Ten men went to mow
Oliver Gilmour
THE VIRTUOSO CONDUCTORS: THE CENTRAL EUROPEAN TRADITION FROM WAGNER TO KARAJAN by Raymond Holden Yale, £22.50, pp. 370, ISBN 0300093268 ✆ £18 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Sitting at Stamford Bridge at the weekend, Chelsea trailing Bolton 0-1, I reflected on the nature of 11 brilliant players and their manager. After Mourinho’s half-time talk, Chelsea scored four goals in 10 minutes. There are inspiring and uninspiring gaffers. If he were a conductor, José Mourinho would be a virtuoso, but what does this imply? Passion, charisma, sensitivity, psychological insight and a spiritual dimension are all vital, but perhaps Otto Klemperer, one of the subjects of this impressive book, succeeded in subsuming all this into a simple phrase, ‘the power of suggestion’, in a 1969 interview: ‘The art of conducting lies, in my opinion, in the power of suggestion that the conductor exerts — on the audience as well as on the orchestra.’ The book comprises chapters on nine conductors plus an introduction on the way Wagner influenced their art, making it in effect ten. Holden’s choice, three of them famous composers, might seem arbitrary (the absence of Toscanini), but is fully justified by his subtitle, ‘The Central European Tradition from Wagner to Karajan’. He gives us a profound quote from perhaps the greatest conductor of the 20th century, in his chapter ‘The Transcendental Furtwängler’:
Great composers are seldom completely satisfactory performers ... Their coolness, or mistrust, towards their own passion which has so ruined their concepts ... gives them that suspicious coolness, that objectively standoffish attitude that we can see in Strauss, Pfitzner, Reger, etc.
Holden might have applied this to omit Richard Strauss from the line-up.
It is refreshing to learn as early as page six that The Spectator critic in 1855 was unimpressed by Wagner both as composer and conductor.
We are inclined to assume the inevitability, in terms of vertiginous ascent, of these famous figures. Holden is good on the pitfalls and setbacks that beleaguered them. After Furtwängler brought a performance of The Merry Widow to a standstill in Zurich, he was sacked and had to return to Munich to a minor non-conducting position. Klemperer’s bipolar condition frequently landed him in trouble; and even for Karajan the prospects looked grim until he was rescued by Walter Legge of EMI. Holden informs us that, when Furtwängler died in his mid-sixties, the Berlin Philharmonic approached Karajan to replace him for their US tour. He agreed on condition that the orchestra made him Conductor for Life. What impels a man to lay down such a condition? The vanity of von Karajan was awesome, but despite being narcissistic, nasty and Nazi, he was a superb conductor, a view that has been unfashionable in this country for a long time.
Conducting technique is certainly not one of the major criteria for greatness (you have to learn it in order to discard it). Holden tells us how Mahler’s conducting technique presented problems at Olmutz. He had a habit of passing his baton from his right to his left hand and covering his face with his free hand. He was subsequently spotted in a local café practising with a billiard cue. Furtwängler’s technique was all over the place; and Holden tells us that physical gestures were of only passing consequence to Klemperer, who later stated that when conducting he paid little attention to conducting technique because it distracted him from the music. ‘Any asino can conduct — but to make music — eh? Is difficile.’ (Toscanini.) Mahler stated, a little more profoundly, that what is interesting about music does not lie in the notes but behind the notes.
The basis of the Central European tradition investigated by Holden is constant tempo modification. When practised at its best this is imperceptible and allows the audience to feel the music in the ‘right’ tempo. A member of the author’s team of virtuoso conductors is Felix Weingartner. In an essay elsewhere, Weingartner wrote:
Neither the quickening nor the slowing of the tempo should ever give the impression of the spasmodic or the violent. We have in music no signs for all this. They exist only in the sentient soul.
This book is good in its non-polemical narrative style, particularly illuminating on pre-fame days. Mahler’s exhortation to Klemperer, ‘If after my death something doesn’t sound right, then change it’ might give food for thought to the authentic lobby. There is a chapter on Bruno Walter, ‘a moralist whereas I am an immoralist’, according to Klemperer, and indeed the current maestro superstar Valery Gergiev might be surprised to learn from Walter that conducting without a baton carries ‘the seeds of decay’. He prefers hands only, but at his 2005 Prom he seemed to be using a pencil stub between his thumb and index finger (or was it a toothpick?).
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