians—no matter how they make their sounds or what the individual characteristics and histories of their instruments are—agree on this point of departure.1 Then, after a short, or sometimes dramatically long, wait, the maestro enters and bows with the orchestra to general applause and occasional shouts of “Bravo!” Perhaps you might ask yourself how he or she got there.

Like all stories about the conductor’s art, there is no single way to the heart of the labyrinth. As I said earlier, the maestro can be an instrumentalist who rose from one of the orchestra’s various sections to a leadership position, like the violinists Bernard Haitink, the long-serving principal conductor of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, and Alan Gilbert, the music director of the New York Philharmonic (2009–2017). Nikolaus Harnoncourt also made the transition, from playing within the cello section of the Vienna Symphony to becoming the leader of the Concentus Musicus Wien, an orchestra that performed music from the classical period, and earlier, on replicas of original instruments of the period.

Conductors Daniel Barenboim, Georg Solti, James Levine, Riccardo Muti, and Michael Tilson Thomas all began as pianists. John Adams leads not just his own music but the music of other composers, much as Mendelssohn, Berlioz, and Wagner did in the past. Stravinsky, Copland, Villa-Lobos, and Miklós Rózsa mostly focused on their own works in concert and on recordings. A few singers, like Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Plácido Domingo, moved to the podium from the stage, and at least one choreographer, Mark Morris, frequently conducts performances of his own ballets.

For every one of these seemingly logical progressions, there are the exceptions. Leopold Stokowski was a trained organist, for example, and never played in an orchestra or formally studied conducting. As a teenager, he watched Hans Richter conduct concerts in London. Richter was the man Richard Wagner had chosen to lead the 1876 world premiere of Der Ring des Nibelungen. Stokowski’s other inspiration was Arthur Nikisch, whose concerts and opera performances the young man attended and about whom Johannes Brahms had said, “It is impossible to hear [my Fourth Symphony] any better.” For Stokowski, having graduated from London’s Royal College of Music at age sixteen, there simply were no courses in conducting at that time.

It also does not follow that a great instrumentalist has the interest or the capacity to conduct, even the most brilliant ones. Soloists like Jascha Heifetz and Vladimir Horowitz did not pick up the baton; and some former members of orchestras—great virtuoso players—have attempted conducting careers with mixed success.

Teaching the art of conducting is as amorphous as defining who will become a conductor. Like Stokowski, Arturo Toscanini never studied conducting. It was thrust upon him. Serving as the assistant chorus master and principal cellist of a traveling Italian opera troupe in 1886, he was pressed by the singers to take over a performance of Aida in Rio de Janeiro after a crisis erupted in the opera house due to factions for and against the Brazilian conductor who was scheduled to lead that night. Conducting the opera from memory, his triumph was absolute, and the nineteen-year-old became, on that night, a conductor.

Today, every conservatory has a conducting program. Indeed, some students can be given a doctorate in it. These young people are trained in score reading and stick technique. They may take history courses and learn music theory, which will give them tools for analyzing a score. They will be given various opportunities to practice. As one can imagine, this is the most cumbersome part of the process. You can conduct in front of a mirror, imagining music in your mind, but that in no way prepares you for when you actually appear before an orchestra and receive the energies of so many people looking at you expectantly. You can conduct along with a recording (and probably everyone who loves music has done this), which is fun, but it is the very opposite of conducting in that you are responding to something, rather than engendering it. Recordings, unlike real performances, remain the same every time you play them.

At first, conducting students wave their hands in a class, standing before a piano (sometimes two, in order to give the sense of an ensemble). Later on in their studies they will stand before the student orchestra directing an excerpt or symphonic movement that the conducting class has studied. A young conductor may also be called upon to conduct new compositions by fellow students or an ensemble needed for a degree recital in which the soloist plays a chamber work that requires a conductor.

In European opera houses, a young aspirant who is a pianist will accompany rehearsals and move up the chain as an assistant chorus master or a junior-level kapellmeister. In the European “house” system, the young conductor will at some point be given a performance within the run of productions scheduled for the season. He will most likely have no rehearsals for this and/or be given a less desirable work from the repertory, like a production of Annie, Holt Deine Pistole!, better known as Annie Get Your Gun. It will most likely not be Siegfried. If all else fails, he will join the administration of the orchestra and sit behind a desk, hoping to find fulfillment in making it possible for others to do what he had hoped would be his life’s work.

American orchestras generally audition young conductors for positions within their music staff. They become assistant conductors, and then associate conductors, and are given responsibility for leading children’s concerts, outreach concerts, pops concerts, and occasionally “serious” concerts on the classical subscription series. After a few years of this, they move on, usually to regional orchestras; and if they are noticed and there is belief in their potential, they can move up. However, as a colleague pointed out, “It is generally a good thing not to be an American.”

To that one can add, “or a woman.”

All of these are generalizations, of course, and every conductor you have ever heard of has a different tale to tell, a different journey, and, significantly enough, different weaknesses, which will prove irrelevant to the greatest in our profession while being disqualifying for lesser mortals.

There are a few common denominators among all conductors, however. Every one of us must have an innate capacity and desire to lead. We are, after all, sergeants. Our devotion to our troops is also commingled with a necessity to achieve agreement and commitment, and that can be done in many ways: employing fear, love, respect, and, yes, pragmatism. In the so-called Golden Age of the Maestro, the conductor was dictatorial and all-powerful. Well into the middle of the twentieth century there were vestiges of the tyrannical maestro to be found, for example, in the rehearsal tapes of Toscanini and the NBC Symphony. The enraged conductor can be heard screaming and apparently throwing over his podium in 1950 because the playing was not to his liking. “No! No!,” is followed by “Corpo di Dio santissimo! Noooooo!” (“By the body of most holy God, no!”) The sound of his voice, choked with rage, is terrifying to hear. If he were alive today, as great as he was, he would be lucky to be teaching conducting and leading a university orchestra, provided he wasn’t fired for inappropriate behavior.

Until American orchestras were unionized during and just after the Great Depression, a music director could point to a player and demand that he play a certain passage and, if he was found wanting, fire him on the spot. There also were no rules to determine the length of a rehearsal. When Serge Koussevitzky built a summer home for the Boston Symphony—Tanglewood—it was his personal playground, and members of the orchestra never knew when they might be released to go home and have dinner with their families. While Gustav Mahler, for example, ran short rehearsals, others could verge on being sadistic in their behavior toward orchestra players. It was how they got results and raised the standards we have come to expect from our great conductors.

In 1920, Toscanini was brought to trial for apparently attacking a member of his orchestra in Turin, Italy, breaking the man’s violin bow and striking him in the eye with his baton. The charges were dropped because Toscanini was “under the exaltation of his genius” and therefore not himself. A full-page and perhaps exaggerated story in the January 18 Washington Times recounted how a contemporary psychologist, a “Professor Pastor,” testified that Toscanini’s subconscious was acting out, much as a mother would do anything to protect her baby, to excuse the maestro’s violent response to the violinist playing flat in a rehearsal of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Professor Pastor was doing research for a paper appropriately entitled, “Enthusiasm.”

In the first place, Professor Pastor said that he had made a special pathological study of Toscanini, and had found that on great occasions this prince of conductors becomes so possessed by sublime frenzy that his normal personality forsakes him. He becomes transfigured by genius, beside, or rather outside of, himself, so that the inhibitory nerves are completely paralyzed.

There is truth in Professor Pastor’s conclusion, of course. When we conduct we are not ourselves. Sometimes it feels as if a low-level electrical current were passing through us from the very moment we enter the room to rehearse, and an even higher level of electrical disruption during a performance. It can take hours to return to “normal,” even as one is greeting well-wishers and presumably saying things that other people remember, but you do not. Toscanini frequently could not sleep after a performance.

But while the image of the all-powerful tyrant still remains part of the mythology—it is something many people want to believe—it is absolutely untrue today. No one ever saw a photograph of Fritz Reiner smiling. In general, if a conductor was smiling in an official photograph, he was a pops conductor. The young Simon Rattle and James Levine had the courage to be photographed smiling, leading to today’s more approachable image of the maestro.

As much as a conductor must show leadership skills, his job is currently determined by orchestra members who fill out rating forms and can blackball any guest conductor at any time. Like all human relationships, a break can occur even after years of productive partnership. In Europe, orchestras are protected by strict labor contracts, making it almost impossible for a music director to fire anyone. In powerful national institutions, the job of an incompetent musician is protected until retirement, and the only way to ensure excellence is to “rotate” that player off certain important concerts (and assign him to guest conductors) or to hire another player.

The Washington Times’s full-page story of Arturo Toscanini’s trial for attacking an orchestra player with his baton (January 18, 1920, page 28)

But even without the tyrannical powers of the past, a great conductor gets his way just by being there and being totally present. After Toscanini passed away in 1957, a number of musicians who played under him in the NBC Symphony became conductors. One of them was Frank Brieff (1912–2005), a former violist, who served as music director of the New Haven Symphony while I was a student at Yale. Frank was an enormously kind and gentle man who shared many stories and experiences with me as I was just beginning to study and perform. Once he put a baton in his hand, however, he became someone else. From his first upbeat, he was in a rage, insulting the players and doing what appeared to me to be an impersonation of Toscanini. Perhaps he was under the spell of the music he was conducting, as Professor Pastor might have said. But, to me, it was fake. It felt as if he would have gotten far more from his players had he just been Frank Brieff, an insightful, patient, and kind musician, whose performances would have glowed from an inner warmth, much as the late performances of Bruno Walter and Maurice Abravanel did.

At that time (the late 1960s) I was reading a great French play, Lorenzaccio, by Alfred de Musset. Lorenzaccio is sometimes called “the French Hamlet.” It tells the story of Lorenzino de’ Medici, who pretends to be someone he isn’t, and when action is required of him, he cannot act, because “my mask has stuck to my skin.” Frank Brieff’s mask had Toscanini’s face on it, and it severely limited his effectiveness as a maestro. Orchestras and musicians are profoundly smart in that they have a laserlike perception of dishonesty, which is seen as fundamental weakness. Becoming a conductor has something to do with becoming oneself.

Sir Colin Davis famously answered a query by a young conductor as to how to deal with questions from an orchestra during a rehearsal. He said that the best response is to know the answer and offer it; but if you don’t know it, the second-best answer is to say you don’t, “for then you become like Parsifal, and no one can touch you.” Some of us are cowed by the thought of not knowing the answers, while others of us seem oblivious to the questions. Davis, when asked by a member of the Boston Symphony about the orchestration he preferred at a certain point in Mahler’s Symphony no. 4, did not know the answer. He said, “I will ask my friend tonight. Mahler.” The player made the choice and it was never discussed again. Recently, a member of one of the world’s greatest ensembles said she really liked her new music director because “when he makes a mistake, he admits it.”

Leadership and honesty translate into authority, and therein lies another common denominator of greatness. How does a person who wants to be a conductor have the right to give orders and make decisions, especially in a field so rife with opinions and moving elements? In ancient Rome, the word auctoritas meant more than just one’s place in society, it also referred to the “mysterious power of command.” Conductors have differing backgrounds and pathways, but all of those past experiences must result in one and the same thing: authority. A great violinist, an experienced opera singer, a lifelong student of performance practice, a great composer, a person of tremendous life experience, a protégé of a great sorcerer of the rostrum, a clear-thinking deconstructor of complex music, a possessor of prodigious memory and a discerning ear, a well-prepared and efficient worker—any and all of these things can be enough to establish authority and a shared aspiration with one’s fellow musicians.

It is therefore not surprising that questions about the person who is standing before an orchestra usually miss the point. For instance, it is not a requirement to be able to play all the instruments of the orchestra. What is important is to know how they function as individual instruments as well as their function within the score. It is the player who is the expert, not the conductor. A conductor who is a bass player, for instance, will probably get into more trouble telling the bass section what to do, because he is breaking the boundary of respect between the players’ duties and the conductor’s. The conductor asks for something and the player tries to accommodate that request, but the way it is achieved is not the province of the conductor.

Many important conductors perform without a score, and this generally impresses the audience and the critics. It impresses the orchestra only if the conductor isn’t making mistakes because of “conducting from memory.” That phrase is in quotation marks because there are vastly differing ways conductors manage this feat. Some musicians, like the great pianist Arthur Rubinstein, claimed to be seeing their music—turning well-worn pages, coffee stains and all—even though it was not in front of them. Others remember the process of the work through many hours of study and repetition. Others use mnemonics.

Toscanini’s deteriorating eyesight required him to memorize music. Fortunately, he had an astounding capacity for memorization, something that was noted as early as his elementary school days. Like Rubinstein, Lorin Maazel had what is sometimes referred to as an eidetic memory—something that can be found in children but seems to dwindle as a young person ages. This kind of memory is also called “photographic.” Maazel was known even to rehearse music without a score, which is almost never done, because a conductor usually is starting and stopping and needs to tell the orchestra exactly where in their music he wishes to start up again. Without the score in front of him, or without a mental picture of the pages, that would mean memorizing the rehearsal marks—the numbers and letters used in a score to facilitate rehearsing—in addition to the notes themselves.

Dimitri Mitropoulos used to write numbers on the shirt cardboards that came from the laundry, indicating the sequence of beating patterns in a piece of music. From these shirt cardboards he would memorize the numbers for whatever piece he was performing. (He rehearsed with the music in front of him, but performed from memory.) Eleazar de Carvalho, the great Brazilian conductor and teacher, made up a story from which he could conduct The Rite of Spring without a score, much as Roman orators memorized their speeches by “placing” sections of their remarks in imaginary rooms.2 They would think about walking in those rooms in order to access the large topics of their prepared remarks. For Claudio Abbado, conducting from memory was the only way. Quoted in The New York Times in 1987, he said, “I feel more secure without a score. Communication with the orchestra is easier.”

Some, however, use a score no matter how many years of experience they have—Solti, Furtwängler, Klemperer, Stokowski, and Pablo Casals all did—while others are inconsistent. Bernstein conducted a Ravel program with a score, except for Bolero, saying, “It would be impossible to use a score for that.” I always assumed he meant that it would look bad, since the piece appears to be so simple. In fact, there are many interior color shifts that are fun to bring out and complicated to remember, but conducting is also theater, and he went on to memorize its larger patterns, if not every moment of every part. Still, Bernstein looked maestro-like, that is, like a master, and the orchestra played it to the best of its abilities.

Erich Leinsdorf wanted the audience to know whenever he was conducting from memory, even though he was mostly invisible when leading an opera from the orchestra pit. I well remember attending a performance of Le nozze di Figaro at the old Metropolitan Opera House. From my seat in the dress circle I had already noticed an open score at the podium before Leinsdorf entered, bowed, and with a mighty boom shut the score, as if insulted by this challenge to his knowledge. The giant thud from the pit disrupted the audience’s attention, so we were not prepared for the overture’s opening, a murmuring pianissimo. Fifty years later, I can still recall the shock of these two antithetical sounds coming from the pit.

Zubin Mehta split the difference when he conducted the Met’s Carmen in 1968. His score had tabs in it, so he could go to the next section about which he was insecure, and then continue from memory for the arias and ensembles.

For many, having the score is like having the sacred text before you. It is a connection and a comfort, though it can be liberating not to have a book and a music stand between yourself and the players. Those who prefer to have a score feel it is a sign of respect for the text, and that it ensures consistency, which translates into more secure playing. Sometimes your eye will fix on something that might be particularly interesting to hear, an inner voice in the violas or a passing note in the second horn, and a slight shift of the maestro’s body or a look into someone’s eyes makes that happen. It is usually repaid by a secret smile between the player and the conductor.

Authority also comes from the rehearsal process. If the orchestra sounds better with each correction or suggestion, and if the atmosphere in the room is professional and efficient, respectful and demanding, a conductor can consider his work well done. The balance of all those adjectives will shift depending on the orchestra, the work being rehearsed, and a cumulative sense in the room, one that is made up of so many variables it is hard to list them. These can include how tired the orchestra is from its previous workload; how hot or cold it is; whether the program is part of a pops or a classical series; whether it comes just before or after a vacation; whether there’s a guest conductor, and whether he’s returning or making a debut and perhaps making an antagonistic first impression. Within seconds of making music, an assessment is made. By the first break in the rehearsal, that assessment is more or less fixed, and it will take a lot to change it.

In general, the music director who auditioned and accepted a young player as a member of the orchestra will be that musician’s hero, and no one who follows can compete with that very personal (and understandable) feeling. When Herbert von Karajan took over the Berlin Philharmonic, those who had played for many years under Wilhelm Furtwängler found Karajan profoundly upsetting. “Furtwängler used to look at us fervently…but now suddenly we weren’t even so much as looked at,” a former member of the Berlin orchestra says in a BBC documentary called The Great Conductors. “His eyes were closed, and he’d stand there in front of us. With this powerful music, if the conductor pays no attention to you…that was very difficult for us at the beginning.” If you go back far enough, you will hear in various recorded interviews of elderly players who performed under Gustav Mahler with the New York Philharmonic (1909–11) that they were totally unimpressed with the “new man” from Italy, Toscanini. “In the Pastoral [Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony], Toscanini was only interested in the storm, but Mahler…” said one of the elderly bass players of the New York Philharmonic in Remembering Mahler, William Malloch’s 1964 audio documentary.

Orchestras and their individual members constitute a very special and passionate club. At every moment, except when a musical institution is created, they are changing internally: a certain percentage of members are new, a large percentage are recent members, and another percentage constitutes the old guard, some of whom may have diminished technical facility. The leadership of most orchestras defaults to those who want to lead, but rarely do the best players take part in the meetings and negotiations, which can be confrontational. From the outside, it is an orchestra with a name and a history. Inside, it is always on the boil. A guest conductor will always figure into this complex situation, even if it is not obvious to him, and the person chosen to be music director will inevitably be something of a lightning rod, both internally and externally, dealing with the board, the critics, and the audience.

Just as an orchestra looks to its own history and traditions, and each musician will tell you who his important teachers were, conductors find their justification for standing there before the players by their lineage—whether or not they were great violinists, famous pianists, or have a great ear. Whom they studied with (and not necessarily in a school), assisted, or witnessed will inevitably figure into their biographies and be part of their personae.

As in a medieval craft guild, conducting is passed on and taught in a hands-on way, whether or not one completed a conducting course in a school. There is no conductor, past or present, who does not trace his training to a great mentor. Sometimes the influential master merely passes through the younger one’s life and imprints much information in a short period of time. On the other hand, perhaps in a master class or, better yet, as an assistant, a younger conductor can spend years with the master. My three mentors, Leonard Bernstein, Leopold Stokowski, and Carlo Maria Giulini, were in my life for very different amounts of time: Bernstein for eighteen years, Stokowski for two, and Giulini for just a number of rehearsals and performances during the early 1980s. In spite of that, they each had, and continue to have, an equal effect on me as a conductor.

Bernstein taught me to be a rabbi, studying, explaining, and arguing an evolving interpretation of sacred scrolls. Stokowski taught me about the essential use of imagination in reanimating music, as well as the responsibility to change it in order to “tune” the work to the auditorium and the strengths and weaknesses of the orchestra, and to recognize the development of the instruments themselves since the time of the music’s composition. Giulini showed me the essential spirituality of the vast majority of music we perform, emanating from Europe’s Judeo-Christian heritage—that is, until Claude Debussy and his contemporaries removed God from their musical universe. (That same spiritual heritage was reforged by the World War II refugee composers, many of whom composed for Hollywood, as well as by the mystic Catholic Olivier Messiaen.)

Tanglewood, 1971: Meeting Leonard Bernstein.

When one spoke to Bernstein about conductorial matters, he would inevitably speak of his two mentors, Serge Koussevitzky and Fritz Reiner. Koussevitzky had studied under Arthur Nikisch, who had played violin in the Bayreuth orchestra for the world premiere of Wagner’s Ring cycle in 1876, and conducted the premiere of Bruckner’s Symphony no. 7 in 1884. Reiner, who also studied with Nikisch, was told by him to use only his eyes to give cues. In addition, Reiner had been a close associate of Richard Strauss’s—whose father had played principal horn for Wagner. In this way, both of Bernstein’s mentors could trace their lineage through two degrees of separation between themselves and Richard Wagner, who, as I said earlier, made the role of a conductor essential, not only with the invention of the orchestra pit, but also by writing music that demanded a fluid performance practice of endless transition rather than strict tempos. “The art of composition is the art of transition,” he once said. To that one must add that performing Wagner’s music requires the flexible leadership of a conductor.

Bernstein passed on hundreds of stories and experiences to me—from his own life as well as Reiner’s and Koussevitzky’s—while demonstrating his current reality as a conductor. Similarly, after attending rehearsals with Stokowski, I would occasionally return to his apartment for lunch. His extraordinary stories would include references to observing Mahler, discussing music with Furtwängler, discovering Shostakovich in a Moscow cabaret (“playing the funniest piano music I ever heard”). He spoke of visiting Sibelius and taking a boat ride in the middle of the night to hear Finnish monks chant at sunrise. He reminisced of going to Java, with its windmills, to buy a gamelan like the one Debussy and Ravel had heard at the Paris International Exposition of 1889.

I emerge from an elevator at Yale’s Woolsey Hall on November 24, 1971, sharing a joke with Leopold Stokowski.

My first conducting teacher, the Swiss-German Gustav Meier, had attended a conducting seminar in Vienna with Hans Swarowsky, the legendary teacher and former student of Strauss, Schoenberg, and Webern. Meier was in the same class as Zubin Mehta and Claudio Abbado, but decided to become a teacher. Indeed, Meier became perhaps the most important conducting teacher in the world until his retirement in 2015 and death the next year.

What all of this means is that my training in the art of conducting is directly linked to the men who invented it and participated in its golden age. Does that make me a great conductor? Of course not. Does it mean, however, that my training leaps across the centuries and makes me part of a long line of ancient storytellers, mentored by the great sorcerers? Yes, it does. As André Previn once said, “Music is the only club to be in.”

Every conductor you have ever heard of or see on the podium will have stories that link his or her training to the source, even if it is removed by more degrees of separation than mine. It is how we learn and why we pass on what we know, not only to our audiences, but also to the young ones who choose to climb the stairs and knock on the door. It is the only way.