Chapter 7

Who’s in Charge?

Of all the images of a conductor as a supreme leader of symphonic music, none is more memorable than those of Leopold Stokowski in the 1940 animated feature Fantasia, released by Walt Disney. During the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth, there actually were cartoons and caricatures of conductors—usually composers, including Beethoven, Wagner, Strauss, and Mahler. These images were sometimes silhouettes, but Fantasia’s were different. They were not in a magazine or a newspaper you held in your hand. They were on a giant movie screen and bigger than reality, and the sounds of the music emanated from speaker systems placed around the theater in discrete multichannel pre-stereophonic sound called “Fantasound.”

As the film begins, the Philadelphia Orchestra is seen entering a specially designed set. The background is an opalescent blue, and the musicians are in silhouette. As they begin to warm up, various instruments briefly light up, as if their sound were creating little bursts of color. A commentator, Deems Taylor, in white tie and tails, introduces the concept of the picture—and then we see the maestro.

Stokowski climbs a specially designed rostrum, his back to us. All is silent except for the sound of his footfalls. He and the stairs are jet black and the cyclorama toward which he walks is blue, with vague images of two harps, a music stand, and a few players. He, however, has no music stand, and he towers over all below him. His arms widen to embrace the invisible orchestra. Slowly turning from right to left, he achieves a full profile of his handsome face and baton-less hands. He reaches upward, and when his hands come down there is music—a pink-gel spotlight illuminates his face and hands—and for a few seconds he becomes three-dimensional.

Cutting off the violins, the lights go out. He turns to the right and repeats the gesture. This time, the woodwinds play, and the maestro’s face and hands are suddenly green, until the cutoff, when, as expected, the light on him goes out. Finally, his back to us, he gives the upbeat for the cellos and basses, which (we assume) are somewhere in front of him. This time, his head and arms, lighted from the front, have a passionate red glow. As the music proceeds, a celestial orb emerges before him, as if invoked by his movements. Let there be light, and there was light. The light, in this case, has been invoked by the music of Bach, and that music was commanded by the gestures of a conductor.

It is irrelevant that Stokowski was not actually standing before the orchestra, nor was he conducting. He was acting to the playback of a recording he had made with the orchestra when he had his score in front of him. What matters is the image of his being totally in charge of the music, the musicians, and the universe itself.

Even the conceptual art that preceded the filming of Fantasia had this narrative as its goal: an all-powerful, elegant, and masculine dominator is in charge. The preproduction chalk images show an extended body of a humanoid alien, with unnaturally long arms, a pencil-thin body with a broad torso, and unquestioned authority.

One can only imagine the reaction to this circus act by Otto Klemperer, Fritz Reiner, Pierre Monteux, and Serge Koussevitzky, all of whom were having successful careers in the United States. In those days, only Toscanini could compete with Stokowski’s use of the media, and began weekly live radio broadcasts in 1937 with the NBC Symphony—created just for him. In 1950 those radio concerts became black-and-white television broadcasts, visually countering Stokowski’s colorful Hollywood foray.

Nothing could have been more perfect for the Italian maestro, since his skin was a ghostlike white, as were his hair and mustache. He wore a priestly black suit, not white tie and tails, and all the television public saw was a deeply concentrated face and a pair of white hands, one of which wielded a baton. The crude camera work frequently just focused on him directly from the front, as if the viewers were sitting in the oboe section. His black eyebrows helped outline the myriad of facial expressions that passed over the aged visage of the grand master of the central repertory, who in the war years stood out as a fiercely antifascist political force. His politics and the development of television (and the extraordinary commitment of NBC’s chairman, David Sarnoff, to create the greatest orchestra in the world by offering the highest salary of any orchestra and a fifty-two-week contract) gave Toscanini his last opportunity to seal his legacy as the most authoritative and powerful conductor of the age. And, unlike Stokowski, Toscanini was actually conducting, and his orchestra and singers were performing live. He appeared both demonic and saintly.

Conceptual chalk drawing for the Bach Toccata and Fugue segment of Fantasia

Together, however, Stokowski and Toscanini created a worldwide narrative of the modern conductor. What would Verdi and Schumann have thought of the shows they put on? On the other hand, Herbert von Karajan was clearly inspired by it, as was Leonard Bernstein, even as both had equally enjoyed the extraordinary opportunities afforded them with the development of the long-playing record and stereophonic sound. Together these two rivals would bring the image of being totally in charge into the last half of the twentieth century, and then close the book on it.

Arturo Toscanini during an NBC television rehearsal in the early 1950s

It should be clear by this point that conductors are in charge and are simultaneously not in charge. Control is a myth, but it is one we all cling to. We stand front and center at a concert, and the audience tends to look at us most of the time. Concert halls in which the stage is seen from above or, in some cases, around and behind allow an audience to experience more of the give-and-take. Older halls, like Carnegie Hall and the Konzerthaus in Vienna, place much of the audience behind and below the stage level, making the conductor appear taller than in real life and dominating the outside stands of strings. I sometimes wonder how audiences and critics would respond to performances if they saw nothing at all but still participated in a live event.

With the arrival of films and videos, a director could lead the viewer’s eye to better participate in the complexities of concert music. Bernstein used television to teach and explain music (ostensibly to young people, but the entire family watched). Karajan created highly polished movies, using retakes, close-ups, dramatic backlighting, and fifteen cameras. Obviously these two giants of the podium were simultaneously taking very different approaches to the use of media and classical music. By 1979, Karajan created his own company, Telemondial, in which he was totally in charge of every aspect of the production and performance of his videos, directing the cameras and using another conductor to stand in for him at rehearsals. Needless to say, in these videos Karajan came across as even more powerful and remote than Stokowski in Fantasia. (For one thing, there were no cartoons and no Mickey Mouse!) Bernstein, by contrast, came across as a trusted and sincere human being who wanted to share his enthusiasm with people at home.

The world of the all-powerful, all-knowing maestro abruptly came to an end with the deaths of both these giants—though Valery Gergiev remains something of a twenty-first-century holdover from that past, given his perceived total control of the Mariinsky Theater’s orchestra, ballet, and opera in Saint Petersburg. Yes, there are a few who still growl for the photographers, but conductors’ images began to change rapidly once Simon Rattle put on a colorful sweater and smiled. He was so good that the smile and the multicolor pullover were accepted, and he was allowed to continue being both serious and all-embracing. He even loved Broadway musicals. He remains a unique force.

Unlike the characters who emerged in the nineteenth century, today’s maestros can be openly gay, and can be women (this is just starting, mind you). However, there is still the residue of racism and “other”-ism in how we hear conductors. Germans still conduct German music. Italians conduct Verdi and Puccini. Scandinavians are good at Sibelius and the music of the gray skies, and Americans are hard to pin down in what is still a fundamentally European repertory, but are rarely seen as profound interpreters. In answering the question of who is in charge, one always has to remember that the hiring entity is ultimately in charge.

After a series of performances I conducted of Wagner’s Rienzi in San Antonio, Texas, in 1977—attended by the composer’s granddaughter Friedelind—Andrew Porter had made a pretty astounding pronouncement in The New Yorker, claiming that our performance proved Rienzi to be a greater opera than Tannhäuser, thus causing “the stock judgments of musical histories to be rewritten.”

I was immediately re-engaged. When my wife and I returned, it appeared that I was a viable candidate for the job of music director, a position that was open. One board member said that the new music director would be required to live in San Antonio, though the orchestra had a fairly short season. Mind you, I would agree that any music director should commit to the city in which he is music director. However, it was an additional comment that I found disturbing. “If I buy a Picasso, I want to know it’s hangin’ on my wall, whether I look at it or not.” Another member of the search committee said, “We want the accent.” She felt that the credibility of their music director and the value therefore given to her orchestra would be best served if the music director were European and had a charming accent. They were in charge. I did not get—nor did I want—the job.

Richard Wagner’s granddaughter Friedelind with me in San Antonio, Texas, during rehearsals for Rienzi in 1977

No one should think the power of the orchestra board is a recent phenomenon. Mahler’s two seasons with the New York Philharmonic were fraught with controversy. He had to contend with Henry Krehbiel, the respected critic of the New-York Tribune, who objected to Mahler’s reorchestrations of the music of Beethoven and Schubert, as well as with the orchestra’s board members, who did not particularly like the repertory Mahler chose to conduct. For his second season (1910–11) they created the six-member “Guarantors’ Committee” to oversee and approve every musical work on his programs. One year later, Sir Edward Elgar, already a British knight of the realm whose music was seen as representing the British Empire, was fired by the board of the London Symphony Orchestra as its conductor-in-chief because his concerts didn’t sell well enough.

Unlike music directors, guest conductors walk a fine line between being demanding and being acquiescent. Adjusting and inspiring something different while simultaneously respecting the traditions and the unique nature of each institution is no easy matter. Just how “in charge” can anyone be who shows up on Tuesday morning and is gone by Sunday, having conducted two or three concerts?

When I was first making the rounds of the big orchestras in the 1970s, I had a one-rehearsal concert with the Philadelphia Orchestra at their outdoor summer home Robin Hood Dell. The soloist was Mstislav Rostropovich, who played two cello concertos, the Haydn C Major Concerto and Bloch’s Schelomo. I started the program with Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony and began the second half with Ravel’s La Valse.

Rostropovich was a human hurricane. Full of ideas and with a fixed interpretation of the Bloch, he stood up at one point and said to the orchestra, “Here must be like thousand birds!” I was caught off guard and took a moment and said, “Please. Like a thousand birds.” Rostropovich was in charge.

I had never conducted the “Unfinished” before, but like I did later with Rigoletto, I studied it from a newly published (1968) critical edition in which the editor, Martin Chusid (again!), discovered that a note in the first movement had been changed in the standard engraving to make a dissonance sound harmonious. Chusid was sure this was the work of an engraver who assumed Schubert had made an error. Since that same offending note appeared once again later in the movement, and was clearly written in the composer’s hand both times, he restored it. George Szell subsequently recorded the symphony with the incorrect-sounding right note.

Armed with the score, I enthusiastically corrected the Philadelphia Orchestra, naively thinking that they would welcome the news and respect someone who did his homework and brought the research to them. Yes, the orchestra played the notes I requested, but they also did a thing orchestras do when they absolutely hate something—show a barely audible disdain as the offending notes and the young guest conductor passed into history, not to return for thirty years. They were in charge.

Once the invisible art collaborates with the visible—whether that is in the opera, a Broadway musical, the ballet, or the cinema—the question of who is in charge becomes exponentially more complex. The pecking order is difficult to predict. In general, the opera house was the last bastion of conductor-as-ultimate-authority. Symphony-orchestra programming is a messy affair, with lots of pushes and pulls, though a conductor can have a major influence on how any work will sound just by being truly engaged and present. That is one way of defining being in charge, though perhaps not in the way one thinks. “Ask Ernest what he wants me to conduct and I’ll do it,” a famous maestro said in front of me, referring to the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s vice president Ernest Fleischmann.

Broadway conductors are functionaries who do what the composer, the director, and the producers say. At the first rehearsal in the pit for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Song and Dance, the amplification on the electric instruments (guitars, some percussion and keyboards) was so loud that I just stopped and yelled to the sound engineer, “If you ever do that again, I am walking out. PLEASE let me balance the orchestra acoustically first.” Webber was there and backed me up. However, during the run, my performance, and that of the orchestra, were judged by the stage manager, whose job it was to write performance reports that were passed on to the company manager and the producers, even though I was the musical supervisor of the production.

As a producer of On Your Toes and as the Kennedy Center’s advisor for music theater, I had the ideal position: conductor, music director, and the man who had hired everyone on the stage and in the pit. This was unprecedented, and is unlikely ever to happen again. I was in charge—except when Roger L. Stevens, chairman of the Kennedy Center, wanted a report. Then he was in charge.

The conductor is absolutely not in charge of ballet, as I’ve said. Charles Isherwood of The New York Times articulated this fact when he pointed out that Valery Gergiev, “who rules over both ballet and opera [at] the Mariinsky…[is] very possibly the most powerful figure in the Russian performing arts today [with] more dominion over ballet than anyone since Jean-Baptiste Lully in the late-seventeenth-century France of Louis XIV.” However, Isherwood found the company far more buoyant when its music director was not conducting the dancers, while at the same time admiring the maestro’s concerts and opera performances. His tempos, Isherwood said, “straightjacket[ed]” the dancers.

While this may or may not be true, when the New York City Ballet hired the symphonic conductor Andrew Litton to be its music director, an observer indicated clearly who is in charge. “Mr. Litton gave a downbeat with a pencil, the rehearsal pianist began, and a slightly terrified-looking corps de ballet rushed out for a few moments before [ballet master in chief] Peter Martins and Rosemary Dunleavy, a ballet mistress, clapped their hands to stop the action. ‘Where’s the fire?’ Mr. Martins asked.” It was too fast—something that would never be said to Litton had he been conducting the very same work in a concert.1

Perhaps in earlier days, when the great symphonic ballet scores were being composed by Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Ravel, Debussy, Prokofiev, and Falla, a ballet conductor had greater authority, but that is doubtful, since the choreographer ruled supreme, and if there were musical questions, the composer was there to answer them. However, Tchaikovsky absolutely hated what was done to his score for Swan Lake—cuts, abrupt tempo changes to fit the steps—by its original choreographer, Julius Reisinger. In any case, in today’s dance world, unless you are Valery Gergiev, the conductor is not in charge.

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No field has changed more in the diminution of the conductor’s authority than opera. During the nineteenth century, when new operas were being presented all the time in hundreds of opera houses, the composer and the theaters agreed on the scenic conception, and there was no such thing as a stage director. The stage directions were part of the libretto, after all, and the scenery was a series of brilliantly painted oil-on-canvas drops that magically appeared to be three-dimensional when illuminated. Occasionally there were stairs. It was expected that Spontini, Verdi, Wagner, and every other composer supervised the productions of their own works. A stage manager handled the comings and goings of the artists.

When my ninety-five-year-old Sicilian grandmother came to a Saturday matinee of La Bohème at Lincoln Center which I was conducting, I thought I would mention to her that she had seen the very same opera sung by Enrico Caruso and Geraldine Farrar in 1914. My grandmother, whose English never developed much past the utilitarian stage, shook her head and, after a moment of thinking, said, “I think-a they act-a more, nowadays.”

Indeed they do! Not only that, but because the repertory of operas has been frozen so that the last Italian opera to make it into the canon was composed in 1924 (Turandot), and German opera petered out somewhere during the career of Richard Strauss but may have effectively stopped in 1911 with his ever popular Der Rosenkavalier—and even with the occasional productions of works from beyond the early twentieth century—operas nowadays are controlled by stage directors who attempt to interpret the stagnant repertory in new and memorable ways. Doing what the libretto says is rarely an option and is seen by music critics as a lack of imagination.

The artistic director of Turin’s Teatro Regio told me he was thinking of asking Woody Allen to direct a new production of Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd. I said something like, “But he wouldn’t know anything about the British navy during the Napoleonic era, and the moral and political forces at play.” Nor had he ever directed an opera at that point. “Yes, you are right,” he said, “but it would be a sensation.”

I conducted my first opera in 1973, Menotti’s Saint of Bleecker Street, with the composer in attendance. Since then, I have conducted a rather large repertory that starts with Monteverdi and concludes with world premieres, with a heavy dose of Verdi, Wagner, Puccini, and Britten in the middle. I have been attending operas and the musical theater since the age of eleven, which means witnessing the double-golden ages of Broadway and the Metropolitan Opera. This period includes the original Broadway productions of My Fair Lady, West Side Story, The Music Man, The Sound of Music, and Gypsy as well as performances by the greatest opera singers and conductors of the second half of the last century. What has transpired during the past sixty years is significant.

Once the composers of the operatic repertory that still feeds every opera house in the world died, and popular new operas were discarded for political and aesthetic reasons, while other new ones—though highly touted—failed to find an audience, opera houses had to find a way of surviving. This included justifying their aesthetic positions and encouraging audiences by applying modern and provocative concepts to the interpretation of eternal artworks, playing on the dependence of music and musical theater to be interpreted in order to exist.

Therefore, the aesthetic criteria that fueled the never-ending avant-garde also supported its subsidiary philosophies that reject music being narrative and representational, and lean toward jolting the audience with provocation, as if we were in the height of the Weimar Republic or in the post–World War II rage against the failure of high culture to combat the horrors that preceded it. This is the world of staging operas that exists today, and conductors might be advised to look up from the pit only when cueing a singer.

When David Pountney produced an acclaimed new production of Dvořák’s Rusalka in 1986 at the English National Opera, the curtain rose to show us a white-walled Victorian bedroom, with the title character on a swing and with her legs tied together. Later in the storytelling, the bedsheets were crimson and her legs untied.

The parable was explained to us. The fairy tale was decomposed and deconstructed. This production of Rusalka was about a girl going through her first menstrual cycle—which is a rather clinical and unpoetic way of saying that she was leaving childhood and becoming a young woman. The fact that Dvořák wrote a beautiful opera about a water sprite who desires to become human, which takes place within a forest and describes the wonderment of nature in its rippling orchestration and musical imagery, was just too obvious, so its symbolic meaning needed to be explained. I remember greeting a horn player after act 1 and his saying to me as he indicated the stage behind him, “It doesn’t look like the music sounds, now, does it?” Indeed, it did not.

On my first day in Turin as a guest conductor in the 1990s, the stage director described his fantastic vision of Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream to me and the cast, and said, “Well, Oberon is a homosexual of course, because he is a male soprano, right, Maestro?” I said that I did not think that was certain, since I believed the choice of his being a male soprano had more to do with a reference to baroque opera and making Oberon less human and more magical.

As the director explained his vision for the opera, which he set in the Hotel Grande Bretagne in Athens, with a six-foot-tall bearded man in a dress cruising the guests in the lobby and the boys in the chorus of fairies costumed as French maids—lipstick, rouge, short black skirts, white aprons, high heels—every singer in the room sat frozen in disbelief. At the first break, everyone went to the phones to call their agents and managers. My Italian manager told me not to worry. “No one ever blames the conductor. Just conduct the music. It will be fine for you.” It was, but it was not. Yes, I was invited back to be the theater’s direttore stabile, but I would have absolutely no say in what I was looking at and accompanying onstage.

This included a Madama Butterfly that looked like it took place on a desert moon of a distant planet. The director was embarrassed by Puccini’s emotionality and insisted on delaying Butterfly’s suicide until the very last chord of the opera. The musical positioning of her suicide is very specific. Puccini has her do it behind a screen as her son plays in front of it, unaware of what is happening. After she has stabbed herself and the screen collapses forward, making the flower petals create clouds of color, we hear music that describes the fast approach of her husband, the father of the child. He calls “Butterfly!” three times from offstage, always getting closer. He then runs onstage with the American consul, to see what he has caused. In a dying gesture, Butterfly points to the child. Pinkerton kneels and Sharpless grabs the child to shield him from the sight. The final chord is the horror of both men—and the audience. The curtain falls quickly.

In this new version, Butterfly waited and waited and waited and, just as Pinkerton arrived, she stared at him and stabbed herself on the last chord and there was a blackout. There was no time for the audience to react—no catharsis whatsoever—and also far too much music for her preparations to commit hara-kiri. What the director achieved was a Butterfly in which no one shed a single tear. That was his way to justify performing the opera in modern Italy, removing any sign of kitsch or embarrassing emotionality. He got his way. The company’s artistic director, who had the authority, found this interpretation valid and “interesting.”

On Broadway, a revival is rarely that. Some call these productions “revisals.” Unlike opera, which usually holds the musical text as sacrosanct, Broadway has a far looser attitude toward every aspect of a show. “The New Gershwin Musical” on a marquee generates more excitement than “The Great Gershwin Musical.” For some shows, this means a drastically reduced orchestra (this saves money), the addition of songs from other shows by the same composer, and sometimes a complete rethinking and reimagining of the text. The one thing you can be sure of is that the owners of the original property have approved the adaptation and that the title of the show has been retained. After that, anything and everything goes.

When Arthur Laurents had his way with West Side Story in 2009 (he had written its book in 1957), the chief drama critic of The New York Times, Ben Brantley, wrote: “The production that opened Thursday night at the Palace Theater…lovingly replicates Mr. Robbins’s balletic choreography.” It did nothing of the kind. Laurents’s production began with an overture cobbled together for a 1980 revival of the show. West Side Story has no overture. In 1957, the audience, after a full blackout, suddenly saw five Jets in front of a cyclone fence. The music and their arrogant movements are synchronous: Buh-CHINK. Buh-CHINK. Buh-CHINK-buh-CHINK. Silence. However, under Laurents’s “loving” direction, no one moved. Instead, the Jets waited during the music and then moved in the silence. In other words, Laurents destroyed the basic establishment of movement with music that Jerome Robbins and Leonard Bernstein had established in 1957.

Laurents went on to remove the nightmare ballet in act 2 (“Arthur never liked it,” Gerald Freedman, who directed the scene work in 1957, told me), and changed the ending so that the Sharks and the Jets did not join in carrying Tony’s body offstage. Laurents said it was “unrealistic.” Others might point out that the murder of so many kids because of racism brought the Jets and Sharks together, and was the point of the show. From start to finish, Laurents had made his own West Side Story, and all the creative arguments he lost in 1957 he got to win in 2009, because Jerry and Lenny were dead, and no one disallowed the rewriting. Critics had not seen the show in 1957, nor had they seen or remembered its revival in 1980, when, except for the added overture, it was the original show. And they did not do their homework.

The tales of discontinuity and arrogance have steadily increased during the past half-century. Any director who stages an opera and has it take place when it is meant to take place is considered a routinier and not a true artist. When a production of Wagner’s Ring does not admit to Wagner’s two essential elements—that the earth and nature are precious and cannot be harmed, and that human love is stronger than any god or any magic—then it is not worth producing or experiencing. Alas, we have seen Ring productions that take place in the Washington, DC, Metro, in a surreal puppet environment in which the singers had to climb into inflexible costumes, and on a small stage behind which a gigantic and noisy apparatus clanks and creeks its way to upstage the action. They are all failures, and anyone who has gone to the movies or the theater knows that great designers can find new ways of depicting stories set in the past or in exotic places or in our backyard without changing their locale or historical period, though that can be done, too. Cinematographers can, with their designers, create dragons that are dragons but don’t look like other dragons; period costumes and places that are true to the story but are not mere replicas of other designs. We seem to be saving a lot of money in current opera productions by putting our men in Armani suits no matter what story we are telling.

All of the above would not matter if a stage director of an opera understood how music and gesture work together. When Wieland Wagner produced his final Ring cycle at Bayreuth in 1965, all the action took place on a raised elliptical disc that seemed to float in a sea of blackness. With almost no props, it was the interaction of the singers, and the sly and brilliant colors of the cyclorama behind them, that made the drama absolutely riveting. It was not set in the American West or in the Wagners’ living room or at Dachau. It was an eternal drama about families and politics.

There is no stronger memory for me than seeing Astrid Varnay and Martha Mödl counter each other like two sumo wrestlers in the act 1 scene between Brünnhilde and her sister Waltraute in Wieland’s production of Götterdämmerung. His Ring did not precisely follow Wagner’s stage descriptions, but it did tell his stories clearly and convincingly, and therein lies the difference. Birgit Nilsson loved working with Wieland Wagner because “he found my Isolde, which was not Varnay’s Isolde.” In other words, he was a director adapting his production to the individual talents of his singers, much as a conductor adapts to the singers he is conducting, all the while maintaining the overall integrity of the entire performance.

Directors of opera have been empowered to provoke or comment on the artwork they have been hired to present in order to be deep, important, and relevant. But more often than not they are sensational, infuriating, or boring. The problem is, they are in charge, and opera houses support them.

Once upon a time, Arturo Toscanini took charge of staging operas when things were going wrong, as he did at the Metropolitan in 1914 for Il trovatore, again at La Scala for Lucia di Lammermoor in 1923, and then for Die Meistersinger at Salzburg in 1937, just as Otto Klemperer did in 1929 with The Flying Dutchman. Karajan did much the same thing at his Salzburg festivals. Were they “good” productions? This would have something to do with how you like your operas. What certainly did happen was that the music was well performed and the sound of the music and the look of the stage were congruent.

A true opera conductor wants to support the vision onstage. Its colors and its shapes need to be in conversation with the music. That is the basic idea of opera and why it was invented in the first place. Uncoupling the elements and having them fight each other, or ignore each other, is precisely what critics who support a never-ending avant-garde want. This is not about creativity or imagination. It is about provocation and disregard of the text. The audience frequently boos. The conductor and the singers get standing ovations, as if their musical performance were a separate element. Life moves on. Another new production of a standard opera is announced, and the process begins again.

Having conducted a Turandot in which the title character committed suicide after she sang the word “Amore,” and was required to writhe onstage while the chorus sang happily about love and eternity, was as difficult an assignment as I could ever imagine. Was I supposed to find some dark, inner voice in the happy harmonies? (There are none to be found.) Was this suddenly some weird post-Brechtian commentary in which the happier the music, the greater the discontinuity? The legal department of Ricordi, which controls the ownership of Turandot, it should be noted, did not object to this complete turnaround in the story. Apparently one of Puccini’s descendants had seen the production when it was new and did not object.

Sometimes a stage director, the production designer, and the conductor all participate in something extraordinary. Those of us who experienced Puccini’s Manon Lescaut conducted by Thomas Schippers, with direction by Luchino Visconti, at Spoleto in 1973, will never forget the totality of the experience. This was true of the Böhm–Wieland Wagner Tristan which I attended at Bayreuth in 1966, and the Bernstein–Zeffirelli Falstaff at the Met in 1964. It was also true of Bernstein’s work with director Bodo Igesz and designer Josef Svoboda on the Met’s Carmen in 1972. Whether one liked it or not, it was a riveting experience in the theater, and every tempo and gesture were in sync. The subsequent audio recording could not do justice to the totality of the theatrical experience. In the end, Bernstein let Marilyn Horne sing her extraordinary “Prends garde à toi” the way she wanted to sing it, because ultimately it allowed her to put her stamp on the role. She, it should be noted, modified the effect, and both parties found a middle ground that was acceptable to them and also pleased the diva’s fans.

A television director once said that his mantra was “Never make the talent look bad.” In a way, that is the job of the conductor, too. In fifty years of conducting opera I have rarely had a diva be “in charge,” because performing opera absolutely has to be about collaboration. However, I remember watching Luciano Pavarotti during a dress rehearsal of La Bohème in Turin, in 1996, with his chosen conductor. (He only performed with conductors he had known in his early years.) Already in his sixties, Pavarotti was both arrogant and deeply insecure, since he could not read music. At one point, he broke character and walked forward toward the apron of the stage. With the index finger of his right hand extended, he ominously wagged it back and forth toward his maestro to publically remonstrate him for something or other. The tenor was in charge.

Gian Carlo Menotti was a great collaborative stage director. Never was this more true than in a production we shared of La Bohème for the Washington Opera. Menotti understood every word and never upended Puccini’s dramaturgy. Indeed, he made it live. My job was to partner with him, using Puccini’s two-tempo opera—50 percent at the breakneck speed of speech, and 50 percent at the ritual-dreamlike speed epitomized by Wagner in his Tristan.

The joy of that rehearsal period remains with me. Whenever I pointed out something in the score that Menotti had missed, he turned it into gold. Anyone who knows La Bohème will remember the place just near the end of the opera when Mimì dies. After what will be her last utterance, the word dormire (“sleep”), there is a long silence with a hold (fermata) on it. Puccini has written the word lunga (“long”) over the pause. Normally when this opera is performed, this pause is short. Rodolfo walks upstage and Mimì’s hand drops. Synchronized to the hand dropping, a conductor brings in a C-sharp-minor chord, indicating her death.

Puccini wanted something far more dramatic. If one follows his instructions and makes the silence truly long, there is time for the tension in the audience to build while all the characters onstage, unaware that she is passing away all alone, are going about their routines. Musetta is heating up some medicine, and the others are trying to be quiet so as not to disturb Mimì’s slumber, and so forth. Then, after perhaps thirty seconds of silence, Mimì’s hand drops. She is dead, and only the audience knows. (Thirty seconds of silence is incredibly long, forcing a collective tension on the audience as the aural emptiness stretches onward.) With full knowledge of what these young people do not yet know, we hear Rodolfo ask, “What did the doctor say?” to which Marcello says, “He’s coming.” Musetta begins to pray to the Virgin to spare Mimì. It is a brilliant use of silence, music, and words to set up the explosion of grief that inevitably follows.

When I pointed this out to Menotti, he made full use of this silence, giving the characters specific instructions of what they would do while they were still clinging to the hope that Mimì might get better. The dramatic irony was practically unbearable because the audience knew what was coming and the music had stopped. The ending of the opera, as Jerry Hadley shook the body of Sheri Greenawald, and her lifeless head bobbed back and forth, was one of the great cathartic moments I have experienced in the theater. It was everything Puccini might have wished for. The composer was in charge, and it was the complete opposite of the Madama Butterfly in Turin and the Turandot in Bilbao that awaited me.

Menotti may have gotten used to being in charge when he staged his own operas, which was something he always did. However, when he was commissioned to write an opera for Beverly Sills as part of her fiftieth-birthday-year celebrations, the proviso was that Sills’s longtime friend and director Tito Capobianco direct the new opera—first in San Diego, where he was the artistic director, and then at the New York City Opera, where Sills was the general director. The opera, Juana la Loca, premiered in San Diego in June 1979. Menotti was late in composing it, and stories emerged that he was locked in his hotel room writing away as rehearsals had already commenced.

The production arrived for its New York premiere a few months later, with its entire original cast reconstituted, but with three significant changes: the opera’s name was shortened to La Loca; Menotti had composed some of the transition music needed to link the separate scenes, which he had not done for San Diego; and instead of Calvin Simmons, who had led the world premiere performances, I was chosen for the task—though I do not remember why. Having worked with Gian Carlo a number of times, I was happy to collaborate with him and honored to lead what would be Sills’s final performances in a complete opera.

At the first rehearsal, everyone gathered in a rehearsal room at the New York State (now the David H. Koch) Theater. Since the cast already knew the production, we started out with them singing while recreating Capobianco’s San Diego staging. We stopped after the first scene for notes. Menotti wanted less rubato from me, which I was happy to do. Then he said, “If I may, that character should not be standing there, because he cannot not be overhearing the conversation.” Beverly took a moment and said in a deliberate manner, “Gian Carlo, I told you no changes.” Menotti took a moment for this to register. “This is not a change, Beverly. It just doesn’t make any sense.” Sills repeated her order. Menotti, understanding what was happening to him, said, “Excuse me. I wrote the libretto and the music, and I know where the characters have to be.” This was followed by silence. No one in that gray room moved. “Well, if I cannot have any say in this, I will leave.” Silence. And with that, he put on his coat and walked out of the room.

Capobianco, who had been silent, now spoke. He looked at Beverly and said, “Thank you.” As if this weren’t enough, Sills shocked everyone in that room by what she said next. “Who does he think he is? Does he think these performances are sold out because of him?” The rest of her monologue is erased from my memory because I simply had never experienced anything like this before, and my brain was busy trying to imagine what I was supposed to do. On the one hand, I should have left with Gian Carlo to support the composer. On the other hand, I had just moved to New York City with a wife and a one-year-old son and I had no other work. I quickly decided to stay in the room, justifying the decision as being both practical and the only way to protect the composer—and avoid a scandal.

During the rehearsal period I shuttled back and forth to Menotti’s apartment to pick up new music for the rest of the scene changes. I would tell him how well things were going. I believe he thought I should have resigned. Beverly saw me as a spy who was loyal to Menotti and not to her. Menotti spoke of legal action, and there are letters somewhere warning the New York City Opera.

On opening night, September 16, 1979, I conducted the New York premiere of La Loca. At the end, to cheers from the audience, Gian Carlo was brought onstage by Sills and took a bow. It was the first time he had heard his entire opera. The next day, Harold C. Schonberg gave both Sills and Menotti damning notices in the Times. He wrote that “Miss Sills does not have the high notes for really old-fashioned opera” and that Menotti’s music lacked “real ideas” and exhibited a “total reliance on outworn idioms of the past,” but he did note that the composer “received a cordial reception at the end,” Ironically, he also noted that I “led a clean-cut performance”—“presumably with the coaching of Mr. Menotti.” Except for that first day in a rehearsal room, Mr. Menotti had been absent from the scene, and there was no coaching for me or for anyone else.

It is hard to imagine any situation more operatic: a composer’s authority superseded by the soprano who was also the general director of the opera company. Beverly Sills was definitely in charge.

Conducting opera should ideally be a partnership, but we have entered a period in which stage directors are permitted to decide on musical editions and cuts, and even feel empowered to demand tempos from a conductor, as happened to me during the interval at a dress rehearsal a few years ago. Because the director had staged part of the opera (a lullaby) as a Lindy hop, the staging demanded that the character of the music (clearly delineated by the composer) would have to be changed. That is when there are no winners.

The New York premiere of La Loca, with Beverly Sills and me, in 1979

Everyone has a boss, of course. For conductors, who never publicly admit to this reality, it can be a dancer, a singer, a stage director, the management of an opera house, one’s reputation, the acoustics of the hall, the quality of the players, a pre-existing production, the music, a living composer, or the dreaded click track that guides your precise tempos in a movie score.

“Live-to-picture” concerts have become a regular part of a conductor’s technical demands. It is something we developed in the early 1990s at the Hollywood Bowl. At that time, there was no digital projection, and synchronizing to film clips was like riding a bronco without a saddle. The idea, first attempted by John Goberman in his “Symphonic Night at the Movies,” was to show an extended excerpt from a “talking picture” and play the orchestral music composed to accompany it. In the 1920s, when films were silent, music—whether it was a piano, an organ, or an orchestra—usually accompanied them. Once sound film was developed, and a composite sound track was fixed to the image, playing live-to-picture became unnecessary and disappeared, except for silent-film restorations.

The idea was born out of our desire to find viable ways to play the thousands of hours of unperformed symphonic music composed in Los Angeles for the movies. There were two other ways we did this: One was simply to play the music, like all other symphonic music, edited into suites. Another way was to perform the complete score, with live actors reading the screenplay, like a grand radio drama with a full symphony orchestra.

Movie nights at the Bowl with the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra playing live to images on a big movie screen quickly became a tradition and led to finding the best ways to synchronize live perfor-mance with the original sound track. At first we played only to film clips for which the original music track was separate and could be removed. We could therefore play the clip with the dialogue and the sound effects and add the music live. Sometimes we only played extended scenes that had no dialogue, like the dream ballet from the film of Oklahoma!, and sometimes we “ghosted” the sound track, playing simultaneously with the original orchestral score, as we did with “Over the Rainbow,” with Judy Garland singing and the MGM orchestra playing.

Over the course of the next decade my colleagues and I developed new techniques involving digital cues put on a video screen that looked like colorful streamers passing from the left to the right side of the image, indicating just where the music has to “land.” In addition, there were times we used another technique: when the music was in a steady tempo—a march or a section of a dance routine. I wore headphones and heard a click-click-click to ensure the live music was precisely where the original sound track was.2

These various techniques require conductors to accompany an artistic component that has no living, breathing soloist. The picture does not care if you are with it or not. If you are too slow, you must speed up to get to where you need to be. But just like passing a car on the highway, once you have caught up, you are too fast and have to slow down. The pushes and pulls never stop as you navigate an accompaniment that can (if you are accompanying a complete film) last well over an hour.

Sometimes, the sync is a “soft sync,” which means it is not necessary to be anywhere but in the general area of the original sound track. Other times a conductor has to hit a precise spot in order for a gesture in the drama, and the music created to articulate it, to be exact. All of this sounds unnatural, of course, and in one way it is: conductors become the servant of another conductor—the one who originally conducted the music on the sound track.

However, like anything else in which one has a boss, there are nevertheless remarkable freedoms within the prescribed tempo restrictions of providing the accompaniment. And when all is said and done, the composite effect is precisely what an audience was supposed to experience when Wagner was staging his operas and insisted that the movements of the actors were precisely synchronized to his music. The way this synchronicity was achieved is completely different from that of accompanying a film, but the effect is the same: music and gesture are locked together as a visual/aural unity.

Critics generally do not understand why any conductor worth his salt would ever agree to follow in the tracks of another conductor. Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim in The New York Times began her review of The Fellowship of the Ring performed live-to-picture in April 2015 with the following clever opening: “Imagine a musical version of the orcs, Tolkien’s enslaved former elves, made to serve the cult of an all-powerful moving image under the baton of a brainwashed wizard.”

Yes, it does sometimes feel like this, which is why many conductors simply will not participate in live-to-picture concerts—though, it must be said, more and more “serious” conductors are choosing to do so. Therefore, it behooves conductors to learn how to do it. Fonseca-Wollheim’s point is understandable: “…Far from celebrating the artistry that goes into film music, this marathon ‘Lord of the Rings in Concert’ only underlines the abnegation of artistic privilege that genre requires.”

“Artistic privilege” is a fantastic phrase, and well worth contemplating. I absolutely understand how soul-draining it is for those of us who believe we should always enjoy artistic privilege. Conducting a film score that is as long as an opera by Wagner, and knowing that the audience basically has little or no interest in just how hard your job is, can be dispiriting. The public has come for the communal excitement engendered by seeing a beloved drama unfold before them on a screen, but with a very different perspective: the “background music” is brought forward and played live by a huge symphony orchestra.

All conductors, presenters, composers, and audiences are in a transition with this developing possibility for performing new and recent orchestral music, which is, after all, what most of this music is. With digital projection rather than celluloid film clips, more information can now be added to our scores, making it possible to study and practice by uploading the adapted film onto our personal computers. It was not until 2015 that I agreed to conduct an entire film. That was in Tokyo, and it was Danny Elfman’s score to Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. Because the dialogue track was in English, rather than the Japanese dubbed version, there were subtitles in Japanese throughout the presentation. When I conducted the same work at London’s Royal Albert Hall, Disney did not want to put English subtitles on the print. That resulted in a heated argument during the performance between the composer and the management of the hall, who wanted the dialogue to be louder and louder for audience comprehension.

Elfman correctly said, “In Tokyo, it was a concert with visuals. In London, it was a movie.” Disney subsequently agreed to put English subtitles on all future presentations, even when it is performed in English-speaking countries—just as supertitles are used in opera houses when the opera being performed is in the language of the majority of the public.

We conductors can learn a lot from the experience, it should be said. No one is ever going to particularly notice us in the dark, under the screen, but having to control tempo fluctuations for huge periods of time to synchronize with a film requires a level of concentration that is an unprecedented technical challenge for a conductor. It is very long, complicated, and perilous.

With older films, one gets to ghost-conduct with Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Max Steiner, Miklós Rózsa, Franz Waxman, Bernard Herrmann, and Leopold Stokowski. Attempting to replicate Stokowski’s tempos in Fantasia is something no conducting class could ever teach. How he could turn an eighth-note upbeat into a half-note simply by continuously raising his arms becomes a physical reality when you actually have to do it. The new technologies are bringing us farther back in time while advancing our techniques forward. The dead can teach us lessons no one will otherwise understand, unless one tries it. I have accompanied Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Frank Sinatra, and Gene Kelly. I know what their sense of rubato was, how they caressed some notes, moved forward with others, and made natural portamentos—the slide between notes—when they wished to make a musical or dramatic point.

Danny Elfman and me at the premiere of an all-Elfman orchestral concert at London’s Royal Albert Hall on October 7, 2013

Of the various deceased soloists I accompanied on the stage of the Bowl, including a piano roll of George Gershwin playing “Swanee” and a recording of Erich Wolfgang Korngold at the piano, it was the second movement of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto no. 2 played by the composer that was the most challenging and the most illuminating.

Rachmaninoff agreed to “cut” a piano-roll version of his most popular work in March of 1919, after the mechanisms developed by the American Piano Company (Ampico) had become so accurate that no one could tell, when listening from behind a curtain, if a person or a machine was playing the piano. He performed the entire concerto, the machine cutting the information of pitch, speed, quality, pedal movements, and everything else onto a moving roll of paper. The idea was for this piano roll to be used when Rachmaninoff was not available to appear in person.

During my tenure at the Bowl, I became aware that someone had a copy of the second movement only, and that the information on the roll could be transferred digitally by scanning it into a computer and played on a Yamaha Disklavier, an acoustic grand piano that uses electromagnetic solenoids for playback. Rachmaninoff’s second movement was complete; and, except for his duplication of the orchestra’s opening chords, it would be theoretically possible to put a grand piano on the stage of the Hollywood Bowl and accompany Rachmaninoff—that is, if I was willing to memorize every twist and turn of his playing, which was incredibly free. After all, he had written it and was performing it.

Although Rachmaninoff recorded his Second Piano Concerto acoustically with Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1929, this would be completely different. The piano would actually be playing and the pedals and keys would be going up and down. The orchestra would be live, responding to his playing through my gestures. To make all of this even more bizarre and wondrous, the piano would be placed exactly where Rachmaninoff last played his beloved concerto, on the stage of the Hollywood Bowl, July 18, 1942, seven months before his death in Beverly Hills. The Bowl Orchestra and I performed with him three times, September 15, 16, and 17, 2000, when I became the only living conductor to have accompanied Rachmaninoff.

I have learned much from accompanying films and deceased artists, ghosting conductors who had observed the very first conductors of the nineteenth century; and although the training is grueling and not respected, every conductor might do well to learn from these men and women as we present music for today. Far from being an abnegation of artistic privilege, it is a death-defying act of humility and acceptance, because, ultimately, they are in charge.

In 2002, Judy Garland sings with the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra.