Chapter 6

Relationships

THE RELATIONSHIP WITH THE MUSIC

Overriding everything is a conductor’s relationship with the music. This may seem obvious, but conducting is also a business. People do it for a living, and getting a job and keeping it is particularly complicated, because it depends on the opinions of so many different people. There is no such thing as job security, no matter who you are or how famous you have become. That said, the only truth that will move you forward and that will always support your soul is how you relate to the music.

Perhaps it is more correct to say “how you relate to music,” because we do not always conduct the music we love or want to conduct. Music directors and guest conductors are frequently required to conduct music they may not feel speaks to them. Guest conductors are usually told who their soloist is going to be and what concerto that soloist is going to play. It’s a take-it-or-leave-it proposition, based on an orchestra’s need to attract audiences by means of the star power and credibility of a soloist playing, usually, a popular and impressive concerto. Anyone who attended concerts with the New York Philharmonic during Pierre Boulez’s tenure (1971–77) had to feel a certain sympathy for him when his job included conducting music he had openly resisted—works by Mendelssohn, Dvořák, and, perhaps worst of all (for him), a 1973 performance of Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto with Van Cliburn, since Brahms was a composer in whom he had no interest and Cliburn was considered the pop star of pianists.

Leonard Slatkin writes in his autobiography Conducting Business of having to learn Elliott Carter’s Symphony of Three Orchestras in 1984. Carter was one of America’s leading intellectual composers, lauded with awards, and is still considered one of the greats of postwar classical music—at least in America and by American music critics. The Carter symphony was part of a multiple commission that required all six of the commissioning orchestras involved to program it. Georg Solti was music director of the Chicago Symphony at that time. Unlike Boulez at the New York Philharmonic, Solti refused to learn the work. Claudio Abbado was the Chicago’s principal guest conductor and was so important to the administration that he was permitted to program only what he wanted—and that did not include the music of Elliott Carter. Next in the pecking order was Erich Leinsdorf, another regular guest. “Leinsdorf had a particularly rough time with Carter’s Piano Concerto and told me that he never again would conduct a piece by him,” Slatkin writes. Like Solti, Abbado, and Leinsdorf, Slatkin felt little affinity for this music; but he was pressured into learning it all the same. The work had received its world premiere with Boulez in 1977, but by 1984 the Chicago Symphony had not yet played it. Slatkin was told, “Either [you] do the piece or the CSO [will] lose about a quarter of a million dollars.” So, in order to maintain his relationship with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, he reluctantly agreed to learn it and perform it.1

Slatkin’s story is important in many ways, and we shall revisit it later on. It makes clear, among other things, that part of the new set of requirements for classical-music conductors of our time is that we frequently must be prepared to conduct the most complex works and be authoritative and technically proficient in the entire gamut of orchestral music—something a Toscanini or a Hans Richter never was expected to be.

Although some of us choose to become experts, or have expertise grafted onto us by the hard and exclusionary categories within the world of orchestral and theater music, most conductors who lead our institutions must be able to handle it all. In general this means that the music directors of our major orchestras are required to demonstrate a facility for leading new music of immense complexity rather than just how well they address Tchaikovsky and Beethoven. Even though this is the repertory that audiences come to hear, it will be their commitment to complex modern works by which the critics will judge them. Most conductors who spend months learning a new contemporary work know that it is unlikely they will ever conduct it again.

Setting aside the mental and technical challenges of the numerous nontonal (what the general public calls “modern”) orchestral and operatic works that have emerged since World War II, a conductor’s affinity—or, perhaps a better word, “love”—for certain composers or certain types of music does not always mean he or she is a particularly persuasive interpreter of that music. This is another—frustrating—part of the mystery. Just because a maestro loves the operas of Wagner and is uninterested in nineteenth-century French opera doesn’t mean that he will be viewed as better at Tristan than Manon. Indeed, he may never be given a chance.

Perhaps a certain distance allows us to be a better friend to the music, not wallowing in what we love but, rather, presenting it dispassionately. But as Lorenz Hart once wrote, “Unrequited love’s a bore.” We are, after all, salesmen, and we are here to sell whatever we perform. If that is too crass a phrase, then call us supporters or cheerleaders. When asked “What’s your favorite piece of music?” the answer must always be the same: “The piece I am conducting.” When we are “in” that piece, we know things we never knew before and might forget afterward.

Sometimes, this forced marriage takes time to turn the process of learning the notes into understanding why those notes exist and deserve to be played. In 1995, I was asked to learn and record three violin concertos that had been banned by Hitler, as part of a series of recordings Decca made in Berlin. The composers were Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Ernst Krenek, and Kurt Weill. Each required a different entry point.

The Weill was particularly inscrutable, because it comes from the early 1920s—that is, before he sounded like Kurt Weill. Although he was already an accomplished composer and had just completed his studies with one of Europe’s most important teachers, Ferruccio Busoni, Weill was yet to have the stylistic breakthrough that emerged with The Threepenny Opera in 1928, when he became a man of politically charged, popular musical theatre. And so when faced with his concerto from 1924, how was I to invest the knowledge of what Weill was to become with what the young composer was attempting? Besides learning the notes, of course, I was investigating Weill’s political activities at that time, and it was his joining Berlin’s November Group—a politically active radical group of artists—that unlocked the door for me. I remember lifting my hands to begin the recording session in Berlin and suddenly having an image of young artists, self-described radicals and revolutionaries, confronting new laws regarding the arts. The snare drum and the punctuating chords in the brass and bassoons became symbolic of military-governmental power. As I was conducting it for the first time and hearing it in front of me, I suddenly knew what to do with this music.

Korngold’s style was well known to me at that time, and a number of recordings of the violin concerto were helpful in getting to know it, but two things happened on my way to Berlin: Brendan Carroll’s biography, The Last Prodigy, suggested that the concerto, completed after World War II, did not in fact use melodies from Korngold’s film scores for Warner Bros., as is the accepted wisdom. Carroll’s sleuthing into the multiple uses of these themes pointed out that all the materials in the concerto appeared in films from the late 1930s. Why, if Korngold wanted to create a violin concerto on movie themes in 1945, did he not make use of music he had composed more recently? In a 1937 interview in Vienna, Korngold spoke of a new violin concerto, even though a completed concerto only emerged a decade later. What Carroll was suggesting was that Korngold’s themes in some of his earlier film scores had come from an unfinished violin concerto, and not the other way around.

Korngold’s elder son, Ernst, told me that his father never expected the film scores to be played in public, and so he occasionally recycled music from other sources—not an unknown practice by many composers, including Beethoven and Handel. In fact, that was one of the reasons Korngold felt he could write film music: While Hitler was in power, his new music could not be played in the Third Reich. Once the war ended, Korngold ceased to compose for Warner Bros. and completed a symphony, a symphonic serenade, a string quartet, and a violin concerto before his untimely death in 1957 at the age of sixty.

What does this have to do with my conducting the concerto? It means that, based on Carroll’s research, I was the first conductor to view the work as a violin concerto first and foremost. If themes later appeared in films, that is more like Mozart’s K. 467 being used in the movie Elvira Madigan or Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Yes, the notes in the Korngold concerto were the same notes other conductors had followed, but psychologically my starting point was essentially different. (Can anyone but me hear the difference? I cannot say.)

Secondly, in studying the score, I realized that Korngold had created a magical aura around the solo violin part. (The orchestration is all but inaudible on Jascha Heifetz’s famous 1953 recording, thus giving the false impression that the orchestra has merely a perfunctory role in the concerto.) Richard Strauss was Korngold’s greatly admired mentor. In Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben, the extended solo violin cadenza is a portrait of the composer’s wife, Pauline. Korngold’s love for his wife, Luzi, is well known. Korngold dedicated his 1945 Symphonic Serenade to her, and when I focused on that I suddenly found myself imagining this concerto to be Korngold’s loving portrait of his life partner, his angel. In the second movement, the celesta, harp, and vibraphone are used to color many of the notes of the solo violin with an aura of bells hanging in the air. This touch of magic opened the work to me; and when we recorded it, I had those instruments placed around the Canadian violinist Chantal Juillet, and whenever I perform the work in concert, no matter who is the soloist, I do the same thing. All of this was part of a process that granted me permission to conduct it.

The Krenek concerto was totally unknown to me. With the score and whatever knowledge I could acquire, I was confident in those recording sessions that I could support Chantal and give it a passionate and convincing performance. The pressure was great because this would be the world-premiere recording of a concerto that had been composed in 1924, and therefore the work itself would be judged by our performance of it. Then something miraculous happened: A witness from the actual world premiere appeared at our recording sessions in November of 1995.

Berthold Goldschmidt had been, in his youth, one of the great young German composers of pre-Hitlerian Germany. Unlike Krenek, who fled to America, Goldschmidt fled to England, where his music was not performed. Goldschmidt, part of the “collateral damage” done to German music, survived by working at the BBC, and was rediscovered only in his last years by Decca producer Michael Haas, who proceeded to record some of his works. Goldschmidt was able to recount the meaning of Krenek’s concerto, contextualizing those already-learned notes, just before the engineers pressed the Record button.

Although we knew that the concerto had been dedicated to the beautiful violin virtuoso Alma Moodie, Goldschmidt knew of the rumors of her affair with Krenek, and became convinced of their veracity when he went backstage to greet Frau Moodie after the world premiere. Krenek was not there for the performance. Goldschmidt, some seventy years later, wrote about the experience. “Memory came alive and I was rapidly drawn into a ‘biographical short story’ unfolding before my retroflecting eyes and ears.” He spoke to me about every aspect of the score and its imagery: the “capricious, elegant beauty” of the composer’s musical description of Moodie at the beginning of the concerto, the reference to the opening “erection motif” of Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier (who knew?), the repeated rhythm of the night train along the tracks, the decision of the lovers to break up and pursue their separate careers, and so forth. Even though Goldschmidt had heard the concerto only at its world premiere, he was absolutely sure of what had inspired it and what it meant. By telling us, and being present in the room, we were able to perform with knowledge, insight, and experience that otherwise would have been impossible to achieve.

As you can see, finding a way into the music is different for each piece, and different for every conductor. One starting point should logically be the text itself: is it the most accurate representation of the composer’s wishes? And here we go again! Composers change their minds over the years, and some of the greatest performances are given with inaccurate versions but still translate the composer’s intent.

For many people, Sir Thomas Beecham was the greatest conductor of Haydn’s symphonies. But the scrupulously edited critical edition by H. C. Robbins Landon was not completed until after Beecham’s death in 1961. Nevertheless, Beecham’s recordings are still cherished. Maria Callas’s recording of The Barber of Seville with Tito Gobbi in the title role is a desert-island disc for many opera fans, but its text and performance style run counter to what musicologists tell us of performance style in Rossini’s time. Let me explain.

Musicologists are tasked with providing critical editions of music from the past. Their processes are generally thorough, but they may or may not understand how music is created and why certain decisions were made between the arrival of the score, and its parts, and the performance. In opera and musical theater, there are many artists—singers, directors, composers, producing institutions—who together achieve the performing edition you hear in any theater. A critical edition (or “best text”) will take all these “voices” into account and correct errors in the notes themselves (usually, in classical music, very few of them need correcting).2

Critical editions also tell you what to do with the notes. Are they linked together or separate? Are they to make a crescendo or remain at one dynamic? This may seem trivial but it is not. Works that fell out of favor, like Donizetti’s Il furioso all’isola di San Domingo, have to be reconstructed when published after a long hiatus to make sure that old copyists’ mistakes aren’t being perpetuated. On the other hand, works that have remained in the repertory, like Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, have to be cleansed of 175 years of alterations due to changes in taste and the desire of singers never intended for the title role (high coloratura sopranos) to play it, continuing the opera’s fame to create brand-new traditions and expectations from an audience.

In addition, Italian operas from the early and mid-nineteenth century were edited and published decades later using stylistic changes that would be normal for operas composed in the early twentieth century. Thus, a series of fast notes in the violins that in 1825 were played as separate notes—each note on a single up or down bow motion—were published a half-century later as being all on a single bow stroke. This made it possible to play the music faster but also robbed it of its internal energy. Part of the reason for this was that conductors, including Toscanini, felt they were being faithful to the text while ignoring a significant aspect of it: namely, the tempos required by the composer.

It’s like the challenge for strict constitutionalists and religious fundamentalists: a sacred text still has to be translated and made vital no matter how much one claims fidelity to “the Word.” Toscanini made Verdi sound excitingly new by performing the fast music faster and the slow music slower than the music he had in front of him. In order to play all those rapid sixteenth notes at the faster pace, they had to be taken in one bow. This new style made Rigoletto sound fresh and relevant, as if Puccini had composed it in 1920 rather than Verdi in 1851. Is there anything wrong with that? you may ask. The answer is no for some and yes for others.

There is and always has been an internal battle in every composer between the ideal work of art and the vicissitudes of live performance, and nowhere is that more problematic than in the most complex art form: opera. Most of the changes Wagner made after the 1843 world premiere of his Flying Dutchman are those of orchestral balance. What worked in Dresden for its premiere did not work in successive theaters where Wagner continued to make changes—even regretting near the end of his life that he did not have time to edit the entire score. Three of the reasons for that are (1) Wagner’s greater experience as a composer, (2) the different acoustics of the various theaters, and (3) the varying quality of the players in the orchestras.

Leopold Stokowski, at the age of ninety, reminisced about observing Gustav Mahler prepare the orchestra and choruses for the world premiere of his Symphony no. 8 in Munich in September 1910. “Rehearsals were closed, so I bought a violin case at a pawnshop and just walked in with other members of the orchestra. No one stopped me, and I went up to the balcony to observe.” Then he said something I will never forget. “The orchestra hated him.”

“But why, Maestro?” I asked.

“He kept changing the orchestration.”

And there you have it. Mahler was “tuning” his new piece to the hall and balancing it based on his players. Even though he was a brilliant orchestrator and conductor, he continually had to adjust precisely how many horns played this line, whether to double something in the violas, change an octave in the clarinets, and make other adjustments, all to illuminate and clarify his intentions so that the symphony sounded the way he imagined it when he first notated it.

This is why Stokowski felt it was his responsibility to change the orchestrations depending on the hall and the orchestra he was conducting. Any conductor who says he is only doing what the score says is either not telling the truth or does not understand a principal function of a conductor when a composer is not present. Mahler altered all his symphonies (which is one reason we have different “editions” of his music) and felt it was his responsibility to do this with the music of other composers and, as I quoted him earlier, what others should do with his works.

There is a term, psychoacoustics, that refers to what we subjectively hear and perceive as opposed to the sounds actually being emitted by the orchestra. This is a fundamental question we conductors have to face when studying a score and attempting to realize it for an audience: are the printed dynamics those that an audience hears or those the orchestra should play? Let me explain with an example.

A climactic moment in Leonard Bernstein’s overture to Candide is what is called a triple canon: a melody starts, and shortly thereafter the same melody begins again, traveling in time and trailing behind the first iteration, and then begins a third time—and it sounds good! (“Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream” is a well-known song that can be sung as a canon, or a “round.”) Bernstein loved to create melodies that could work this way: three separate voices performing the same tune, and at every moment the ear can perceive the tune in different places at the same time.

The problem with the orchestration of the triple canon in the overture is that the second voice was orchestrated to be played only by the second violins, so that the ear heard just voice 1 and voice 3. When I first conducted the overture, I asked the second violins to play louder than the other voices, so that the triple canon could be heard psychoacoustically by the audience. Ultimately I gave up, because there just wasn’t enough power, and I added a trumpet to voice 2. The composer’s intention was therefore achieved in an acoustical reality rather than in what was literally on the page. It was implied. Bernstein subsequently performed his overture with this change in 1989, shortly before his death, and it is now published this way.

In 2003, when I was preparing a series of performances of The Flying Dutchman, my chorus master at the Pittsburgh Opera, Joseph Lawson, showed me his score before he began preparing the chorus. He had gotten a series of editorial changes that reflected, he said, the “old Bayreuth traditions” of Dutchman. Throughout the score the vowels and phrasing were changed for both the men’s and the women’s choruses. The phrasings of short-to-long notes were all reversed, and in some cases final short notes were removed altogether. He had gotten the Bayreuth changes from the Lyric Opera of Chicago’s chorus master, Donald Palumbo, who had gotten them from Norbert Balatsch, the retired Bayreuth chorus master, who had succeeded the legendary chorus master Wilhelm Pitz at what was once called “Neue Bayreuth”—meaning the postwar Bayreuth Festival. These “old” traditions apparently were created during the 1970s to help the Bayreuth chorus sing together in the specific acoustic of that theater—a theater in which the coordination of pit and stage is enormously difficult, since the sound from the covered pit reaches the stage so late.

The Flying Dutchman was never performed at Bayreuth during Wagner’s lifetime, but it says a great deal about the mecca of Wagner performance that the notes, vowels, and phrases had been changed to make a better and more controllable performance. As a man of the theater, Wagner probably would have been the first to assist in this process. When I asked Pierre Boulez if the orchestra materials at Bayreuth were maintained from the first complete performances of The Ring as well as Parsifal, which had their world premieres there under Wagner’s direct supervision, he looked at me quizzically and said, “No. We just replace them with new ones.”

On the one hand, Boulez, who was creating a very new performance style for a post–World War II Wagner—cool and clear—was not interested in going back to Wagner’s original edits. On the other hand, Boulez also supervised the critical edition of Debussy’s 1913 ballet, Jeux, with footnotes and alternative markings from various original sources. As you can see, we are all pickers-and-choosers when it comes to the text we use and interpret.

We live in a time when scores do not appear in the composer’s hand but are entered directly into computer files that can be updated and altered without leaving much of a trail. We also live in an era when musicologists and performers show little respect for each other. Imagine my surprise to learn that the libraries of the Metropolitan Opera, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, and the Seattle Opera—three major American opera houses that regularly produce the operas of Wagner—did not at that time own a copy of the critical edition of The Flying Dutchman. Robert Sutherland, the Met’s chief librarian, told me that their materials reflect an active tradition “that goes back to a time when the people who performed it at the Met knew Wagner” and that their traditions were “both practical as well as valid.” But what about those who made changes over the years, and how those changes led to other changes? Is that, then, the “house style”?

When I assisted Lorin Maazel at La Scala in 1985 for a series of performances of Puccini’s Turandot, the Scala chorus sang the phrase “Gira la cote!” (“Turn the whetstone!”) in act 1 twice as fast as in the score. Maazel turned to me during the dress rehearsal and said, “It’s an old tradition at La Scala.” I dutifully copied this into my score.

Then, afterwards, I thought about it. Turandot was left incomplete at the time of Puccini’s death in 1924, though he had completed two and a half acts of it. If this change is an “old tradition,” it is a tradition that was most probably created in the 1930s or 1940s by some unknown conductor who thought it unrealistic for the offstage chorus to be ordering the preparation of a stone made to sharpen an executioner’s blade at a speed that was mysteriously slow. But opera is totally unrealistic. A costumed chorus is pretending to be the population of Beijing in 1400, singing words in Italian to music composed in the 1920s. Toscanini, who conducted the world premiere of Turandot in 1926, famously said, “Tradition is the last bad performance,” and yet, of course, he, too, was creating many of the house traditions at both the Met and La Scala (though not this particular one). A perusal of Puccini’s manuscript, it should be said, shows that the published text is what he wrote and intended, not what was being performed at La Scala, the opera house for which he composed it.

A close-up of my personal score of Turandot, with annotations from Lorin Maazel made in 1985

Perhaps this example seems unimportant, and it is doubtful anyone who loves Turandot would find the above discussion particularly relevant to the enjoyment of the work. Details! On the other hand, all critical editions are thousands of details that add up to something big: knowing, as closely as possible, what the composer wrote. It can be an unimpeachable source of authority for a conductor, and from that point—and not someone else’s interpretation—one can go forward with a direct line to the source, provided (here we go again!) a conductor knows how to use the text and what the notational world of the composer was. In some scores by Beethoven, for example, the loudest dynamic he writes is fortissimo (ff) and the softest is pianissimo (pp). A score by Richard Strauss might have a range from fff to ppp. This does not mean that Strauss expected his loudest sound to be louder than Beethoven’s. He just wanted more gradations. In other words, a conductor with even the best score has to understand all the ranges of dynamics and articulations within the universe of that score. He must also understand what that might have meant to the musicians who played this music in the composer’s time, and finally, and most important, how to best translate that into our time.

Christoph von Dohnányi famously said conductors needed to play Alban Berg’s twelve-tone opera Wozzeck in a brutal style in order to replicate the effect it had on audiences in 1925. Musicians in 1925, however, would have played this score using the kinds of songful connection between melodic lines (called portamento) that was part of their training. Doing that today makes Wozzeck more lyrical. Dohnányi wanted none of that, preferring that the score be heard as revolutionary and shocking. Other conductors prefer to play the music more as Berg would have heard it in his mind. We, almost a century later, would then hear Wozzeck as part of a tradition of dark, emotional, and—this is important—empathetic works. One way is closer to the anti-emotional brutality that Stravinsky wanted in his late performances of The Rite of Spring, and the other is to present Wozzeck as a plea for understanding and forgiveness for those under the yoke of militarism and poverty. Yes, we can alter a work that much, even as we claim to be doing just “what it says.”

In our relationship with music, getting inside the head of the composer, there is nothing quite like studying a score from the composer’s handwriting. It is so deeply intimate that it makes you feel especially connected to its very source. To open the score to Benjamin Britten’s last opera, Death in Venice, and see all the notes in his handwriting is a profound and spiritual experience. We rarely get a chance to see a composer’s manuscript, though microfilm and digital archives exist and can be sought out. In centuries past, a conductor worked from either an engraved score or a copyist’s handwritten edition. Under some circumstances, a conductor performed directly from the manuscript. Even as late as 1952, Leonard Bernstein conducted from, and marked in red and blue pencil, the manuscript of Weill’s Threepenny Opera.

Once photocopying arrived in the first half of the twentieth century, it was possible to create exact copies of the precious texts. Benito Mussolini, understanding the spiritual importance of sharing the manuscripts of the great Italian composers, published limited photographic editions of masterpieces from the Italian lyric stage, making it possible for conductors all over the world to study and be inspired by them.

Today’s computer-engraved scores generally make reading easier and give all new music an imprimatur of seriousness. Orchestras absolutely will no longer accept hand-copied materials on their stands without making a negative judgment call on the worthiness of the music itself. We conductors and musicians have gained enormously from this development, but we have also lost our contact with the unique sources of the notes before us. They all look like the same person wrote them.

The beginning of the famous mad scene from Donizetti’s handwritten score to Lucia di Lammermoor

When I first conducted Bernstein’s Mass, shortly after its world premiere in 1971, the score was in many handwritings. I soon learned which parts Bernstein orchestrated and which were done by others. I also learned which sections were recycled from other sources, like the “Sanctus” music, which came from a birthday song he had composed for his old piano teacher, Helen Coates. The same was true for his opera A Quiet Place. Today, that complex history is erased. Is it better this way? Absolutely, because the conductor approaches the work as a complete entity, one that ultimately is the brainchild of a single artist, though he may have been aided and abetted along the way. Also, as I said, it has the advantage of legibility.

Bernstein did not conduct his A Quiet Place until after it had been performed in Houston in 1983 (under the direction of John DeMain) and, later, in a totally revised version at La Scala and the Kennedy Center (both under my direction). Irwin Kostal, whose manuscript was intended for copyists and not conductors, had orchestrated much of the opera. He was not particularly interested in lining up all the notes on the page as would be expected if the score were formally engraved. As a result, there was a constant challenge in simply knowing who was playing with whom, and that meant drawing dotted lines up and down hundreds of score pages. (“How did Mauceri conduct this thing?” was something Bernstein—half-seriously—frequently said in Vienna, when, for the first time, he conducted the opera from the full-score manuscript.)

As the central classical repertory remained fixed and conductors and orchestras found themselves at an ever-expanding distance from the years in which the music was written, the role of conductors became ever more crucial in keeping the music alive and vital. When the composer is present, however, everything reverts to a time when both conductor and composer regularly shared the stage and the pit. Simply put, whenever the composer is present, the conductor becomes the assistant conductor. We do not protest when we hear that something is too fast or that an inner voice in the orchestration needs more clarity. We do it.

That is, except when Bartók kept interrupting Serge Koussevitzky during the first reading rehearsal of his Concerto for Orchestra, which, it should be added, Koussevitzky had commissioned. Bartók sat in the balcony of Symphony Hall in Boston, in late November 1941 as the Boston Symphony began playing. The cellos and basses started the quiet opening melody. Then the violins entered mysteriously a few moments later, only to be interrupted by the man in the balcony. After a moment, Koussevitzky started again, only to receive another correction from the composer. Koussevitzky told the orchestra to take a break, and when they returned, Bartók was on his way back to the hotel.

Composers are generally emotional when they hear their music being played live, especially before a world premiere, and our job is to do whatever they ask, while also establishing our needs in the process of preparing a performance. Some composers, such as Gian Carlo Menotti, were extremely generous in their sense of collaborating with the conductor. He was also quite demanding, and wanted his opera La Loca to be conducted in a fairly cool and unromantic way, even though the music seemed to call out for a romantically passionate performance style from the early twentieth century.

Miklós Rózsa, in his last years, suffered from many physical disabilities, including a number of partially paralyzing strokes and almost total visual impairment. But his mind and his ear remained sharp. “The violas can play louder when they have the theme,” he said after hearing the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra play his waltz from Madame Bovary in 1993. Rózsa, who was eighty-six years old, had recorded the work on the same stage (MGM’s soundstage, now Sony’s) forty-five years before. “The tam-tam is a little loud,” was another suggestion. A month later I visited him at his home to play the finished recording. After one hearing, he was silent. Then he demanded hearing it again, after which there was another long silence. His head moved slightly and, as if looking into space, he said, “Maestro, may I kiss you?”

These are our most fulfilling moments, of course. No review and no other opinion matters when a conductor hears this from a composer.

Puccini told Toscanini, who was conducting the twenty-fifth-anniversary production of Manon Lescaut at La Scala, “I didn’t know I had written such a beautiful opera.”3 The orchestra’s English-horn player said,

Toscanini called Puccini from the podium and told him to look over some harmonies he wrote in the score in a certain spot which [Toscanini felt] showed emptiness, and see what he thought of it or better still, to listen to [Toscanini’s changes]. Puccini’s answer was, “I don’t have to. If you put those notes there, it’s because they are needed.” Toscanini replied, “But you wrote this opera, not me, and you must see if you would like the correction I’ve written.” “The opera, yes, but you are a better musician than I, and I take any correction from you.” Toscanini asked the orchestra to play those penciled notes and Puccini listened very attentively and then said, “Benissimo! I will call Casa Ricordi [Puccini’s publisher] and tell them to insert that in all the scores.”4

Pierre Monteux was not as fortunate with Igor Stravinsky. Ernest Fleischmann was serving as general manager of the London Symphony Orchestra when, in 1963, the eighty-eight-year-old Monteux conducted The Rite of Spring—without a score, it should be added—fifty years after he had led the work’s world premiere in Paris and its subsequent tour to London. Stravinsky sat in box 7 of Royal Festival Hall—the upper box, nearest to the stage on the right side of the theater—along with Fleischmann, and detested the way Monteux was interpreting the work. When it was over, the composer stood up, smiling to the audience and blowing kisses to Monteux while, as Fleischmann recounted, “saying the most disgusting things to those of us within earshot.”

Leonard Slatkin seems to have had the most unusual experience in his relationship with a living composer. He had learned Elliott Carter’s massively complex Symphony of Three Orchestras for its Chicago premiere in 1984, and the composer attended the dress rehearsal. Clearly Slatkin was concerned, because so much was simply wrong, with “whole passages [going] awry.” But all Carter had to say afterward was that he wanted the cellos in one place to be “more espressivo.” What is clear from this astonishing report is that Carter was incapable of hearing his own music. “I was now pretty confident that what he wrote on the page was not what he heard,” Slatkin relates in his autobiography. “Most other composers I had worked with always wanted to ensure that we were approximating what was written. Mr. Carter seemed oblivious to this.”

David Del Tredici was nervous before I conducted the premiere of his monumental “Alice” piece All in the Golden Afternoon, not just because he was the composer and we were performing in Carnegie Hall but because I was nervous, too. Jerry Goldsmith and Elmer Bernstein were easy, and completely understood the challenges, since they both frequently conducted their music, not only for the sound tracks but also in concert. Howard Shore was always a supportive gentleman, inquisitive and accepting of performances that were not like what he had conducted on the sound track to the Lord of the Rings trilogy, unless there were specific things he wanted.

Danny Elfman made the biggest transformation. He is a composer who never conducts his own music but who supervises every tempo, the orchestral balance, and the overall mix. He had never been particularly interested in hearing his music live. Once he had composed it for a movie and his music was affixed to its final, edited version, the music and its performance were all one thing, and Elfman’s job was over. After the wrap, he moved on to composing his next score. Then, in 2013, he changed his mind, arranging and participating in the live performance of many of his film scores. His suggestions now regarding interpretation are few, but without exception they involve playing the music with freedom from the tempos originally used in the recording sessions for the picture. He has learned what a conductor can do to free his music from its original recorded representation, even as we are playing much the same notes, adapted for the acoustic reality of a concert stage rather than a recording studio.

It should be said right up front that composers who were/are conductors write the music that exhibits the greatest predisposition for realization, since they know how to translate what they imagine into a notational system that is practical. Thus Mendelssohn, Wagner, Mahler, and Richard Strauss tend to be easier to conduct than Verdi, Puccini, or Debussy. Puccini only gradually learned how to translate what he was playing on the piano into what a conductor needed, and so, from Manon Lescaut and La Bohème to Turandot, it gets easier, even though the music itself does not sound any easier. Puccini learned how to write for a conductor, something that probably never occurred to him at first.

With Bernstein, it was clear that what he wrote was doable, though complicated. From 1973 until his death in 1990, he entrusted me with conducting his music. As a conductor, my relationship with Bernstein the composer remains my longest and most personal. It started with Mass in Vienna, for its European premiere in 1973 with the Yale Symphony Orchestra, and continued within a few months with Candide, in a new version of the 1956 show, with an entirely new book by Hugh Wheeler, a production by Broadway’s leading director, Harold Prince, and Stephen Sondheim on call to write new lyrics when required. I was the music director, the twenty-seven-year-old kid foisted on them while Bernstein was totally absent from the proceedings, available on the phone but not on the scene until the piano dress rehearsal.

There I was, put in the position of having all the music Bernstein had written for Candide, enough for two musicals, and suggesting what went where and what got recycled with new lyrics by Sondheim. It (and I) must have been insufferable for them. Nevertheless, Candide went on to win many Tonys, and Bernstein and I were just getting started. At his request, I performed, and occasionally premiered, his music in Tel Aviv, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, New York, London, and Milan, and on internationally broadcast television programs.

Here’s the point about conducting Bernstein for Bernstein: he was critical, engaged, supportive, and flexible. When I asked him if I could conduct the final section of Mass in seven rather than the unequal three-beat pattern he used in his recording, he said, “Why not?” When I had reorchestrated and created a new three-act version of his A Quiet Place at La Scala, he said, as he left the theater during rehearsals, “You’re doing a great job so far.” There you have it: so far. Yes, it was not ever easy, but what an amazing school it was, a gift that keeps on giving.

And we laughed a lot. Bernstein was the funniest person I ever knew. I once referred to the elongation of the last beat in a measure as a “Jewish upbeat,” because it had the effect of sounding like the music one hears at a bar mitzvah dance. (The Jewish Otto Klemperer, when asked about Bernstein’s interpretations of Mahler, said they were good, but “too Jewish.”) In Vienna, after a performance I conducted of his Mass, Lenny said, “Your Jewish upbeats have become positively anti-Semitic.”

When he decided to conduct the first movement of Brahms’s Symphony no. 3 in six quarter-notes, rather than two dotted half-notes, as is generally done, it was to hear an inner rhythm in the violas which is generally inaudible—it acts as a kind of energy force, but, unless you are a violist it is below the surface. Lenny wanted to expose it to the light. He wanted us to know how Brahms had made this first movement work. After the performance he realized it was a pyrrhic victory. “It was a mistake,” he said with a laugh. He never did that first movement in six again.

I was with him in his dressing room before a performance in 1972, at the Metropolitan Opera, for a new production of Carmen he was conducting. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis paid him a visit there. I can still see my wife having a chat with Mrs. Onassis while I am helping Lenny put on his Koussevitzky cuff links. I realize how anxious he is, and I say, as only a wide-eyed twenty-six-year-old could, “You’re nervous, aren’t you?” To this he says, “Of course I’m nervous, and I wonder at my colleagues who are not nervous when one thinks of the responsibilities of conducting an opera.” These are moments I can never forget.

The last time my family spent time with him, it was serendipity. During the 1989 Broadway run of Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera, starring Sting, our twelve-year-old son, Ben, joined us at a benefit performance for children with AIDS that had been organized by the actress Sinéad Cusack, the wife of Jeremy Irons, with whom I had recorded My Fair Lady. Lenny arrived during the prelude and was sitting directly in front of us. At the first interval I asked him if he knew Jeremy and Sinéad. He said no, and so I introduced them. At the second interval I asked him if he had ever met Ute Lemper, the great German chanteuse with whom I had recorded much Weill in Berlin. He said no, and so I introduced him to her, too.

After the performance, Lenny and our family went out to an impromptu dinner. Ben walked ahead of Betty and me, his arm around Lenny’s shoulder. Ben was now the taller of the two. I suddenly realized that for eighteen years Lenny had introduced us to nearly every famous person we knew—Lauren Bacall, Jerome Robbins, Stephen Sondheim, Aaron Copland, Betty Comden, Adolph Green, Hal Prince, Alvin Ailey, Stephen Schwartz—and on this night I introduced him to three famous people. The sun was setting; something profound was happening right before my eyes. We hardly would have known that within a year we would get the phone call telling us that Lenny had passed away.

If we are truly blessed, all of this is a way into the heart of someone’s music. I am not Hans Richter conducting Wagner. I am not Bruno Walter conducting Mahler. But when I open a score by Leonard Bernstein, I know things—many thousands of things—and perhaps I bring them to bear when I raise my hands before the orchestra. I certainly hope so.

Opening night of A Quiet Place at La Scala, June 20, 1984, with Leonard Bernstein.

THE RELATIONSHIP WITH THE MUSICIANS

From the earliest reports of conductors in the nineteenth century and their relationships with musicians, one reads about two opposing methods of achieving greatness: terrorizing the players or making them love you. In Carl Bamberger’s indispensable book The Conductor’s Art, he describes the Italian composer and conductor Gaspare Spontini (1774–1851) as achieving brilliant opera performances in Berlin by being one of the first conductors to refuse to lead while seated at the harpsichord.5 Instead, he stood with the orchestra facing him, their backs toward the stage, he and his baton “the center of command, and the respect he generated among his players was enormous. He obtained his results by authority and unrelenting severity, thus becoming the precursor of the tyrannical conductor of later times.” On the other hand, Carl Maria von Weber (1786–1826) achieved equally brilliant performances in Dresden and Prague “by inspiring his co-workers rather than intimidating them as Spontini did.”

There was another developing dichotomy: the conductor as a superior intellect versus the passionate young firebrand. Felix Mendelssohn (1809–47) was a wealthy, refined, and highly educated man with a prodigious memory and curiosity about other people’s music (namely Bach, Handel, and Schubert). His unique qualities, including his moderation, brought Leipzig’s Gewandhaus Orchestra to international fame. At the other end of the spectrum, the wiry redhead Hector Berlioz (1803–69) achieved his great and historic performances through a mixture of wild physical exuberance and tradition-breaking music that was based more on fantasy and emotionality than classically balanced structure.

If you recognize attributes of contemporary conductors in that list of legendary maestros, it makes abundantly clear that there has never been one way to achieve greatness—except to be a super-sized version of oneself. The players who followed each of those men were led in very different ways, and that is true of how conductors successfully interact with our orchestras, choruses, and soloists today, even if the tyrant is more of an image than a reality. When he is truly tyrannical, the conductor has to be protected from the musicians’ anger, either by the funder—the state government or private philanthropy (which may be the board or the conductor himself)—or by university tenure systems. Fritz Reiner, one of the tyrant conductors, was famously hung in effigy when he refused to take the Chicago Symphony on tour. One of the members of his bass section described what it was like to play for Reiner when he said, “Believe me, before a concert, the bathroom was a popular place.”

I once watched a highly regarded conducting teacher who had been trained in Germany in the 1940s—and who had little success as a professional musician—torture his American student orchestra in a way that I will never forget. He stopped the students in the middle of a rehearsal of a Beethoven symphony and said, “You are playing mezzo-forte but the music says piano. [Pause] Why do you play mezzo-forte when it says piano? [Longer pause] Why don’t you just play forte? [Even longer pause] Maybe you could play mezzo-piano. [Short pause] But no [condescending smile], you play mezzo-forte—[shouting] even though it says PIANO!”

It was as if I were peeking into a rehearsal from 1840 in a provincial town somewhere in Europe. All I kept thinking was: If your hands are not telling them to play softer, just say it’s too loud. The students put up with this man’s behavior, and perhaps some thought this was good training. Others’ eyes just glazed over, awaiting the next time they might be required to play.

Conducting is inevitably about partnership. Ultimately, every great conductor is linked with a great ensemble, and that relationship establishes something unique for both parties. While we mostly think of Karajan with Berlin and Vienna, we do not think about Karajan with Chicago, Toscanini with Philadelphia, Stokowski with the NBC Symphony, Levine with Berlin. When James Levine made his debut with the Metropolitan Opera in Tosca in 1971, something happened that could never have been predicted, and a partnership was created that would last over forty-five years. With Georg Solti, it was Vienna and Chicago.

A great conductor can also show up and have the orchestra take an immediate dislike to him. The story Leopold Stokowski told me about how the Munich orchestra hated Mahler in 1910 is not a singular example of a mismatch. Television producer Humphrey Burton captured one of them in a film that documents Bernstein’s rehearsals with the BBC Symphony in 1982. The film is painful to watch because it is a conductor’s nightmare—rehearsing a work and having the orchestra resist and simply not want to cooperate as the cameras are rolling.

Bernstein is seen preparing a performance of Sir Edward Elgar’s Enigma Variations, one of the treasures of British classical music and known to every player in the BBC Symphony. As he attempts to rehearse different sections of the orchestra, with the cellos playing a rapid passage alone and then with the tuba player, and then rehearse another section like an unwanted substitute schoolteacher, all respect seems to evaporate and the air is sucked out of the room. At one point, the concertmaster, Rodney Friend, utters an “Oy,” after which Lenny says, “All right, let’s hear some other faults at [rehearsal figure] 51. Like, violins.” Another “Oy” and Bernstein says, “Never mind your ‘Oy.’ Sit up. Be a captain. Take a breath. Lead your troops. Three, four!” The violins play the figure, ending very much out of tune. “Fabulous,” says Bernstein. “Really?” says the concertmaster. There are forced smiles and terrible vibrations in that room, and all of it is captured on film.

Imagine, if you will, how it feels when one appears for the first time before a symphony orchestra. There can be as many as one hundred players seated on the stage—a group of individuals who have dedicated their lives to perfecting their art and who are, willingly or unwillingly, subjugating their individuality by donating to a greater entity, the orchestra. It is hard and sometimes thankless work. If you are a woodwind player or a principal string or brass player, you occasionally have the opportunity to play a solo and thereby express your artistry. (“You do the andante,” said the late John Mack, then the Cleveland Orchestra’s principal oboist, to the twenty-eight-year-old me, “and I’ll do the grazioso.” In other words, I was responsible for the tempo, and he was responsible for the elegant way in which he would play his solo.) The vast majority of the orchestra is following their section leaders and creating the glorious sound of a symphony orchestra, the epitome of expressivity in Western music. In the greatest orchestras, for example, there is no such thing as a rest. When a player is not playing he or she is listening and supporting those who are. But the very anonymity of their jobs can also eat away at the special nature of their individual talent and achievement.

One Tuesday morning, a kid shows up as a last-minute substitute guest conductor. The managing director of the orchestra introduces him with something like, “I suppose you can all imagine how difficult it is to find a last-minute replacement for Maestro Josef Krips, who had to cancel for health reasons. Next week, I am happy to announce, we will have [the well-known and highly respected] Gennady Rozhdestvensky! This morning we have John Mauceri…Please welcome him.” And with that self-exculpatory introduction, I was left on the stage of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion with one hundred members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1974. We all had The Rite of Spring on our stands. The orchestra looked at me and wondered how and why it had come to this. I had to think quickly or risk losing them. I remember saying, “Good morning. Can we all turn to number 142?”

Number 142 is the final section of Stravinsky’s famous score. It is called “Sacrificial Dance (The Chosen One).” In this case, that would be me. I decided that there was no point in the Los Angeles Philharmonic playing through the entire score wondering if this newly arrived maestrino, younger than anyone else on that stage, had the chops to beat through the climax of this notoriously difficult orchestral work. It is like running a gauntlet in which each step requires an instantaneous and precise adjustment or you and the orchestra will fall and the music will, in all likelihood, stop. So we started. Having gotten to the end, no hostages were taken, and members of the string section waved their bows (a way of saying “Okay”), and I said, “Now let’s go to the beginning.”

For whatever complex reasons, the Los Angeles Philharmonic took a liking to the new face before them. Some of the players brought fruit from their yards for me. I got a crazily ambivalent review from Martin Bernheimer in the Los Angeles Times, “The orchestra played well for the new conductor. Whether it was because of him or in spite of him is hard to tell.” A member of the orchestra told me this was a great review. “You should see what he writes about Zubin,” he said.

A photo of me taken by a member of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1974

Every conductor is always auditioning, even as we appear to be the unquestioned leader of all that is in front of us. As we get older and develop a reputation, there are new expectations and new suspicions. It is never simple. Anyone who is aware of the last years of Herbert von Karajan in Berlin or Seiji Ozawa in Boston knows that, even at the apex of one’s career, psychological, political, and physical changes are always at play. After all, our careers last a lifetime. Orchestras are required by their very nature to act with unanimity. This also means they are behaving tribally, and tribal behavior can be unsettling and unstoppable as well as the source of awe and admiration.

As I discussed earlier, orchestras in America, and in some parts of Europe, currently have a major role in determining who will be invited back to guest-conduct, who will become their next music director, and who will be banned for all time. Within an orchestra there are many conflicting forces, involving job security, the future of the institution, fear, pride, a desire for inspired leadership, and, in some cases, cynicism. (“This, too, shall pass,” muttered a percussionist in a major orchestra a number of years ago regarding a newly appointed music director. He did not, however, outlive the offending maestro.) What makes all of this even more complicated is that rarely does anyone tell a guest conductor what could be improved. We usually walk away thinking we had a success. The rating sheets can tell another story.

When Karajan was announced as coming to the Metropolitan Opera for his double-debut—as a conductor and as a stage director—for Wagner’s Ring cycle in 1967, there was talk of resistance within the orchestra because the conductor had joined the Nazi Party in 1933. My wise conducting teacher Gustav Meier said that once Karajan began rehearsing, it would be clear to everyone that he knew every note of the score and was a great musician. There would be no resistance. He was correct.

Karajan, however, did something even more astonishing by turning the tables on everyone at the Met. After conducting and directing Die Walküre in 1967, he returned the next season for Das Rheingold, but then refused to come back for the last two operas in the cycle. It is said that he felt the orchestra was not good enough. It took another five years for the Met to complete the Karajan Ring—without Karajan. Erich Leinsdorf conducted Siegfried in 1972 and Rafael Kubelik presided over Götterdämmerung in 1974, with Karajan still listed in the program as the director, though Wolfgang Weber actually rehearsed the singers and supervised the lighting.

In 1976, I watched a similar situation between conductor and orchestra with Karl Böhm, who was making his San Francisco Opera debut during the same season I was. Böhm, fifty-one years older than me, was conducting a new production of Richard Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten, and although he was a world expert on the music of Strauss—indeed, he conducted the official Nazi celebration of the composer’s eightieth birthday—the orchestra was on edge. Böhm demanded and got a huge number of rehearsals, during which he seemed perpetually annoyed. He hardly spoke, and when he did, it was in German; a translator leaned over the railing of the pit to shout out rehearsal numbers. There was no rapport. and there was palpable tension, but there was clear respect, too, for Böhm the musician, and a series of great performances ensued.

Are artists to be forgiven for their political activities, or should they be held accountable? The British were the first to forgive those who supported, or were suspected of supporting, the Third Reich. As a result, Richard Strauss, Kirsten Flagstad, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Herbert von Karajan, and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf all performed and recorded in London after 1945.

All relationships are, of course, unpredictable. The kindly and soft-spoken Carlo Maria Giulini was beloved by the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He seemed loath to correct a mistake, trusting the orchestra to hear it and fix it. However, during a rehearsal of Debussy’s La Mer the principal cornet was playing a phrase that Giulini could not accept. After two or three repetitions, it turned out that the player had something quite different in his part from what the maestro had in his score. Once this was cleared up, Giulini apologized to everyone for not speaking out sooner. His modesty and his annoyance at himself were so genuine that what might have been simply unacceptable for anyone else only made the orchestra love him more.

Soloists create a similar but far more personal challenge for every conductor. In the case of an instrumentalist, these great musicians make a living going from orchestra to orchestra, time zone to time zone, conductor to conductor, prepared to play a limited number of works that they offer each season. They may meet the conductor for the very first time at an orchestra rehearsal with no time to discuss privately issues of tempo or the myriad details that go into performing a concerto. Occasionally, there is a separate rehearsal for soloist and conductor, and the give-and-take begins immediately.

Some aspects of a soloist’s interpretation are purely technical. If a conductor is too slow, a violinist can get tied up with not enough bow; too fast and a pianist blurs a passage; not relaxing an upbeat may mean a soprano will run out of breath on the next phrase. Truly great artists are able to accommodate various speeds, of course, but others will and can play their concerto only the way they have practiced it, and you have very little time to learn and remember before you are together with other musicians onstage and in front of an audience.

For many Americans, the most famous moment in which the curtain of conviviality was rent asunder occurred on April 6, 1962, when the towering and eccentric pianist Glenn Gould clashed with Leonard Bernstein, then the music director of the New York Philharmonic. Bernstein and Gould just could not agree on how to perform Brahms’s Piano Concerto no. 1, and on that night, the conductor came out and made a speech before the music making began. There is no recording of that night’s speech, but the next day, when Bernstein repeated his unusual introduction, it was recorded. “…A curious situation has arisen,” he told the audience,

which merits, I think, a word or two. You are about to hear a rather, shall we say, unorthodox performance of the Brahms D Minor Concerto, a performance distinctly different from any I’ve ever heard, or even dreamt of for that matter, in its remarkably broad tempi and its frequent departures from Brahms’ dynamic indications. I cannot say I am in total agreement with Mr. Gould’s conception, and this raises the interesting question: what am I doing conducting it? I’m conducting it because Mr. Gould is so valid and serious an artist that I must take seriously anything he conceives in good faith, and his conception is interesting enough so that I feel you should hear it, too.

But the age-old question still remains: in a concerto, who is the boss: the soloist or the conductor? The answer is, of course, sometimes one, sometimes the other, depending on the people involved. But almost always, the two manage to get together by persuasion or charm or even threats to achieve a unified performance. I have only once before in my life had to submit to a soloist’s wholly new and incompatible concept and that was the last time I accompanied Mr. Gould. [The audience roars with laughter.] But this time the discrepancies between our views are so great that I feel I must make this small disclaimer. Then why, to repeat the question, am I conducting it? Why do I not make a minor scandal—get a substitute soloist, or let an assistant conduct? Because I am fascinated, glad to have the chance for a new look at this much-played work; because, what’s more, there are moments in Mr. Gould’s performance that emerge with astonishing freshness and conviction. Thirdly, because we can all learn something from this extraordinary artist, who is a thinking performer, and finally because there is in music what Dimitri Mitropoulos used to call “the sportive element,” that factor of curiosity, adventure, experiment, and I can assure you that it has been an adventure this week collaborating with Mr. Gould on this Brahms concerto, and it’s in this spirit of adventure that we now present it to you.

These comments, well known to many musicians, caused a stir at the time. They are honest and important, because the question of who is in charge, which shall be addressed later in this book, is rarely discussed in public. As a coda, The New York Times’s chief music critic, Harold C. Schonberg, was lethal in his review, suggesting that Gould did not have sufficient technique to play the Brahms at a normal speed. Soon after, Gould retired from performing onstage.

Soloists also may shift in their willingness to accommodate another point of view depending on the respect they have for the maestro and their own desire/need to be asked back, especially if the orchestra and the conductor are positioned in a major city. There were a number of world-famous visitors to New Haven and its symphony orchestra who saw it merely as a gig played somewhere between Boston and New York. In those instances, it was the job of the conductor to pay attention and follow.

Then there are the glorious moments between a soloist and a conductor. Some artists are unafraid to make direct eye contact. As you fix each other’s gaze, face and upper torso turned toward the other, something truly intense and deeply private takes place. An artist who is unwilling to let the other one “in” will never achieve this. Both conductor and soloist have to allow themselves to “move the other’s furniture,” as someone once said.

For my professional orchestral debut with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, my soloist was Rudolf Serkin. He had chosen Beethoven’s last piano concerto, known as the “Emperor” Concerto. It was a work he had been playing for longer than I had been alive. We met on the stage of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion with the orchestra ready to play. I had managed a phone conversation with Serkin. He was lovely and supportive. I confessed that I did not possess perfect pitch. “And so,” he interrupted, “you are concerned about the end of the cadenza, no?” “Yes,” I said.

This dangerous place comes at the end of the first movement. After playing a long solo, the piano begins an upward chromatic run—all the white and black notes—ending on an E-flat. If a conductor misjudges that last note by giving an upbeat too soon, there will be a clash of harmonies. If a conductor misjudges and comes in too late, there will be a terrible silence before the orchestra enters. Quite simply, this has to be perfect, though it is easy enough if you are nervous to lose your sense of tonality by a half step. “I tell you what,” Serkin said in lightly inflected speech. “I will start the chromatic scale, and when I smile at you, you give the upbeat and we will be absolutely together.”

Throughout rehearsal, I occasionally suggested things to the orchestra, like asking them to conserve the movement of their bows so that they could give more bow at the end of a phrase. Each time I spoke, Serkin would look happily at me from the keyboard and shake his head, Yes! And when we got to the great cadenza and he began the dreaded upward chromatic run, I watched him. After a few octaves he looked up and he smiled. My arm went up, and when it came down, we were all in E-flat major.

A photo of Rudolf Serkin sent to me after my professional orchestral debut

More than anything else, it is eye contact that turns the soloist and the conductor into a single being. Whenever one sees a soloist with closed eyes, he or she has hung out the Do Not Disturb sign on the door to their soul. There are many reasons for this, since so much concentration is going on in their minds and bodies. Some nonclassical artists simply do not know how to use a conductor and are unaccustomed to having a performing partner who, at the very least, is a copilot. Admittedly, it takes getting used to.

Some, like Garth Brooks, Kristin Chenoweth, Carlos Santana, and the great fado singer Mariza, figured it out right away. Josh Groban, like many pop artists, usually stands close to the audience and well behind the conductor—with his earpieces in. The earpieces provide him with the sound of his voice and the orchestra in a “mix” and adds reverberation so the singer feels totally comfortable, but closed off from the actual acoustic environment of the stage. At a rehearsal for a single song we were going to perform together, he was willing to try to stand next to me so we could communicate much as in a classical concert. But once he had an audience that night, he turned his shoulders slightly away from me, walked toward the public, and sang, as I watched the side of his mouth and then the back of his head. With his eyes closed much of the time, and an occasional glance at his adoring fans, there was no room for a conductor to get in between. Since his music is relatively simple and his performance style does not require rhythmic precision, that seemed to be acceptable to him, and to everyone else.

Television directors rarely understand how important it is for classical singers to stay in contact with their maestro. Early in my career, I conducted Leontyne Price for the Kennedy Center Honors. She sang “Vissi d’arte” from Puccini’s Tosca. The director placed her ten feet behind me so he could get good camera angles. I said this would make synchronization impossible. He told me that he had directed the cameras for the popular 1950s crooner Perry Como, “who had a really tiny voice, unlike Miss Price,” and his conductor never complained.

I tried gamely to explain that one-tempo songs with a little orchestra and a soloist who played with phrases, riding over the background of harmonies and rhythms, was not the same thing. “I am pretty sure I can do ‘Vis-’ with Madame Price, but how do I do ‘-si,’ not to mention ‘d’ar’ and ‘te’? Each of these syllables is synchronized to a different harmony that must mirror the words and the music. They must be one thing, unlike Mr. Como’s back-phrasing a melody over a steady pulse from an orchestra.” The director just stared at me and shook his head, wondering how he got saddled with this annoying conductor. I can see his point. My job was to solve the problem created by his need to put on a television show, not to make him understand why I was unhappy—an unhappiness based on the fear that I would fail at my job under these circumstances.

I had a similar situation at the Grammys when I was asked to conduct “Granada” with Plácido Domingo. Once again, the television director (this time in Los Angeles) wanted Domingo to be down front, behind me. This seemed all right, since “Granada” has a relatively fixed beat. It also has a vocal introduction that is flexible and free in its tempo, but I could follow by turning my back to the orchestra and making out Domingo’s breathing. However, once the introduction is finished, the orchestra has a passage that leads into the song itself. I asked how he wanted to deal with that: either we could go on in tempo or, after the orchestral section, I could wait to hear “Gra-” and bring in the orchestra on “-nada.” “John, please just go on in tempo,” he said.

Rehearsing with Leontyne Price for television in 1981, and looking understandably worried

Either he forgot, or the ear-splitting cheering of the crowd was so loud that he did not hear the orchestra. In the event, the failure I feared with Leontyne was realized with Plácido. I went on in tempo, and he waited. The camera was on his face in a tight close-up, and the television audience saw his head whip around toward the orchestra as he jumped to the downbeat and sang the song I now refer to as “Nada.” Every time he and I see each other, he looks at me in a way that I imagine has something to do with that upbeat and the missing “Gra-.” I am still so embarrassed I never bring it up. All things considered, it was my fault, because I should have been prepared for this eventuality and I was not.

Eye contact, as I said, will always be the key to successful partnering. The experience of a Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto at the Hollywood Bowl with the great Israeli virtuoso Gil Shaham—his body turned directly toward me and mine toward him—remains an indelible memory. (He famously does this with every conductor.) I can only imagine it is akin to the feeling two ballroom dancers have when they execute a perfect tango together.

Choral conductors are usually uncomfortable facing an orchestra because so much of their training has to do with creating a cohesive and blended sound of human voices rather than confidently dealing with instrumentalists. Amateur choruses rehearse over many hours—frequently once a week for months—whereas professional choruses are more like professional orchestras in their ability to sight-read and perform with a few hours of rehearsal. Choral conductors will inevitably mouth the words of the text, encouraging a direct visual contact with their singers, whereas orchestras have no cohesive words in their parts and are watching the conductor from various angles. Chorus masters will frequently accept the reality that they prepare the chorus for the orchestra’s maestro and only sometimes are given a bow at the end of the concert they did not conduct.

The experience of conducting works that require a chorus and an orchestra shifts how we conductors move and where our attention goes: the chorus usually comes first. There is a singularity of adhesion between chorus and maestro because we conductors, making direct eye contact, form the words and breathe the music but the sound is coming toward us and not from us. The visceral nature of the alchemy of human voices conjoined with a symphony orchestra—all responding to the conductor’s mind and body—is a singular and admittedly thrilling privilege.

Conducting opera and relating to the singers onstage takes the complexity of having a single soloist or a chorus standing on risers and facing you to an entirely different plane. What opera singers have to achieve is the most difficult in classical music. Not only are their bodies their instruments, they must memorize hugely complicated music and words, and perform while wearing costumes—all the while walking around the stage, remembering their positions, and being somewhat believable as a character. Stage directors may require physical positions that are uncomfortable for them and may well impinge on their ability to see the conductor in the pit or on the various television monitors hidden from audience view (and/or the prompter that some big theaters employ, who acts as a security device between the stage and the pit).

Above all, an opera conductor has to know how to intuit the breathing needs of every singer: how much time it takes to inhale and how much breath is expelled to sing each phrase and prepare for the next one. A conductor must always breathe with his singers in order to be aligned with them. In the past, many great conductors emerged from opera houses, where they began their training as coach/accompanists, because it is in those small coaching rooms that one gets to know what singers need. That tradition, while no longer generally true, continued with James Levine at the Metropolitan Opera, Riccardo Muti at La Scala, and Antonio Pappano at London’s Royal Opera House. Each of them could work directly with individual singers, without the need for a third person to play the piano in the room.

What makes relationships with singers in an opera so complex is that each one must share only a percentage of a conductor’s direct concentration, because there are many soloists, a chorus, and an orchestra with which to contend. There should always be musical rehearsals that are separate from staging rehearsals, and ideally a one-on-one rehearsal with each singer—but that is usually impossible. Depending on the opera house, the respect given the conductor, whether the opera is a standard work or something unusual, a new production or a revival, a conductor’s direct preparation with the singers can vary wildly. I have taken over productions on no rehearsal and I have rehearsed some operas for seven weeks.

To give you a sense of the challenge, take one aria: “In questa reggia,” from Turandot. The soprano playing Princess Turandot will be standing at the top of a grand staircase staring directly forward. What you might not think about, however, is the enormous distance between her and the conductor. Eye contact is easily achieved, except that—because of perspective—her entire body appears to be the size of your hand.

She will inevitably be festooned in a glorious costume with an ornate headpiece and a flowing gown that has been carefully arranged by supernumeraries. For the audience, this is a greatly anticipated moment. There is a feeling of electricity in the air. What is about to happen is a make-or-break moment for the soprano, who—even though we are in the middle of the second act—has not yet sung a note and was only vaguely viewed in the previous act, when she was seen making an imperious gesture, reaffirming the execution of the Prince of Persia. There she is, regal, powerful, and totally in control.

Something very different is happening for the performers. The soprano—every soprano—will be nervous, because this is a very big moment, and just before she utters her first line she will find her harmonic bearings with a D-major chord, marked “quietly”—piano—played by two flutes and a muted French horn, plus a single stroke on a suspended cymbal (also marked piano) that gives the Western harmony a certain Chinese color.

Think about what a conductor must do and what the soprano must do: The conductor waits to make sure the soprano has found her position at the top of the stairs. He fixes on her and exudes confidence. A small and slow upbeat brings in the D-major chord, played by four musicians who are not sitting near each other in the pit. (The two flutes are, of course, but the French horn might be on the other side of the pit, or a few rows behind them, depending on the size and shape of the opera house’s pit. The percussionist will most likely be at a distance from the flutes and the horn.) The maestro gives these four players a collective look as his hand comes up and then, at the bottom of the downbeat, the chord sounds. It must be sounded together, and that is achieved through the experience and willpower of the four players, who understand the conductor’s intent and translate it into how they inhale and produce a tone: one flute on an A-natural, the other on the F-sharp below it, and a concert D-natural below that on the French horn. Making a sound on the French horn is a completely different process from making one on a flute. Whereas one blows across the opening in the head joint of a flute, much as one gets a sound out of a Coke bottle, in a horn one purses one’s lips and makes a buzzing sound into the mouthpiece. The horn player has selected the length of the metal tube by pressing on its valves, and by regulating the buzz selects the correct note—a D-natural—to come in precisely with the two flutes. The percussionist makes his cymbal sound just the way you would imagine it: by striking it. But Puccini’s score says the player should use a mallet that is customarily used for the timpani to make a specifically pointed sound. The player does not just hit the cymbal. In fact, the stroke of the timpani mallet coincides with his wrist pulling away from the instrument, almost as if he were lifting the sound out of the alloy of copper, tin, and a touch of silver. The diameter of the cymbal will have been chosen by the player, though the conductor might have asked for a lower or higher sound to color the D-major chord the way he imagines Puccini wanted it.

The soprano, meanwhile, is about as far from the audience and the pit as she will ever be in any production of an opera. The D-major chord sounds very far away from her, and once she starts to sing she will no longer be able to hear the harmonies below her. The conductor is her lifeline, watching her lips, hearing only some of what she is singing; how much he hears will depend on the characteristics of her voice and the acoustics of the hall. In any case her voice emanates from her mouth, and the conductor’s ears are approximately at the floor level of the stage below.

The aria progresses as the soprano, inhabiting the movements of a fifteenth-century Chinese princess, relates the story of the brutal rape of her ancestor the Princess Lo-u-Ling. Puccini asks for occasional relaxations of tempo in order to allow her to tell this tragic story with controlled anger that floats above unbearable sadness and, as we will find out in the next act, fear, because she already knows on first sight that the man she is singing to will vanquish her through love.

How does a maestro help project that underlying sadness? The answer has to do with the quality of the accompaniment when Turandot says, “Principessa Lo-u-Ling,” and the strings enter softly, with their mutes on. How a conductor makes their undulation a representation of Turandot’s sadness will make her subtext clear: Puccini says she is extremely cold and solemn. The orchestra tells us, through a combination of sound quality and the shaping of the repeated sighs, who she really is—even as Turandot is putting on a terrifying show for her latest suitor—and the soprano playing her is navigating her voice on a distant perch, high above the stage.

Within a minute of this aria, while still atop the staircase, the soprano will face a series of technical challenges. Puccini and his librettists suddenly give her a lot of words and fast notes to sing: “e sfidasti inflessibile e sicura l’aspro dominio” (“and defied, inflexible and secure, the bitter domination [of man]”). Puccini instructs the conductor to make a small ritard, but the soprano also has to navigate notes that are fast and ascend to a G-natural and then drop precipitously down more than an octave to a low F-sharp on the words “l’aspro dominio.” Some sopranos will take a breath after “inflessibile” and others will go forward if they can, and then grab a quick breath at “sicura”; and then every soprano takes another breath to power the low notes for “l’aspro dominio.” where Puccini has also added accents on each note. It is always possible that a soprano will take breaths differently from what she did in the room rehearsals, or indeed at the dress rehearsal or previous performance, depending on how she is feeling that night.

The challenge for the soprano is that she really does not want to spend too much time in her lower voice, because this aria is going to end with her having to dominate on fortissimo high B-naturals and a final high C over the full power of the orchestra, which by the end of an aria that started with three wind instruments and a cymbal will number over eighty musicians. The conductor must understand how much chest voice she might use at this moment, and moderate the string chords so she can be heard. Extraordinarily enough, all of this is done mostly by reading her lips and watching her breathe, while mouthing her words and mimicking her breathing. A conductor must become Turandot, not only for the soprano’s sake but also for the orchestra’s, which is watching you and your demeanor. Even the biggest-voiced Turandots in the world can barely be heard in the pit, given the libretto’s stage requirements and Puccini’s orchestration.

The glorious part of this process for conductors is the tremendous feeling of shaping this narrative—from quietude, through sadness, then rage, and finally triumphant defiance. Existing in a Jungian totality, we are everyone on that stage as well as everyone in the orchestra pit, commenting: we are the singer, we are the character, but we know more than Turandot knows about herself and communicate that knowledge to the audience. We soar with her, higher and higher, until she is joined by the tenor in a high C in which he proves to be her match; and then we bring in the chorus, which bursts forth as the aria comes to its end. The conductor, without making a sound, has successfully steered the ship through a perilous passageway and now, with barely a moment’s rest, moves forward into the dramatic riddle scene that will determine the principal characters’ fate.

We conductors are sometimes an unseen character in an opera or musical. This was especially true with Bernadette Peters in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Song and Dance, in which she was alone on the stage for the entire first act. I was, at different times, the person she was talking to, the person she was talking about, her inner self, and, on a few occasions, the audience’s response to her character. It was the same with Renata Scotto when she performed in Poulenc’s La Voix humaine. Again, she was alone onstage in a monologue, with no one to play off of except the conductor.

If conducting operas is a daunting and glorious task, conducting ballet is arguably as difficult, though generally less rewarding, and far less valued by the public. Whereas conducting an opera has everything to do with understanding the physical needs of singing, conducting ballet has everything to do with the individual abilities of dancers to perform and inhabit the choreography they have been given. Yes, the steps are generally the same from one Swan Lake to another. However, instead of mimicking the breathing of a singer, a ballet conductor has to notice how the dancers’ feet and legs are managing the steps. No two dancers dance at the same speed, and it is difficult for them to tell you what they need, especially when they are dancing. One can always intuit the needs of singers by the way they breathe. If dancers find a tempo too fast or too slow, their muscular responses begin to present themselves as a passage continues. In other words, it is too late to suddenly slow down or speed up. A brilliant dance maestro must merge an invisible art form, music, with a silent art form, dance.

Dancers are no longer trained first as musicians, and neither, in general, are choreographers. Looking at the photograph here of Maurice Ravel and Vaslav Nijinsky at the piano is an astonishing sight, for not only is Nijinsky playing the top part (Ravel was a concert pianist, after all), but his left hand is crossed over his right hand in a fairly advanced form of pianism. In Russia and Europe, musical training was expected for all dancers and choreographers.

This was true of George Balanchine, who could discuss his work with Stravinsky in terms of the notated music and not jargon currently created for musically illiterate dancers and their choreographers (“Start at the fifth set of fours,” “Let’s try it from the twelve counts”—or, more creatively, “Go back to the mushrooms” or “Just after the jumping jacks”). There is no orchestra in the room as the dancers are learning their steps and the intentionality of their movements. A pianist will learn the names of sections and jump to the proper place in the piano reduction of the orchestral score. If there is no rehearsal pianist, a technician goes to a cue on a recording which he now knows is “mushrooms” or “jumping jacks,” but which is actually, say, 4:32 on track 4 of the recording being used to set the choreography.

Vaslav Nijinsky (LEFT) and Maurice Ravel playing Daphnis et Chloé in 1912

Once the dance has been rehearsed in a room and is being accompanied with a live orchestra, a conductor has to watch the incredibly complex series of movements to know if he is providing the right tempo to show the dancers at their best. Some dancers move a little ahead of the beat, while others can be late. A dancer who is ahead of the beat usually makes the audience aware of a lack of synchronicity with the orchestra. Dancing precisely on the beat gives the impression of power, and dancing behind the beat gives the impression of weightlessness.

Ballet conducting has one tremendous advantage over opera conducting in that the conductor’s eyes are at stage level, and so we are looking directly at the part of the body that is providing the most important information—the dancer’s feet. With opera, the singers’ voices and their breathing and support apparatus are five feet above our heads—when they are standing on the flat stage. The closer a singer gets to the edge of the stage, the more our heads turn upward to see their mouths.

A ballet master will insist on certain inflexible tempos for the corps (the company dancers), who will frequently be moving in unison. However, when there is a solo or a pas de deux, the job is enormously complex. Many ballet companies can barely afford a live orchestra, and so orchestra rehearsals are usually woefully insufficient even for the most complex music and choreography. At most rehearsals, the company will dance either to a piano—and the quality of the pianist is crucial in preparing the room work for the orchestral work—or to a recording. The conductor must find a way to imitate the tempos of the recording once there is a live orchestra. This can prove to be a daunting and soul-sucking experience, akin to accompanying a movie and attempting to recreate the precise tempos of the sound track. Unless the conductor is in the room for the creation of the ballet (something that is not practical, since it takes so many hours of repetition to build and teach it), he is presented with a fait accompli.

Ballet and its precious dancers are both heroic and vulnerable. They easily can get hurt when a tempo is not right for them. Anyone brave enough to conduct dance is also a hero, made even more so because so little is understood of everyone’s willingness to create the grand illusion of human beings defying gravity through movement and precisely synchronized sound. Few in the audience have a clue as to how incredibly difficult it is, and when the result is good, it is the dancers who are the center of admiration, affection, and, indeed, adulation. The conductor, always looking uncomfortably inelegant, coming onstage at the end and surrounded by the physical beauty of these superb athlete-artists, usually takes a sweaty bow while pointing into the orchestra pit, as the musicians are packing up their instruments or just walking out.

And, with all of the above in mind, you might ask what happens when a conductor makes a mistake. While there are many gray areas in the art of conducting, a mistake—one that every person performing under the direction of a conductor would agree is truly a mistake—occurs when a maestro beats the wrong number of beats in a measure or cues an instrumentalist or singer to enter in the wrong place. In both cases, the ensemble is forced to make a choice: follow the leader or resist. It is a split-second decision that must be made collectively by the musicians acting as a single entity—or not. In the latter case, musical chaos ensues as everyone must figure out how to move on, which in most cases happens.

Whenever a conductor makes a mistake, it is seared into his conscience. It is unforgivable because the necessary part of the job—to beat time correctly—has not been fulfilled. You have let your troops down and created the very insecurity you have been tasked to eliminate.

Sir Malcolm Sargent (1895–1967) is said to have stopped in the middle of a premiere performance of a symphony by Sir William Walton that was simultaneously being broadcast on the BBC, because he had misconducted a bar in a fast-moving scherzo, causing musical pandemonium. The radio public heard the orchestra grind to a halt. After a moment, the conductor’s voice was heard. “Terribly sorry. That was completely my fault.” Few conductors have the courage to be so honest. When Toscanini lost his place during a live broadcast of the Bacchanale from Tannhäuser on April 4, 1954—and the NBC Symphony’s performance began to unravel in front of him—he walked offstage once the concert was over and never returned to the podium again.

On the other hand, when a performer makes an error, it is the conductor’s job to right the ship as soon as possible. This happens most frequently with singers in an opera. As I said earlier, opera singers have their roles memorized; they are remembering their staging; they are in costume; and their bodies are their instruments, so they are in constant awareness of their physical state as they prepare to soar above the orchestra and thrill us with their skill and artistry. Conductors learn a series of hand and arm gestures to warn singers and help shepherd them through those moments where they might have difficulties remembering their part. However, when an unexpected error happens, a conductor’s total concentration goes to the artist in trouble. These are surprisingly intimate and gratifying moments. Wordlessly and at a distance from the stage, the maestro massages the moment and confidently brings the artist back in line with everything going on around him.

But sometimes a conductor must summon superhuman powers to bring everyone together—and there is no conducting course in the world that can prepare you for those moments. They emerge without foreshadowing and can threaten the performance. In 1973, when I was conducting Gian Carlo Menotti’s Saint of Bleecker Street at Wolf Trap Farm Park—which also was the first opera I had ever conducted—I was confronted with such a moment. Near the end of act 1, an offstage group of instrumentalists and singers begins a hymn and slowly enters the stage, while the onstage soloists are also singing. A conductor cues the offstage group by looking into a television camera, and the assistant conductor conveys the beat to the group. As they come onstage, they shift their attention to the conductor in the pit.

That night, with the composer in the audience, the assistant conductor did not see my cue because a supernumerary was standing in front of the television screen, and in a moment of panic he started the band and the singers one bar late. He, of course, could not hear what was happening onstage, since the instruments and singers in his charge were so loud.

As the procession made its way onstage and I could hear them, I became aware that they were a measure late and that we would never be able to continue to the end of the act with two entirely different forces—the stage band and chorus, and the soloists and orchestra—being in two different places. I had to act fast and judge my options. While I continued conducting, part of my brain fast-forwarded through the rest of the act to determine my alternatives. There were no alternatives; only one unlikely action could save the performance.

I turned to the concertmistress and said, “We have to add a bar.” “What?” she said. I said in a louder voice to her, “WE HAVE TO ADD A BAR!” I turned to the woodwinds and brass, who were seated to my right, and while my left hand continued to beat time for the strings (who were to my left), I extended a mighty right arm with a gesture common to traffic policemen. My hand trembling, as if I were stopping a semi van, I stopped them for four beats, while the strings continued and the onstage band kept playing. Then I turned to the strings and repeated the gesture in reverse: the winds and brass (who were now synchronized with the stage) kept playing and the strings stopped for four beats. And in a matter of twelve seconds, everyone was in the same place and we ended act 1 together. I left the pit dazed and exhausted, changed into a dry shirt, and prepared to return for act 2. My professional operatic debut was indeed that. I had become a conductor.

THE RELATIONSHIP WITH THE AUDIENCE

Compared to managers, friends, colleagues, and loved ones, the audience is the most honest. It will let us know what it feels, and not just at the end of the performance. Like the orchestra and soloists, the audience is our partner. Together with the musicians who are performing, satisfying the audience is the ultimate goal of all our efforts. We maestros are all on a journey of conductivity from the source—the music—to the people who we hope will accept, understand, and ideally participate in the performance. It’s one thing for a misunderstood or spurned composer to refer to his music and say, “My time will come.” That concept is totally nonoperative for a conductor. Either we are achieving our goals now or we have failed. We are the translators, not the authors. But the difference between being a translator of, say, the Odyssey and being a conductor of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is that there are many translations of the Odyssey available to those who wish to read them. Beethoven’s Ninth only exists when it is performed. (We shall investigate recordings later.)

A conductor feels the audience even before entering the stage or the pit. The energy in the room—diffuse, concentrated, sleepy, inebriated, anticipatory, or missing altogether—can be sensed from the wings. There are reasons, if that is the word for it, why an audience is excited before a performance. Whenever there is a sense that something really special is about to happen—something highly anticipated—the audience knows, and all those present feed off of it. Ironically, sometimes it can feel as if the performance itself were an afterthought, merely the evidence that justified the collective energy that preceded the music, continuing through the performance and lingering in the mind and heart afterward—sometimes increasing as the years go by. Anyone who attended the farewell performances of Maria Callas—in recital with tenor Giuseppe di Stefano—will know precisely what I mean.

By 1974, Callas was barely Callas, her voice having shrunk in size, her vibrato having curdled into a wobble in its upper register, and her sound clouded and covered. But every now and then something happened—a fiery flash in her eyes, a gesture of vulnerability, a perfectly turned phrase—and memories were awakened of when she was great (and members of the audience were young). Respect, sadness, mortality, curiosity, and a desire to stop inevitability fueled the public’s emotions during the performances and buoyed them and Callas through each evening. It occasionally felt as if the audience were giving her the strength to carry on, and probably it did.

Audience adulation of conductors is usually far more tempered. Occasionally there are fans for a young and passionate discovery. Fandom is rarely sought, but it can be fueled through marketing and public relations. Classical music has very few superstars, and because of the nature of “serious” music, there is an unseemly quality to fan clubs for maestros. Our lives are generally imagined to be impervious to quotidian reality.

While Toscanini understood image and marketing, with his perfectly coiffed looks (“He looked like a porcelain doll,” my aunt Rose once said of him) and television appearances, he openly scoffed at Stokowski, calling him il pagliaccio (“the clown”) for cheapening the image of a maestro by appearing in the movies. Apparently, television and radio was classy and movies were not.

Karajan’s rehearsal costume was a black turtleneck. His highly gelled silver hair made him look as if he were facing into the wind. It was a trademark. Rodney Greenberg, who directed the telecast of his Beethoven Ninth live from the Berlin Philharmonie on New Year’s Day of 1978, said in a post: “What I remember about the Karajan event is how the schedule had him standing on the podium an hour before transmission while the lighting supervisor angled his lamps to best effect to achieve the most precise and flattering lighting on Karajan’s face. I don’t know of any other maestro personally ordering this ritual.”6

Now, as marketing departments have proliferated, millions of dollars in orchestra budgets and staff salaries go into creating excitement around the maestros of American symphony orchestras. Previously, this was done by record companies and personal press agents. Many conductors are discovered in their twenties, and if the machine grabs them, they find their faces on magazine covers, sitting on a chair next to a late-night television host, and giving interviews in nonmusical journals. Referring to Michael Tilson Thomas, The New York Times asked, on the cover of its Sunday magazine, “The Next Bernstein?” Michael also found himself answering the otherwise well-informed Dick Cavett’s questions about how it was different to conduct the “Boston Philharmonic” and the “New York Symphony” (meaning the Boston Symphony and the New York Philharmonic) and questions about Haydn’s music, with Cavett mispronouncing the composer’s name. If Cavett had made such errors with a sports figure, he probably would have had his talk show cancelled the next morning. Michael endured early fame, generated by his undeniable talent and success, as well as the fascination of the public. Others do not survive, and since a conductor’s career lasts a lifetime, as I’ve said, the dangers of early fame are not unlike those for child actors.

Fans, like orchestras, can be loyal and they can be fickle. Tastes change, and fashion can be a cruel arbiter of value. How does a conductor fit into this roiling sea of taste and the desire for something new to compensate for a stationary repertory that is peppered with one-time-only premieres, when, conversely, our art has always been built to withstand ageism, and in many cases age is equated with experience and wisdom? Do we want to hear our Falstaff conducted by a young whippersnapper or by someone closer to Verdi’s age when he composed it (seventy-nine)? The great British actor Anthony Hopkins pointed out that when he played King Lear on the stage he was too young. “The irony is that when you are old enough to play these parts, you are actually too old!”7

The experience of a great performance puts the audience in an equal partnership with the performers. When the audience becomes a single entity, it, like the orchestra, becomes a tribal force. When it is a united adversarial force, it can be terrifying. In 1964, the audience in Parma for a performance of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera was so negative that it made for a mention in Time magazine, especially because the American baritone Cornell MacNeil went to the edge of the stage and shouted, “Basta, cretini!” (“Enough, you cretins!”) at the unruly crowd.

In April 1985 I was in Milan to conduct four performances of Turandot, with a major change of cast occurring halfway through the series and with a less than stellar cast. Everything changed, however, when we learned that Prince Charles and Princess Diana were to attend the third performance, not as private citizens but as the Prince and Princess of Wales—the first official visit to La Scala ever by the British monarchy.

The stars decided that they would sing the first performance and then sing the third performance—which they were not scheduled to sing—skipping the second one so they could rest their voices. La Scala, of course, wanted to put its best artistic foot forward for the prince and princess and so agreed to this new arrangement. The problem was to find someone—anyone—willing to sing performance two. The cast that had been contracted for performances three and four refused to give up performance three and sing performance two, which they saw as a humiliation, but would let La Scala pay them not to sing the contracted third performance, and then join the production just for the fourth and last.

I was called in to hear a soprano, who auditioned for performance two with the terrifying aria I mentioned earlier. It was not very good, but La Scala’s experienced and practical artistic director, Cesare Mazzonis, decided that there was no other option. He assured me there would be no demonstration against her, because he would “take care of the claque.”

The claque is a tradition that goes back to imperial Rome, though the word comes from the French and is onomatopoetic for the sound of applause: claque! The claque is a group of people who are given free tickets (or, in some cases, are paid) to applaud at a performance. They can also boo if they are not paid or, occasionally, if they are paid more by a competing artist. La Scala kept on good terms with the leader of its claque, and enough money had changed hands so as to ensure no scandal would occur that night.

When I arrived at the opera house for performance number two, I found an enormous bouquet of flowers in the camerino, the conductor’s dressing room. The note that accompanied the beautiful gift said, “Best wishes on your performance tonight. Unfortunately I will be out of the country. Sincerely, Cesare Mazzonis.”

Zero Mostel said that when he was an unemployed actor, producer David Merrick paid him and other out-of-work actors to sit in the audience of his production of The Matchmaker to laugh and applaud, keeping the show alive and prompting the audience to think they were having a good time. Current television watchers are told to laugh with the use of canned laughter and applause. People want to have a good time, and artists like being applauded. It works. Is it ethical? A number of years ago, the LA Philharmonic decided not to paper the house. “Papering” is the word used for giving away free tickets, thus filling the auditorium and creating an impression of success. The effect of having paying customers sitting among empty seats was so devastating to the morale of the orchestra, the audience, and the institution itself that the board reinstated the policy of papering, especially when major critics were in attendance.

Should classical institutions be held to a higher standard than a situation comedy or a game show? The answer might seem to be yes, except that a papered house lends support to the artistic vision of an institution—which, in America at least, is a private institution. It also means that people who might not otherwise attend get a chance to hear a great orchestra play. In classical music there is a schizophrenic attitude toward popular success. On the one hand, it is equated with lowering one’s standards. On the other hand, orchestras also like to point out when a young and interested audience fills its houses, especially when difficult contemporary music is being played. This conflicting attitude toward the public—are the people in the seats the audience or fans?—also applies to judging conductors and the repertory they agree to play. What is equally important, however, is that an audience’s response can be manipulated by factors other than the performance itself.

A conductor of a European orchestra recently told me of an offer by the president of the local government’s arts committee to give his orchestra one million euros per year for five years, provided the orchestra focused on contemporary regional composers. By “contemporary,” this committee president, who was also a composer, meant nontonal “modern” music. The conductor said that if he did that, he would lose his audience, to which the official said, “That’s a good thing, because it would justify the need for government support.”

The legendary Romanian conductor and teacher Sergiu Celibidache (1912–96) refused to release any recordings of his performances, because he felt that without the participation of an audience there was no hope of communicating the kind of transcendence that music demands and deserves. For him, a recording was merely a transcription of the notes. It was only after his death that recordings of his live performances were released. Without the participation of a communal audience, those recordings seem oddly exaggerated and technically unimpressive. His concerts, however, were considered life-changing for those who attended them.

When the audience is on the side of the performing artists, we all participate in what is called a “great performance.” All the elements of the ritual are in sync, and for the duration of that performance there is no such thing as a wrong note or a mistake. In my early years with the Yale Symphony—a totally voluntary ensemble of undergraduates, most of whom were not music majors—I knew that there was not a single student who could stand alone on the stage of the university’s concert hall and play his or her part in Mahler’s Symphony no. 3 properly. But surrounded by colleagues who were also wrestling with their parts and committed to every note they played as well as the notes of the others, and with the collective willpower of twenty-three hundred classmates in the audience, they perfectly communicated Mahler’s overwhelming genius and intent to all, like athletes energized by their fans.

In this live performance environment, everyone is performing and holding each other together. Yes, someone can miss a note or make an unwanted squeak or cough. The doors of the auditorium are closed and sealed by a tribal consciousness. A universe has been created and nothing and no one can disrupt the titanic power of orchestra, especially when the audience becomes part of it.

This is the hoped-for primordial celebration: presenting a great work of invisible art—music—in which the conductor acts as the lightning rod of energy shifting between those making the sounds and those listening to them. The audience is the essential element. Without it, music is inert. With it, music fulfills its reason to exist: It becomes a transactional experience.

THE RELATIONSHIP WITH THE CRITICS

“I don’t see how a person can cut off his own head,” says Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner, in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado. “A man might try,” offers the always-helpful Pooh-Bah. That, inevitably, is what goes through an artist’s mind when taking on critics and exploring one’s relationship to them. A former manager once advised me, “Never get into a pissing contest with a critic. You will only get wet.” And yet, since so much of our reputation is built on written assessments, and those assessments absolutely affect whether we are re-engaged, and indeed what an audience comes to expect—and even how they perceive what we are doing—I want to address this thorny issue.

In short: good reviews make you feel good and bad reviews make you feel bad. More than anything else, music reviews are emotional responses expressed in intellectual terms, with the goal of achieving objective credibility through implied superiority. For all the talk about music, the effect music has on us is inevitably emotional. Critics are professional audience members who love music, have a gift for writing, receive free tickets, and are paid to write about music and the performance of it. They live off of us, just as we live off of the music others write.

So many artists have already railed against critics—ever since people began writing about something so ephemeral—musical performance—that it is almost impossible to counter their written opinions with anything concrete. Perhaps it is more important to discuss why it is so upsetting for a conductor to be the subject of a bad review, and why a good one sometimes just seems impertinent.

“People want an authority to tell them how to value things, but they choose this authority not based on facts or results. They choose it because it seems authoritative and familiar.” That quotation comes from the 2015 film The Big Short. It more or less sums up why we have critics and commentators—for politics, sports, and the arts.

A conductor is, after all, a critic. We do all the things critics do not have the time or the inclination to pursue. We study each and every work for countless hours. Some of us read all there is to know about the composer, his time, and the conditions under which he composed the music. We have spent our lives learning the analytical techniques that open up the construction and levels of information contained within the frame of the music and adorn its exteriors. We then rehearse with living people, encouraging the very best from them, balancing history with a sense of the contemporary, and we make essential decisions: the decisions every composer expects us to make to present a living document of his intentions. Every composer understands that the very idea of creating music requires that someone will inevitably have to interpret it.

Having someone review our critical performance edition—which is another way of saying “our performance”—who has not done all the above work is, quite simply, annoying. When a critic writes something negative—“too fast,” “too slow,” “too free,” “too rigid”—it comes as a real intrusion, of course, because how can they know better than we do? As individual members of the audience they are as important to us as any other member of the audience. However, they have something the other audience members do not have: a bully pulpit. No one tells a conductor when he begins to study that our work—should we be blessed with the ability and opportunity to perform—will be judged by a stranger who generally knows significantly less than we do and whose words will be read by far more people than attended the concert.

After a concert performance of Aida at the Hollywood Bowl, the critic of the Los Angeles Times wrote a powerfully negative review. The newspaper received many letters of protest and the editors felt they had to publish at least one of them, but also wanted to give balance by publishing a letter that supported its critic. There were none, and so they published a letter from a person who expressed relief that she had not attended the performance, given what she had read in the paper.

When a guest critic for The New York Times reviewed a group of recordings of music by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, he dismissed one of mine, preferring another of the same work (the Symphonic Serenade, op. 39). It may or may not be a better performance, but what he did not seem to know was that the coda of the second movement (the Scherzo) was taken by the preferred conductor at half the speed indicated by the composer—which in fact was the musical joke (scherzo, after all, means “joke” in Italian). This was a fundamental error the critic should have pointed out.

In the same review he referred to the “charming” melody in the first movement as being stolen from Ponchielli’s “Dance of the Hours” from La Gioconda. In fact, except for two intervals among the first eleven in the first phrase, the melody in the Korngold has absolutely nothing to do with the melody of Ponchielli. They are the same two intervals used in Kurt Weill’s “Mack the Knife” and “Surabaya Johnny,” for example, as well as in folk music and countless works from the Renaissance.

These errors escaped scrutiny because few if any of his readers (and certainly not his editor) knew the Korngold work. The tone of the review was authoritative, and it was well written. No reader could demur without having the printed music in hand, or, in the case of the so-called stolen melody, a reasonable sense of the difference between a major second and a minor third. That is why we get so agitated when we are judged and dismissed by an ill-prepared critic. And there is no appeals court.

A conductor’s reputation is built on a number of things, and the adumbration of critical responses is a major component of it. Once upon a time there were thousands of newspapers whose staffs included music critics who reported on and evaluated performances. They were thoroughly trained in music history and in writing. In the past half-century, that number has shrunk dramatically, giving those who remain a greater power as arbiters, even as readership and interest have also declined. As recently as my 1983 London operatic debut, there were seven daily reviews and seven Sunday reviews in the London press.

Certain critics were always deemed more important than others. Eduard Hanslick in Vienna was perhaps the most important music critic during the second half of the nineteenth century, so important that Wagner responded to his criticism by creating a character in his opera Die Meistersinger that is modeled on his supercilious anti-Wagnerian conservatism. Wagner turned his chief critic into a buffoon, the subject of derisive laughter even today, more than a century after those damning reviews were published.

The man who followed Hanslick at the Neue Freie Presse was Julius Korngold. This created an awkward situation for his genius son, Erich. At first, Julius was accused of ghostwriting the music of his child, to which Julius responded that if he could write music like that, he wouldn’t be a music critic. Things only got worse for young Erich: those who played his music were accused of currying favor with his father, and those who didn’t, bore the brunt of the elder Korngold’s critical wrath, which also diminished Erich’s standing as a composer. Surely this is the most ironic example of an artist’s relationship with a professional critic.

While Wagner composed the most fully formed response to bad reviews, musicians rarely enter the fray. Bernstein did it only once, and regretted it because it gave the critic some form of credibility. Paul Henry Lang was the chief music critic of the New York Herald Tribune from 1954 to 1964, a period that overlapped Bernstein’s tenure as music director of the New York Philharmonic. Like Harold C. Schonberg of the Times, Lang was a strongly negative critic of Bernstein’s work.

Lang had written a review of Maria Callas at the Metropolitan Opera in 1958 that profoundly angered Bernstein, who had been present at her performance. Lang wrote that Callas had sung flat, whereas, according to Bernstein, she—like most great singers—had sung sharp. Audiences rarely complain about sharp intonation, whereas flat intonation is easily perceived and rejected as sour. Bernstein pointed out that a music critic who cannot hear the difference between flat and sharp is perhaps ill equipped to judge music at all, since music is, fundamentally, a series of notes that go either up or down. Lang’s reputation diminished significantly as a result, but he wasn’t fired.

The challenge of being a music critic in a daily journal is immense, practically impossible. Can a music critic properly assess a performance without intimately knowing the music beforehand—understanding it, analyzing it, and then attending a performance? And what critic has the time, especially with a deadline looming?

I once asked a music critic in Berlin what he thought the function of a music critic was, to which he responded, “To report on what is taking place.” Instead, a critic seems more likely to write in terms of what he wishes had happened—what he likes and the way he likes it. In that sense music criticism is a form of autobiography.

A review in The New York Times on May 13, 2016, is a good case in point. Conductor John Storgårds made his debut with the New York Philharmonic and the paper published a highly positive review of his work with the orchestra, giving special praise for his interpretation of Sibelius’s Second Symphony because “Mr. Storgårds emphasized the discontinuities and jarring turns of the music, as well as the piercing shards of dissonance that Sibelius folds into his deceptively sonorous harmonic language.” In other words, the critic praised the performance for illuminating the score’s modern and forward-looking elements rather than the natural and organic process of the work itself, in which Sibelius achieved his most successful and popular symphony.

The aesthetic criterion of discontinuity was part of the manifesto of the avant-garde announced in the early years of the twentieth century. In its view, once the public embraces a new work of art, it no longer has any value. Showing popular composers such as Sibelius, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky as revolutionaries makes their music palatable and welcomed into the overall concept of a provocative and never-ending avant-garde—an idea that remains fixed for most “serious” music critics. It is the way they want to hear all twentieth-century music, by highlighting a work’s jarring and dissonant elements—and perhaps you do, too. Is Sibelius an extension of Tchaikovsky—a charge that was frequently leveled at him when I was a boy—or was he a proto-modernist who depicted alienation in the fast-changing twentieth century? A conductor can point to either, or both.

Occasionally a critic will point to the failings of historical critics of the past. But mostly, if they need to quote other conclusions, it will be from like-minded colleagues, as a supposedly objective and authoritative way of bolstering their own point of view and their own conclusions. The great challenge for anyone in evaluating those conclusions is that today there are fewer writers who draw them. Additionally, they seem to have a similar mind-set, derived from the political/aesthetic battles to define classical music in the twentieth century. We rarely, if ever, read a minority report that might just represent a large segment—perhaps a majority—of readers who care about classical music. This would never happen in editorial or feature writings about politics, athletics, or other, more tangible, art forms.

Visual art is assessed and reassessed all the time. What was once called kitsch suddenly is re-evaluated as great art. Virtually unknown painters receive retrospectives, and the public (and critics) come to alternative and interesting conclusions. Music is unable to participate in this healthy reexamination unless it is played. You cannot hang a symphony on the wall. Performances disappear within a half-second of the final cutoff. Who is to counter a printed opinion of the performance or of the work that has just vanished into thin air?

Any conductor who chooses to champion music that is out of fashion, as Paul Hindemith did with pre-baroque music while he taught at Yale (1940–1953), or Riccardo Muti, as music director of the Chicago Symphony, does with Italian orchestral music of the early twentieth century, must have institutional protection, since audiences have become wary of anything new and unknown, and managements need to sell tickets. Critics require an education, too, and sometimes a conductor’s personal touch can help encourage a reassessment of the composer in question. When Muti learned that The New York Times was covering a concert of his in Chicago, he personally invited its chief music critic, Anthony Tommasini, to come backstage to discuss the composer Giuseppe Martucci (1856–1909), whose music he had just performed. A sympathetic and interested critic can be charmed and educated by a persuasive maestro, and both Martucci and Muti were warmly received in the pages of America’s newspaper of record on October 2, 2016. (“Riccardo Muti, Indulging a Passion for Overlooked Italian Composers” was the headline.)

I have, on occasion, written an explanation to prepare the audience and critics that the various aberrations in realizing a performance text were both intentional and based on research and a certain amount of intuition. For the 1985 English National Opera’s revival of Jonathan Miller’s production of Rigoletto, I made use of the then-newly published critical edition of Verdi’s score, edited by Martin Chusid and published by the University of Chicago Press in conjunction with the great Italian music publishing house Ricordi.

Like most music lovers, I grew up hearing Rigoletto. I was, of course, hearing what we call “traditional” performances—traditions, it should be said, that more or less coalesced in the era of recordings. That means our expectations are based on interpretations that emerged in the 1930s, not in 1851, when Verdi composed Rigoletto. The new edition looked just like the Rigoletto I knew, except for the metronome markings. At many places in the score, the music was indicated to be either slower or faster than anything I had ever heard before.

Chusid explained that these were indeed Verdi’s markings—there was a good deal of documentation that supported Verdi’s absolute insistence on their importance—and suggested I try them. I felt a certain fear, because I was returning to London, where I had had a series of successes with the public and the critics. This was not going to be a new production with all the attendant fanfare in the press, and there was no symposium on the London premiere of the new edition. In fact, the only thing that differed from previous seasons—even the cast was the same—was the brand-new score I was carrying with me on the plane.

Something emerged from that score that would change the way some people view Verdi. The numbers that indicate the speed of the pulse were constructed in architectural ways. The tempo that ends act 1 is exactly the same as the opening tempo of act 2, as if to bring the audience back into the story where they left off, and it is a tempo that otherwise did not exist until the linkage moment. There is a repeating tempo of 63 beats per minute that starts act 1, scene 1, and then starts act 1, scene 2. This same pulse returns at important structural moments, showing the opera to be like a building Verdi had constructed using units of time. However, these are not the traditional speeds that I, and all audience members, had been used to.

Arriving in London with my pocket metronome, I spent most of the rehearsal period saying things like “That’s great. You know, Verdi actually suggested this be a good deal slower.” The English singers were pliant and interested. In each case they found it easier to sing their roles at Verdi’s tempos, and slowly but surely we re-created the temporal world envisioned by the composer.

When I asked if I could write a little “note from the conductor” in the ENO program, the music director, Mark Elder, ultimately understood that this would be of interest to the public and the critics.

The opening night performance of Rigoletto was deemed a success by the London critics, who had been prepared by the published note, and a major discovery, leading to more research and revelation. The rest of the story, however, says a great deal about the ephemeral nature of live performance. The next year, another conductor took over the production. A positive review in one London paper referred to his tempos as “pre-Maucerian.” When I brought Verdi with me to the Italian summer opera festival at Macerata, the local paper’s headline said it all: “Rigoletto at Macerata: But Where Was Verdi?”

An opening-night good-luck card emended by a cast member at the English National Opera, for the London premiere of the critical edition of Rigoletto, January 11, 1985

This Rigoletto did not sound like the critic’s record. It also did not help that most critics see the issue of tempo as being part of a conductor’s interpretive rights, and not subject to the question of “doing what it says.” Changing the notes or rhythms in a piece of music risks general condemnation, but ignoring specific requirements of tempo is, oddly, absolutely fine. In fact, mentioning a metronome is viewed as somehow unmusical, even when it is a fundamental part of a work’s construction.

We conductors, I’ve tried to make clear, have the opportunity to illuminate only certain aspects of a piece of music. Once we have determined what is important to highlight, we generally are critical when we hear other conductors make very different decisions. If I have determined that Verdi based the construction—both micro and macro—of La traviata on a theme—first heard in the opera’s prelude—that descends for six notes and continuously gets softer (diminuendo), and then Riccardo Muti adds a gigantic crescendo when that figure appears in the middle of act 2, it confounds me. When that same figure is performed under Georg Solti in the prelude as a crescendo followed by a diminuendo, rather than Verdi’s clear indication of a heartbreaking and sweet movement toward silence, I shake my head in disbelief. How could someone so great be so completely “wrong”? How could the clear indications of the composer be ignored? Obviously, what is important—indeed, essential—to me was not for them, or for the critics who found much to admire in their interpretations.

While it is tempting, sometimes, to view critics as the enemy, it is both wrong-headed and unhelpful. However, if a local critic takes it upon himself to constantly attack the music director of the local symphony orchestra or opera company, it becomes progressively more difficult for the institution to function. Critics in smaller cities sometimes act as cheerleaders for their local institutions, while others want to prove how internationally knowledgeable they are, hating the fact that they do not live in a major city, and question the reputation of any maestro who agrees to perform in his city: “If you’re so good, what are you doing here?” It was a healthy splash of very cold water to read that my performances of Verdi’s La forza del destino were so disappointing in Glasgow when that same opera served as my London debut a few years before and garnered fourteen very positive reviews. But, as is often said, if you believe the good ones, you have to believe the bad ones, too.

In countries where government support of the arts is a fact of life and newspapers are known for their overt political bent, music criticism can be something of a political weapon. In Turin, where I was the first (and as of this writing, the last) American to serve as music director of any Italian opera house, I frequently attempted to make sense of the wildly disparate critical assessments of my performances by linking the political position of the newspaper to the way my performances were described. The leftist paper La Repubblica never thought much of me, whereas I was really excellent for the centrist-liberal paper, La Stampa, and—well, you get the point, even though I was surely kidding myself. (“One good, one bad, and one in the middle,” my assistant Marcello Sirotti told me after the papers reviewed our Madama Butterfly. “Take your pick!”)

When I was just starting out, I conducted a new production of Mozart’s Così fan tutte at the Santa Fe Opera. The Albuquerque newspaper critic thought it was the slowest Così he had ever heard. A San Francisco critic thought it was the fastest he had heard, and one month later, when Opera News came out, its critic declared that “the production benefited from the perfect tempos of John Mauceri.” Each critic was, of course, correct.

It is difficult to determine why certain excellent conductors are targets and others are darlings. Why was Zubin Mehta a “jet set conductor” but Valery Gergiev a “missionary” conductor, travelling the world, selflessly bringing music everywhere? Mehta once said that he loved flying because the phone never rang and he could study his scores in peace. That very reasonable statement somehow dogged him until his last days as music director of the New York Philharmonic and labeled him as superficial. Perhaps it had to do with his success in Los Angeles (“Tinsel Town”) before coming to New York, and his comment made after guest-conducting the New York orchestra that the LA Philharmonic was better. In any case, the East Coast critical establishment made a collective decision: Zubin was a glitzy and shallow musician, while Gergiev, later on, was a profound patriarch of art. In the New York Times obituary (December 19, 2015) for Kurt Masur, Margalit Fox wrote that Mehta was “responsible for the artistic decline” of the New York Philharmonic, and was “seen as purveying flash and dazzle at the expense of deep musical meaning.” And yet, in Milan, Mehta was praised in 2016 for an “inspired [and] profound” performance of Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier.

Occasionally, a conductor receives only positive notices. This can happen at the end of long careers, but occasionally it happens right from the start, as is the case with Gustavo Dudamel. The consistently positive relationship between Tommasini and the work of James Levine probably exists on the outer edge of that sliding scale of approbation. Levine received uniformly glowing notices in the Times even when he did not conduct, as was true for a performance of a string quartet played by members of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra on December 15, 2015. The same critic held the opposite view of the late Lorin Maazel, who could seemingly do nothing right when he was music director of the New York Philharmonic.

What it says, to me at least, is that Levine’s performances had a natural directionality, coupled with the highest standard of technical proficiency that clearly was the way Tommasini likes his music, and that Maazel’s stretching of tempos and insertion of “the self” was just annoying to him. And no matter what was written about these two men, they are two of the greatest conductors of their era.

There is an element of public humiliation in getting a bad review. For twenty-four hours you feel like you are locked in a stockade in Salem, Massachusetts, for all to pass by and cluck. My “mixed” review from Martin Bernheimer after my professional orchestral debut with the Los Angeles Philharmonic was, I subsequently learned, posted on the bulletin board in the Yale Music Library for all to see. A few years later, I was talking to Michael Tilson Thomas about Bernheimer, and Michael told me he had read my review. “My mother sent it to me,” he said. There is simply no way of escaping a bad review. As Douglas Adams correctly pointed out in his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.”

Critics can undermine our confidence. This has been noted in the lives of composers who after receiving scathing reviews withdrew from composing. This was true of Samuel Barber after the universal drubbing he received for his Antony and Cleopatra in 1966; for Cole Porter after he wrote Aladdin for television in 1958; and for Leonard Bernstein after A Quiet Place in 1983. A conductor is equally vulnerable, and a lack of confidence is the virus that is always lurking within his system. As Tilson Thomas once said, “No one knows how bad you are better than yourself.”

Just before my debut at the Metropolitan Opera in 1976, the Met orchestra was threatening to go on strike. That meant I rehearsed the opera and conducted the open dress rehearsal without knowing if I would conduct an actual performance. After the dress rehearsal, it was reported to me that an announcer on New York’s major classical music station WQXR had attended the rehearsal and went on air to announce that he did not know who the conductor was, but that “a star has been born.”

The Met resolved its labor dispute, and two nights later I made my debut. My family was in attendance, and it was a source of immense pride that the grandson of four immigrants, one of whom had been a conductor of hotel orchestras and a violin teacher, was conducting at the Met.

The first review appeared in the New York Post the next afternoon. I did not read it but called my manager and asked if it was good. “No,” he said. That night at a cocktail party, I was the model of cool when asked, “How did last night go?” I said, “Great, but I hear [Post critic] Harriett Johnson didn’t much care for it.” “Yeah,” was the response. “And the headline!” I smiled, and my wife and I looked at each other and mouthed, “The headline!”

My parents never mentioned what it was like for them, for their neighbors and friends, for my teachers, to have that moment in my life—the cheering audience, the graciousness of Gwyneth Jones and tenor Jess Thomas, the support of the great German stage director Otto Schenk (“I have done Fidelio with Bernstein and Böhm and I don’t miss them a bit!”)—reported as a disaster. The review actually pointed out what a great performance it was in spite of the conductor. (This, if you have been reading thus far, is actually impossible.) The other reviews were positive, and at least one was even thoughtful. It was years before I could summon the courage to read the Post review. The headline? “Beethoven Survives Mauceri.”

January 2, 1976, opening night of Fidelio at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, my debut there. From left to right: John Macurdy, Judith Blegen, me, Gwyneth Jones, Jess Thomas, Donald McIntyre, and James Morris.

For me to enter the pit of the opera house I had been attending since the night it opened in 1966 and know that many in the audience “knew” I was unworthy was a heavy burden. There were ten more performances that season. They were all sold out, and each ended with a standing ovation. Sometimes an earlier standing ovation would come in the middle of the second act after the orchestra’s performance of the Leonore Overture no. 3, which was interpolated into the production. This, of course, made me feel competent again. But as soon as I removed my tails and put on my street clothes, I knew that in a few days I would have to start all over again, with that same dreadful feeling in the pit of my stomach.

Harriett Johnson believed she had the inside story on me. Her informants had decided that I was Leonard Bernstein’s lover and that’s why I was conducting Fidelio at the Met. Believing that, she was determined to punish me and everyone who was a part of this nasty secret. In those days, whenever I read a review that mentioned my hair, I knew I was in trouble. She called me “a Titian-haired Adonis.” And if Beethoven survived Mauceri, it should also be said that Mauceri survived Johnson, but just barely.

Johnson got more than one thing wrong about me, but critics, as I’ve said, generally judge a performance from the point of view of their expectations, which, like audiences’, can be manipulated. The unique qualities in what they are actually hearing, rather than what they were expecting, can be seen as a revelation, as a curiosity, or as incompetence. The assessment of interpretation is as much influenced by fashion as anything else. Sir Thomas Beecham’s Messiah would be unacceptable for today’s critics, with its reorchestration by Eugene Goossens, immense choral forces, and operatic soloists. Indeed, it might be difficult to get good notices for the highly cut version of Cherubini’s Medea as Callas and Bernstein performed it in 1953.

Clarity, nonemotionality, intellectual prowess, and an ability with complex contemporary music—even if the music being performed predated the very concept of “modern”—were criteria that pervaded much of the evaluation of conductors in the late twentieth century, and they still pertain today. Igor Stravinsky best expressed this interpretation of music and its function by claiming in 1960 that his Rite of Spring, composed in 1913, was not “a picture postcard of ancient Russia.” In other words, his ballet was not a descriptive tone poem. Good music in the postwar era in Western Europe and in American universities was not about anything. It was purely music. This proved awkward for the aging Stravinsky who always wanted to be the most avant of the avant-garde, and found himself the composer whose fundamental fame rested on a work that had a specific title and a scenario about prehistoric tribal behavior, abduction, and the ritual death dance of a virgin as a coronation of the goddess of spring.

Stravinsky’s solution was to say it wasn’t what it was. He insisted on performing it with an inflexibility that gave it a machinelike detachment and thereby encouraged the work’s continued validation, one that made it, in 1960, both a relevant musical equivalent of nonrepresentational art and a prescient harbinger, from 1913, of modern music. It is therefore not surprising that critics who believed in this performance concept also supported conductors who continued on this path of interpretation for even older works. Some outliers suggested that the vibrato-free performances of baroque and early romantic music that were so highly touted in the second half of the twentieth century were more of the same aesthetic principle applied backward in time, making even the most highly descriptive works, like Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, sound cerebral and sterile. The conductor who thus became the ideal interpreter of The Rite was Pierre Boulez, representing the young post–World War II musicians who then inspired the same non-narrative—dare one say, non-pictorial?—interpretations of Esa-Pekka Salonen and David Robertson, both acolytes of Boulez.

The nonprogrammatic interpretation of pre-twentieth-century music reached an ironic climax when it was applied to the most proto-cinematic composer of all time, Richard Wagner, who in his lifetime was accused by his critics of composing scenery rather than music. When Wagner’s two grandsons, Wieland and Wolfgang, reopened the Bayreuth Festival in the early 1950s, they removed the old scenic concept that Wagner had created for his operas. No longer were there painted forests on the stage. More important, Wagner’s staging and the very specific movements that coincided with his music were also generally removed, making the operas less specific in time and less specific in physical synchronization.

The 1896 Bayreuth set design by Max Brückner for act 1 of Die Walküre.

The 1960 Bayreuth set design by Wolfgang Wagner for act 1 of Die Walküre. The color of springtime and the central ash tree remain, but the world it depicts floats in space and the circle that represents the magic ring has symbolically broken into two half-circles.

All of this was revelatory in the 1950s and 1960s, but there was a persistent problem for the young Wagner brothers (but not the public). Many of the conductors who had played or studied with the very first interpreters of these scores were still leading the music in a highly emotional and pictorial way. Even when the pictures on the stage were more generalized, they were still epic, dramatic, and breathtakingly beautiful. But when Wieland decided to ask Pierre Boulez to conduct at Bayreuth, he said he had found his ideal collaborator. Indeed, Boulez completed what one might call the de-cinematization of Wagner, to general—though not unanimous—critical acclaim.

Music and its performance practices are always changing. We hold on to some things and jettison others. Critics come to support or reject these changes; and in the case of the removal of the narrative from narrative music, this has been one of the major changes in performance history. Making Wagner an eternal revolutionary, with shocking visualizations and productions of The Ring in which human love and the love of nature are missing—not unlike Stravinsky’s reinvention of his Rite—may end up compromising the composer, his music, and his unifying aesthetic.

This is the fundamental reason we have a difficult time accepting negative reviews and other conductors’ performances. We will have already gone through a difficult and strenuous process, and come to different conclusions, much as an actor will play Hamlet in an entirely different way from another actor, even as they are both speaking the same words. Occasionally, we do experience unexpected pleasure when a colleague surprises us with insights never imagined. This is when our respect is both natural and totally honest. In general, however, that respect is reserved for our mentors.

Of my mentors, Bernstein remains an “active” personality in the classical-music world. It naturally comes as a surprise that, as I pointed out earlier, he was the constant target of both The New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune during his tenure as music director of the New York Philharmonic. His weekly series would open on a Thursday night and, as he said, “every week I would read how terrible I was as I ate my breakfast. And then I would go to the Friday matinee, knowing that everyone in the audience had read how bad I was before they heard a note of the program.”

Did that affect Bernstein’s career? Of course it did. It meant he had to find a greater critical assessment that could supersede the New York critics’ dim view of him as a serious artist; otherwise his “value” would drop significantly. Yes, he was a television personality, and was adored by some members of the New York audience, though it was Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra whose recordings were the biggest-selling classical records in the United States. There was tremendous resistance to him—his vulgarity, his Jewishness, his unbridled embrace of life, his just-too-much-ness—a composer of Broadway shows who also was writing symphonies, a conductor, a pianist, a loquacious tour guide of high culture with a patrician Boston accent who wanted to be called “Lenny.” What consolidated the narrative and gave him the credibility he lacked in high places came from the perfect place: the City of Music itself. And once Vienna declared its love for him (and who can begin to understand what was at play there—anti-Karajan-ism, “proof” that the Vienna Philharmonic was not anti-Semitic, relief to have an American conductor who was so in love with them and their history, or just plain talent) America and Harvard took note. Deutsche Grammophon wanted to rerecord Beethoven’s nine symphonies with Bernstein and his bona fides were firmly established, transforming the once young and brash American who championed American music into a wise international maestro of the central repertory of Europe—who also happened to have composed West Side Story. The European critics lauded him, and soon after, a new generation of American music critics concurred.

Herbert von Karajan died on July 16, 1989. For 455 days, Bernstein was without question the greatest conductor in the world—until his death on October 14, 1990.

The reality is, even when you are the best, it never settles down.

THE RELATIONSHIP WITH THE OWNERS AND MANAGEMENT

Even though conductors can lead only when we are invited to lead, there is always the question of what music we are allowed to lead and who owns and controls access to it. Most of the music we conduct—the standard repertory—is in the public domain, which means everyone owns it. It is performed without incurring fees for the composers and their estates. But ownership is not always about copyright. Sometimes it has to do with a conductor’s “trademark.”

The idea of a conductor “owning” someone else’s music is very much part of the marketing of a maestro. In 2004, after thirteen seasons leading the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, my colleagues and I created a program built around the Joffrey Ballet’s restorations of Vaslav Nijinsky’s 1912 production of Afternoon of a Faun and his historic original production of The Rite of Spring that premiered in Paris the following year. The weekend was all set until a message came down from the Los Angeles Philharmonic administration that The Rite belonged to Esa-Pekka Salonen, and therefore we would not be allowed to perform it. Since the LA Phil has the exclusive rights to the Bowl and also controls the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, this was perfectly within their control. Although The Rite had not been performed at the Bowl for eight years and there were no plans to perform it in the future, no amount of arguing could change the decision. It was not personal, I should say. I had, after all, made my debut with the Philharmonic conducting The Rite and had recently conducted it with the London Symphony Orchestra, and certainly Esa-Pekka had no say in the matter. It was about creating the musical universe in which Salonen was to be the supreme interpreter during his tenure as music director of the Philharmonic. It would become part of his trademark.

The Bowl Orchestra, on the other hand, was being repositioned from being an orchestra that played the entire repertory of orchestral music—opera, symphonies, contemporary works by György Ligeti, John Adams, and Peter Maxwell Davies as well as film music—into a pops orchestra, and replaced the entire program with a “greatest hits” all-Russian concert that included act 2 of The Nutcracker. As a conductor, my job was to commit as totally to the “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” as I would have to the “Danse sacrale.” This had been one of the first lessons taught me by Gustav Meier when, as a twenty-year-old student, I complained that my debut with the Yale Symphony was to be with two Verdi bass arias with their simple accompaniment. “Mach gute Miene zum bösen Spiel,” he said—make the best of a bad situation. Never were more important words said to me. Indeed, I made those two arias my world and never regretted it for a moment.

André Previn told me that his first opportunity to score and conduct a complete motion picture came when he was nineteen years old. The “stunningly bad” picture, The Sun Comes Up, starred the unlikely trio of Jeanette MacDonald, Lloyd Nolan, and Lassie. His total commitment to the project led him to ultimately win four Academy Awards (for Gigi, Porgy and Bess, Irma la Douce, and My Fair Lady) and become one of the most important musicians of the twentieth century.

Repertory is controlled by many elements, and our relationship with those who own the music is like a relationship with a Cerberus at the gates: some are let through while others are kept out. That cannot determine how we do our job. We must always understand that the black dots and lines on the page, the music, are merely an invitation into something bigger and more profound than the sound they make. We can achieve the mysterious “great performance” with many kinds of music. Under certain circumstances, usually involving the conductor, serious-sounding music can be surprisingly trivial whereas simple music can prove to be a transcendent experience. Repertory is ultimately in the hands of the administration of artistic institutions. The Los Angeles Philharmonic is a private institution, and it can play whatever it likes and assign it to whomever it wants. Internally, it has to decide what is best for the institution. Those decisions are enormously complicated, and survival is uppermost: maintaining the public image of a vital, committed, and successful organization while constantly getting conflicting advice from board members, critics, and members of the audience, and keeping the ship afloat. Rarely did I ever feel I had a boss during my sixteen summers at the Hollywood Bowl, but clearly I did.

Like so much in our mysterious and illogical field, music owns us, in the same sense that the land owns the farmer. Some conductors find great fame in being a specifist, which means concentrating on a very limited repertory and becoming “experts” at performing it. Nikolaus Harnoncourt, for example, focused on the music of the baroque era and caused a sensation when he and Gustav Leonhardt set out to record Bach’s 193 sacred cantatas with a small, all-male chorus and male soloists (except for the two cantatas that Bach wrote for a female voice) and on period instruments. He became the go-to person for this repertory. From this position of strength, he gradually expanded his reach into the classical period, and wound up addressing a bit of Bruckner and even recording a highly idiosyncratic Porgy and Bess shortly before his death.

While some conductors can carve out a niche for themselves, most are semi-generalists, in that they are expected to give convincingly authoritative performances of music from Haydn to contemporary works. But you are what you eat, and a conductor is what he conducts. Sadly, the classical world is a world of rigid snobberies, especially when it comes to the great divide: “popular” versus “serious.”

Once a conductor agrees to conduct popular music (sometimes incorrectly called “commercial” music; after all, music has, almost without exception, provided an income for the composer), it becomes a major effort to maintain any vestige of serious bona fides. In the world of high culture, it can be summed up as follows: pop art, yes; pop music, no. Once you have been declared a pops conductor, you can kiss your Beethoven and Shostakovich goodbye forever. You are seen as someone without profundity, someone willing to compromise his art for the money. The fact that classical conductors, in general, earn far more money than pops conductors comes as a surprise to most people.

And while some conductors are seen to be the owners of certain repertory, in the metaphorical sense, much music is actually owned under copyright laws that protect it and require payments for the right to perform it. Sometimes the owner is the composer himself. Other times it is his heirs. Music-publishing houses will rent a composer’s catalogue, and in other cases an orchestra can buy the score and a set of parts and use it whenever it wishes. Surprisingly, there is music that remains under copyright but unpublished, like much of the music of Duke Ellington and George Gershwin. Music composed for films is owned by the studios and not the composer. A conductor who wishes to perform any of the above music has to be willing to do a lot more than simply purchase a score and learn it. Orchestras also must agree to greater expenses in order to present this music.

The relationship of a conductor with managers is equally complex. There are two kinds of managements: the managers of artistic institutions and the conductor’s manager, who negotiates contracts, represents the artist’s interests, and is paid on a percentage basis from the fees the conductor earns. Because operas take up so much time in preparation, opera contracts are usually commissioned at 10 percent, whereas orchestral-concert performances are commissioned at 15 percent. If a conductor is not a music director and wants publicity, he hires a publicist, who is usually paid on a retainer. The overhead is enormous. During the years just after the Berlin Wall fell, all artists who performed in Germany had German taxes withheld from our paychecks as well as a “Unification” tax. Once, after these fees and the costs of management commissions (Europe and America) had been subtracted, my wife said to me, “You have to stop working. We can’t afford it.”

Management lives off of our salaries, after all, and they must believe in us. They have to “manage” us and our expectations, while hoping to earn enough from their highest-paid music directors, their touring projects, and whatever else is an income source in order to sustain their company. Once upon a time, managers like former Columbia Artists CEO Ronald Wilford could exert an enormous pressure on orchestras and opera companies to hire certain conductors because he also represented so many singers and soloists. With Wilford’s death in 2015, those days are over.

Managements of artistic institutions are the other side of this equation. After they engage a conductor, they must decide if he or she will be reinvited. The backroom discussions are part of the dark matter of which we conductors know nothing. Music directors are frequently uncomfortable with the success of a guest conductor: a new rival has emerged! The orchestra members fill out their evaluation forms, which are never made public.

Occasionally, conductors will offer to swap guest appearances with their orchestra with other music directors. Some conductors are supported by governments that want the prestige of one of their own holding an important position in another country. Some are supported within their country as part of its cultural heritage. Some private companies make arrangements with orchestras to support the salary of the conductor. It is not necessarily a meritocracy.

The managers of the artistic institutions always work in conjunction with their musicians. Once a productive relationship is established with the institution’s management, a conductor can look forward to years of collaboration and work. However, once management changes, it is highly likely that a conductor’s relationship with the institution will end, since the new people want to bring in new artistic voices. Gustav Mahler came to New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 1908 having been drummed out of Vienna by a virulent anti-Semitic cabal. One year later the head of Milan’s La Scala, Giulio Gatti-Casazza, was appointed to lead the Met, replacing the Austrian-trained Heinrch Conried. When Mahler learned that his younger rival Arturo Toscanini was going to conduct a new production of Tristan und Isolde at the Met, he was upset: Tristan, which had been a great triumph for him, was “his.” He also knew that having Toscanini conduct the same opera a mere eight and a half months after his own last performance of it, and with new sets and costumes, would inevitably diffuse his personal relationship with the work and, therefore, his reputation. Toscanini conducted Tristan on November 27, 1909, and Mahler once again migrated. This time it was from the Met’s home on Thirty-ninth Street to Carnegie Hall on Fifty-seventh Street and the New York Philharmonic.

And you thought conducting was about knowing the music. It is, of course. It also has to do with knowing the score.