Introduction

If you were reading The New York Times on Thursday morning, January 7, 2016, you would have awoken to three obituaries of two conductors who could not have been more different from each other. Pierre Boulez—probably the most influential figure in classical music in the second half of the twentieth century—received two obituaries and a photo on the front page, one by a former Times critic and devout apologist of modernism in music, Paul Griffiths, and another by the paper’s chief classical music critic, Anthony Tommasini. The third obituary, which included two photos, was for the millionaire and former publisher of a journal for pension-fund and financial managers, a man who could barely read music, by the name of Gilbert Kaplan, who shared something with Boulez: they both had conducted Mahler’s epic Symphony no. 2 with the Vienna Philharmonic.

Boulez was a brilliant and precise musician. He was impeccably and rigorously trained in Paris and used his training and intelligence to significantly shape what classical music in the post–World War II era became. His development as a conductor-composer was seen as visionary. When Leonard Bernstein stepped down as music director of the New York Philharmonic in 1969, Boulez was appointed his successor.

Kaplan, on the other hand, had studied law and worked on the New York Stock Exchange. After hearing a performance of Mahler’s Symphony no. 2 conducted by Leopold Stokowski with the American Symphony Orchestra in 1965, he developed an obsession with the work. He sold his magazine, Institutional Investor, and became the chairman of the board of the American Symphony, to which he was the largest donor. He also bought the original manuscript of the Mahler symphony, along with one of Mahler’s batons, and then paid various people to teach him how to conduct the piece—what the German and Italian words in the score meant; how to move his arms; whom to look at and when. And in 1982 he hired the American Symphony, rehearsed it, and performed the work to an invited audience in Avery Fisher Hall (now David Geffen Hall) at Lincoln Center.

He conducted it from memory (which is more than Boulez ever did). His invited guests were thrilled with his achievement, but Kaplan was just getting started. He went on to conduct the symphony a hundred times and to record it with the London Symphony Orchestra and the Vienna Philharmonic. And if anyone thinks professional conductors think this is something to admire, you had better think again.

How is it possible for Boulez, the thoroughly trained musician who ruled the avant-garde and passed judgments on everyone and everything, dismissing all American composers with a single sentence (“You have no composers, not even a Henze”—Hans Werner Henze being his German rival, who wrote music Boulez detested), to have intersected with a rank amateur? Boulez, the former antiestablishment enfant terrible, had come to represent the establishment practically overnight, with appointments in America at the New York Philharmonic and the Chicago Symphony, and in Paris with a contemporary-music institute that received the second-greatest national funding after the Louvre. Kaplan bought his orchestras and paid for his recordings. And yet not only did these two maestros have their performances of the same work with the same—greatest—orchestras of the world compared, but in some cases Kaplan’s recordings were preferred.

And here, dear reader, is the great mystery of the conductor. Who are we? What are we doing? What defines greatness, not to mention competence? What if you, like numerous amateur critics (read the Internet), think Kaplan’s Mahler with the Vienna Philharmonic to be “a revelation”? What, then, of those who have spent their lives learning harmony, counterpoint, and score reading, entering competitions, painstakingly working their way up the ladder from assistant conductor in a regional orchestra to associate conductor to music director of a second-tier orchestra, and never have the opportunity to conduct Mahler’s Second in Vienna?

In a very mysterious way, all of the above not only is possible, but makes a kind of nonsensical sense, because conducting is both bigger and smaller than you think. My purpose here is to explore its strange and lawless world, one in which everything and its opposite exist—even as one tries to find the common denominators of greatness in our field, our art, our theater, and our job. When you love us, we are geniuses. When you dismiss us, we are charlatans. We are these things and more—and less, since we are simply human, even if we occasionally appear to be godlike to some. And just as in Greek mythology, there are stories of our conducting gods that help illuminate who we are and who we are not. Here is the first sentence of one:

On Saturday, August 30, 1975, Herbert von Karajan had lunch in his Salzburg residence with Leonard Bernstein….

The two greatest conductors of the second half of the twentieth century were archrivals, and while Bernstein was instrumental in lobbying to get Karajan to make his New York debut—in spite of his past associations with the Nazi regime—Karajan was a major impediment to Bernstein’s Austro-German career. And so any story that starts with the above sentence will inevitably get the attention of anyone interested in classical music. What was it like? What did they talk about? A nonpublicized meeting of the two competing and reigning über-maestros of the central core classical music repertory would be like a private meeting between two enemy heads of state, and therefore worth investigating.

I never met Herbert von Karajan. He remained for me an aloof enigma, “the chairman of the board,” as director Harold Prince’s wife, Judy, once called him before one of his rare Carnegie Hall appearances with the Berlin Philharmonic. On the other hand, I certainly knew Bernstein, having worked with him from 1972 until his death in 1990, first as his assistant for the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Carmen, subsequently as his editor, and finally as the conductor he invariably asked to conduct his own works when he decided to disassociate himself from the grind of rehearsing and performing.

At the 1975 summer Salzburg Festival, Bernstein was conducting two concerts, and Karajan, who was the artistic director of the festival, was conducting two operas, one of which—a new production of Verdi’s Don Carlo—he was also directing, as well as three concert programs. It was a rare moment for these two titans to be performing in the same city and with the same orchestra—the Vienna Philharmonic. Bernstein was not a familiar face at the festival, and Karajan, or his wife, Eliette, thought it a good idea to have him over for lunch.

Once back in New York, Bernstein was ready to tell me all about it over a Scotch. It should be said right up front that Bernstein showed very little of the disease we conductors inherit the moment we pick up a baton: envy. Like Karajan in the many jokes once told within the classical music community, we young conductors also wanted to be everywhere, conducting everything. That Karajan was also photographed wearing sunglasses, piloting a plane, skiing in the Alps, and practicing yoga added to his European charisma. Bernstein, however, was always accessible. He was “Lenny.” There were whiffs of negativity toward his colleagues from time to time, but in general Bernstein seemed content to just be Leonard Bernstein. That was his full-time job, and he remained uninterested in the gossip and backstabbing we conductors seem to thrive on. I once made a reference to the fact that Michael Tilson Thomas’s biography kept him at age twenty-three for about five years, to which Bernstein said, “That comment was unworthy of you.” When it came to Karajan, however, it was another matter.

When I first had asked him about the Austrian maestro, Bernstein dispatched Karajan with few words. “He is ten years older and one centimeter shorter,” he said with surgical—and some might say lethal—precision. It was clear that lunch had been something of a trial for everyone. Bernstein’s daughter Jamie, who was present along with her mother, noted in her diary that Eliette “flirted maliciously” with her father and was dismissive of Karajan, making the room understandably uncomfortable. “HVK looked small, frail, tense.”

Karajan decided to break the ice by telling those assembled a story about the great and infamously witty British conductor Sir Thomas Beecham (1879–1961). After the war, Sir Thomas was conducting an ad hoc group of British musicians for a concert in bombed-out London. The irony that Karajan, a supporter of Hitler, was telling this story did not go unnoticed by anyone except, perhaps, Karajan himself. Beecham’s first rehearsal began with Britain’s greatest oboist, Léon Goossens, sounding his A, from which all would tune. Goossens was famous for his unique sound, which included a rather wide vibrato, not a precise, uninflected tone. Once Goossens had played his A, Beecham looked up from the podium and said with mock-British dignity, “Gentlemen, take your pick.”

If this were an audio book, you would hear me imitating Leonard Bernstein imitating Herbert von Karajan imitating Sir Thomas Beecham. Conductors are many things, but we are without doubt totally self-absorbed, fascinated by our field, uneasy at our perceived control—and we tell stories about each other, even when we are at the top of our profession. Anecdotes about conductors are a kind of lifeblood for orchestra players, too.

“I don’t think Herbert has ever read a book,” Lenny said to me regarding the pained attempts to have any kind of serious conversation during that lunch. (It is possible, I should say, for a great conductor to be uninterested in books, as strange as that may seem.) There would have been many things that Bernstein—an avid reader, a student of history, a teacher, and political activist—would have been eager to discuss, including the music of Mahler or Verdi—or any composer, for that matter—or the difficulties of being a music director. But swapping maestro stories over lunch was certainly not his style.

“Lenny, what work of yours should I conduct?” Herbert asked at one point. Bernstein thought for a moment and decided to be as outrageous as he could be, knowing that Karajan would not understand the implications or the irony of his answer. “Um…Mass, I should think,” was Bernstein’s response. Mass, completed in 1971, was Bernstein’s biggest and most complex work. Dedicated to John F. Kennedy, Mass interspersed the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Mass with pop-musical interruptions from onstage political protesters. Bernstein, with nothing to lose at this point in what seemed to be a pointless lunch, was goading his host into considering a work he would never perform. Above all, it would have been seen as an homage to Bernstein: Karajan would have had to learn and produce an entire evening of Bernstein’s “theatre piece,” requiring an orchestra, a band, a company of pop singers, an ecclesiastical choir, and a boys’ choir. It was about as subtly cruel a suggestion as Bernstein could make, since he knew Karajan would have absolutely no idea what Mass was and indeed would have been uninterested in most any music by Leonard Bernstein. Besides whatever jealousies and suspicions were lurking in the room, Karajan rarely demonstrated an interest in any music by living composers. And, perhaps predictably, Bernstein’s modest proposal was followed by silence and a call for coffee.

After relating this story to me, Bernstein added, as if to teach me how to behave, “I have no interest in participating in a Dirigentenkrieg,” which is one of those invented German words: “conductors’ war.”

Bernstein then recounted that he had first met Karajan in Milan in 1955. Karajan was conducting Carmen at La Scala and Bernstein was waiting for rehearsals for a revival of La Bohème that had been postponed due to the illness of tenor Giuseppe di Stefano. After attending a performance of Carmen, Bernstein told Karajan that his conducting was “the greatest opera conducting I have ever experienced…except mine, of course.” This typical example of Bernstein’s dry sense of humor “was completely lost on Herbert, who shook his head with Germanic seriousness, and said, ‘Of course.’ ” Karajan suggested that Lenny go skiing while waiting for La Scala to reschedule the Bohème performances. When Lenny said he did not have his skiing clothes with him, Karajan said he would lend him some of his. That is when Bernstein learned that his Austrian colleague was “one centimeter shorter.” Bernstein accepted the loan as a gesture of friendship. “After all,” he said to me dryly, “he was my first Nazi.”

And therein lies the point about conductors and conducting: it is all-consuming to those who practice it. Even the greatest conductors tell stories about other conductors, while generally focusing on those who are no longer alive—insulation against appearing to show any animosity. Conducting techniques are taught and passed on like a medieval trade, from master to young apprentice.

The secrets, however—what in other fields would be called the tricks of the trade—are frequently guarded from master to master. When Bernstein made his long-anticipated debut with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1979, it was with Mahler’s Symphony no. 9, which, he said, he “taught” to the orchestra. Even great orchestras need to be guided through a work when it plays that piece for the first time. (The Berliners had not played the symphony in decades, and it was for all practical purposes new to them in 1979.) An orchestra’s first-time experience means the conductor is talking much more, explaining to the players how the piece functions, where a melody might lie, how to address the multitude of interpretive choices to be made, and perhaps even giving background information about the composer and his inspiration. Once an orchestra has a collective knowledge of a work—usually the product of years of performances with many conductors—this is no longer required or desired by the players.

The boxes of violin parts, percussion books, woodwind and brass folders—Bernstein’s personal set of orchestral parts used by the orchestra for the Mahler symphony and filled with Bernstein’s emendations, his “tricks,” if you will—had not been returned to New York when he arrived home. Conductors usually have their own set of parts to works they frequently perform. If a work is in the public domain, like a Beethoven symphony, the maestro buys and owns the set of parts from publishers. If the work is still under copyright—that is, the composition cannot be played without payments and consent of the owner or its estate—music companies that have been granted the legal rights to rent the orchestral materials will reserve a set for the famous maestro so no one else can use it and change whatever markings have been added to it.1 There are two reasons for this. First of all, the parts will indicate specific editorial decisions by the conductor, such as beating patterns (“in 2,” “in 4”), and bowings (how the string sections divide up the thousands of notes in their parts into groups according to whether the bow is going upwards or downwards). Both of these can significantly change the way the music sounds. Leopold Stokowski, for instance, occasionally asked for “free bowing,” so that the various sections were not playing with synchronized bow strokes. This created a seamless sound of tremendous control and intensity, even if it looked untidy to an audience.

The other reason is that the parts contain secrets. These secrets will include changes so that certain notes are played louder or softer than the printed dynamics. They may include rewriting, so that (unknown to the listener) certain notes are reinforced by other instruments, or are altered in terms of articulations (accents, lengths of notes) in order to bring out aspects of the work that a conductor wishes to present. And since Mahler never lived long enough to conduct his Ninth Symphony, a conductor has an even greater responsibility to alter (and in his mind, improve) what is on the page, translating the intent with the reality of a living orchestra.2 Bernstein was a Mahler expert, and had conducted the Ninth perhaps more than anyone else in the world, and he was the possessor of years of experience, much of which could be found in his orchestral parts. Karajan was more of a novice in this repertory, having shown little interest in the composer and his nine symphonies.

There were phone calls and letters as Bernstein’s New York office attempted to have his musical materials sent back from Berlin. Months went by. Karajan subsequently recorded the Mahler Ninth with the Berliners and won the Gramophone Award for it. Afterwards, when Bernstein’s music was returned, he was convinced that Karajan had used all of the Bernstein markings for his performances and recording—and Bernstein made sure everyone knew about it.

Perhaps Karajan was playing payback to Bernstein, who, Karajan claimed, had replicated his Beethoven Ninth with the New York Philharmonic in 1958. Karajan had conducted four performances with the Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall, and a week later Bernstein presented a television show on the symphony, which so recently had been rehearsed and molded by Karajan.

Karajan and Bernstein were not immune to jealousy and thievery—as if anyone could replicate another’s performance. Since Karajan did not possess Bernstein’s score of the Mahler, just the parts, he would have had only a partial understanding of Lenny’s edits. He would have had to hear them in rehearsal, since Karajan’s score would have been simply the published text. And while he could have listened to archival recordings of the Bernstein performance, the truth is that Karajan’s Mahler Ninth has a completely different impact from Bernstein’s. The same work as performed by two different conductors with the same orchestra within months of each other can and will have totally different effects on a listener, even when some of the ingredients in the magic spell are the same. “Give three great chefs the same recipe and they will come up with three different dishes” is an aphorism that can be applied to a musical score and its great interpreters.

Bernstein’s tempos in his interpretation of the Mahler are in a constant state of fluctuation: He frequently slows down to prepare the listener for something he wants you to notice; he makes the little, sad two-note melody of the first movement into something like an inhalation/exhalation. Karajan, on the other hand, casts the opening moments of the symphony with much less alteration of tempo. Instead he builds inexorably toward each new climax, reserving his rallentandos—the broadening of his tempos—for the longer impact by using the tempo-fluctuation technique less, and thereby giving the impression of a great arch rather than a series of smaller, well-articulated ones. And all of this—and its implications for the rest of the symphony—happens during the first minutes of this epic work.

All great conductors are different. The mediocre ones are more or less the same.

The person who stands before a symphony orchestra is charged with something both impossible and improbable. The impossible part is herding a hundred musicians to agree on anything, and the improbable part is that one does it by waving one’s hands in the air. It is, after all, a kind of alchemy. Music is the one art form that is invisible. It is controlled sound, constructed to pass through time in a series of transformations. Perhaps it is logical that when leadership is needed for something invisible, the appointed leader does so by gesticulation, without making a sound.

The art of conducting does not go back all that many years—something like two centuries—though it is a kind of medieval guild and is taught through demonstration by older masters. It also exudes a mysterious attraction to anyone who has ever seen a conductor at work. “It must be amazing to feel all that power,” people have often said to me (almost always businessmen). In response, I usually say something along the lines of never being overtly aware of having any power at all. To me, it is a daunting responsibility, first and foremost, though I am very aware of the powerful forces passing through me.

“It must be such a glamorous life!” is another comment I’ve often heard. In fact, more often than not you pack seemingly everything you own into two very heavy suitcases—conducting clothes in one suitcase, civilian clothes in the other, your scores in your carry-on bag—fly to another time zone, settle into an indifferent hotel, set up your room to function as your studio, and set the alarm to awaken you at an ungodly hour, forcing your unwilling body into being “ready,” and then you walk in the rain to the stage door and say to a person behind the glass, “Good morning. I’m the guest conductor,” or words to that effect in one of several languages, and you face one hundred bored civil servants, also known as the orchestra—in many countries orchestras are government employees, after all—and begin a rehearsal of a piece they either know all too well or have never heard but are predisposed not to like. At that moment, glamour is the last thing that comes to mind.

Yet we do it and pursue it, frustrated when we are not invited to conduct the music we love, disappointed when we are not asked back, convinced that every performance was great because it was great, huffing at someone else’s performance (“There’s a tenuto [a hold] on that note, and he plays it short!”), and looking over our shoulder to see who is getting what job and where and how he (usually he) got that job. The answer is never “Because he’s better than you.” There is always a “reason,” and that reason is usually extramusical—politics, money, sex.

The pull, however, is profound, and the joy of being in the epicenter between the making of the sound and the reception of that sound exerts a druglike attraction. While it is difficult enough to be good at it, under the right conditions an unpredictable and divine “agreement” is achieved between the musicians and the audience, and one can be great at it. That is when you are part of something that imprints lives, creates unforgettable memories, illuminates mysteries, stops time, and links our very essence as humans to everything and everyone. Yes, it can be that.

And it can be horribly frustrating, too. The conductor always tries to be totally prepared and to say and do the right thing to the orchestra. Sometimes we feel animosity before even getting to the podium for the first rehearsal. Rating sheets are used by orchestras so that players can express their opinions of the conductors who lead them. It is highly classified information, used internally to decide if a guest conductor will be reinvited. I remember seeing the rating sheet on everyone’s stand before my last rehearsal with one American orchestra many years ago. I thought it might be better if it could be filled out after the performances—the goal of our work together—rather than before the dress rehearsal. I can also remember a musician coming up to me and telling me that my recent performance at another orchestra (which was looking for a music director) had received the highest rating “anyone had ever seen.” (Telling me was, needless to say, a breach of etiquette.) Subsequently, I was not offered the position, and it was cold comfort indeed to run into a member of that orchestra—now defunct—who said she had played for me and could not understand why I wasn’t offered the post, “instead of the schmuck they hired. If it had been you, we would still have an orchestra.” This, too, is a trap, since saying anything at all can and will be used in future conversations, even if it was meant as an honest compliment.

No conductor can do his or her work without an orchestra. We can practice our craft only by doing it; we can hardly rehearse alone in a studio. We are also the center of all criticism when someone does not like a performance. We can get a standing ovation, a great review, and still not be hired back. In other words, the entire process, also known as “your career,” seems random. It only looks like a linear progression when your life is compressed into a short biography found on your Web site.

It is a bit like the T-shirt golfers wear that says, “I hate this game. I hate this game. I hate this game. I love this game. I hate this game.” And when we are done with our work, we have absolutely nothing to show for it except a printed program, and reviews, if you are dumb enough to believe them—and who is not? I can still remember my frustration at not being able to show my mother anything tangible when I would return from a conducting assignment, except to tell a story of how wonderful it was. All of Leonard Bernstein’s early letters to his piano teacher Helen Coates are about how great he was and how the orchestra loved him. Reading them makes Lenny appear to be the greatest egomaniac of all time, and yet I perfectly understand how he wished to bring joy to the woman we all knew as “Miss Coates,” who had not been there to see her beloved young student conduct. And Lenny also wanted his ephemeral activities in far-off lands as he was building a career to be somehow preserved, if only in words. Later, it would be in recordings and on television, but in those postwar years, he was documenting his life and fully expected those letters to be saved, which they were.

Fifty years as a conductor perhaps permits me to explore and remember, to explain and justify, to share stories told by the great men I knew, who implicitly knew I would pass them along. We will explore a world few people really know—what goes into it, what it feels like, and what I have learned from the masters and the magic. Maybe all of this will inform your next concert experience and help you to better hear with your ears, eyes, heart, and brain, when the music once again starts.

Three generations of conductors and a diva share stories: me, André Previn, and Alan Gilbert with soprano Renée Fleming at Carnegie Hall in 2017.