The orchestra and orchestral music

by W. J. Henderson

PART III

How the Orchestra is Directed

XII
Development of the Conductor

It is not so easy to define the functions of the conductor of an orchestra as it may seem to be, because at present there is a general tendency to exaggerate one element of his labor, namely, the interpretative. “Readings” are the order of the day, and we are invited to consider Mr. Paur’s reading of Beethoven’s C minor symphony, Mr. Nikisch’s interpretation of the same, and again Mr. Gericke’s, and to compare them one with another, as we might compare Mr. Barnay’s performance of Hamlet with that of Wilson Barrett. The conductor’s magnetism, his personality, his style, even the cut of his cuffs have thrust themselves between the public and the immortal works of the masters, until it seems as if there must come a reaction which will drive us back to the ancient time-beater. Perhaps it will be advisable, before considering conducting in the abstract, to trace briefly the development of the conductor.

It is impossible to tell when the conductor made his appearance in music. There seems to have been the widest diversity in the customs of different places and different times. In modern music, which may fairly date from the time when vocal and instrumental composition started upon lines of independent development, namely, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the conductor was at first nothing more than a leader. He was one of the performers whom the rest followed. His function is preserved to-day by the leader of the college glee-club. Yet long before the year 1600 there certainly were conductors who used the baton. An ancient manuscript in a Parisian library contains an illustration (which the reader will find reproduced in Emil Naumann’s “History of Music”) showing Heinrich von Meissen, a minnesinger who died in 1318, conducting a choir of singers and players. He is seated on a raised platform and is using a long baton in his left hand and the extended finger of his right. His attitude and facial expression clearly express his intent to guide those below him, or correct someone who is going astray. Two or three of the figures in the choir seem to be repeating his beat.

What became of conductors of this kind between 1318 and 1600 I have been unable to discover. The early operatic performances in Italy, however, were conducted by the harpsichordist, who played the chords sustaining the dry recitative and led the rest of the performers in the orchestral passages. This method of conducting followed Italian opera into Germany and France. Lully’s works were conducted in this manner, and when young Pelham Humphreys, one of the gentlemen of the King’s Chapel, returned from his studies in France, “a young monsieur,” as Pepys notes, and made fun of the performances of his former companions because they could not keep time, he must have shown them how his master, Lully, conducted. At any rate, the conducting of operatic performances at the harpsichord was common in the time of his pupil, Purcell, and when Handel, who had been writing Italian operas for the Germans, went to London, he, too, conducted his own works while sitting at the harpsichord. Heinrich Schütz must certainly have learned this method of conducting when he went down to Italy to get the score of Peri’s “Daphne” for the delectation of the Dresden court, even if he had not known it before. This would account for the introduction into Germany of the Italian method of opera conducting, and it was continued, of course, at Hamburg under Reinhard Keiser and afterward under Handel. Sufficiently numerous pen-pictures of Handel have come down to us, and we know that he conducted the performances of his operas in Germany sitting at the harpsichord.

How did these harpsichordists conduct? Undoubtedly, sometimes with a nod of the head, sometimes with a wave of the hand, and occasionally, perhaps, with a most emphatic stamp of the foot. Not a little light is thrown upon the various methods of conducting by the records of the practices of the church musicians. It appears that even in the days of Handel and Bach there were different ways of conducting church music. Johann Bähr, concert-master at Weissenfels, says, in a book published in Nuremberg in 1719, that “one man conducts with the foot, another with the head, a third with the hand, some with both hands, some again take a roll of paper, and others a stick.” It is perfectly clear, from other remarks of Bähr, that these different methods were applied to different kinds of performances. A Nuremberg engraving, published certainly before 1725, shows a music-conductor with a roll of music in each hand directing the performance of a motet from a score. There is an inscription in verse which shows very plainly that this was a real conductor. “Silent myself, I cause the music I control,” is one of the lines whose meaning is not doubtful. There are other pictures, of about the same date, which show the church-music conductor standing in the midst of a group of singers and players in front of the organ and directing with a roll of music. In some cases the leader of the choir used a violin, with which he could keep the singers on the pitch.

But it seems as if the quiet style of conducting at the harpsichord, as practised in the opera-houses, must have commended itself to the German church musicians as eminently suited to the sanctuary, for, after 1730, the conductors of sacred music ceased to stand and beat time continually. The custom of conducting all kinds of performances from the harpsichord spread. Sometimes the time was indicated by motions of the hand, at others by the sound of the instrument. Thus, in Germany, undemonstrative harpsichord conducting became popular, while in ever-theatrical France, where the eye must always be fed, the practice of conducting with the baton became general. This led to the scathing remark of Rousseau: “The Opera in Paris is the only theatre in Europe where they beat the time without keeping it; in all other places they keep time without beating it.” The influence of Hasse’s conducting of the Dresden orchestra had much to do with the common adoption of the harpsichord method in Germany. In the [diagram of the Dresden orchestra] given in Chapter XV. the reader will see that there were two harpsichords. The conductor sat at the one in the centre; the player who performed the figured bass part sat at the other.

In his famous “Life of Bach,” Dr. Philip Spitta, to whose indefatigable labors of research I am indebted for the above information as to methods of church conducting, says: “When Bach entered on his duties he had the harpsichord in the Thomaskirche [in Leipsic], which had become useless, set in order forthwith, and got the Council to expend the sum of six thalers a year upon keeping it regularly tuned, but it was out of use again in the year 1733.” In regard to the use of the harpsichord for conducting. Dr. Spitta quotes the words of Bach’s son, Philipp Emmanuel, who wrote:

“The notes of the clavier [the German name for any instrument of the piano family], which stands in the middle, surrounded by the musicians, are clearly heard by all. For I myself know that even performances on a large scale, where the performers are far apart, and in which many very moderate musicians take part voluntarily, can be kept in order simply by the tone of the harpsichord. If the first violinist stands, as he should, near the harpsichord, it is difficult for any confusion to ensue.... If, however, anybody begins to hurry or drag the time, he can be corrected in the plainest possible way by means of the clavier; while the other instruments have enough to do with their own parts because of the number of passages and syncopations; and especially the parts which are in tempo rubato by this means get the necessary emphatic up-beat of the bar marked for them. Lastly, by this method—since the musicians are not hindered by the noise of the clavier from perceiving the slightest nuances of time—the pace can be slightly lessened, as is often necessary; and the musicians who stand behind or near the clavier have the beat of the bar given out in the most evident, and consequently the most emphatic, way before their eyes by both hands at once.”

These words are singularly enlightening as to the exact methods and advantages of harpsichord conducting, and they go far toward explaining the reasons why this method survived as long as it did. It continued to be used, as we shall presently see, long after the time-beater had become a fixed institution and even in conjunction with his work. Undoubtedly, this was because the older orchestral players had become so thoroughly schooled to follow the harpsichordist that they could not be induced to give their whole attention to the time-beater and the counting of their own rests. Gradually, however, as the wind choir of the modern orchestra increased in power, the harpsichord was unable to make itself heard, and it had to give way to a method of conducting which appealed wholly to the eye. It was doubtless owing to the continued existence of old musicians trained in the early school that for a time the harpsichord and the baton were employed simultaneously. It is not at all unlikely that in some instances a distinguished composer, whose work was undergoing the ordeal of a first hearing, was invited to sit at the harpsichord, where he pretended much and did little, while his presence added to the interest of the public, and someone else really conducted the performance with a baton. The first violin, too, played an important part in the conducting of an orchestra, so much so that to this day he is known either as the concert-master or the leader, although his functions have wholly changed.

At one time he was the only conductor that some orchestras had. Part of the time he played, leading the others by the motions of his bow and by raising and lowering the neck of his violin on the beats. Again he would cease to play and conduct with the violin bow. He was known as the leader of the orchestra, and his descendant exists in the contemporaneous theatre, where the first violinist of the little orchestra of eight or ten pieces is the leader. Some concert-goers will doubtless recall the fact that both Johann and Eduard Strauss conducted their dance-music in this manner.

In Haydn’s day the performance of symphonic music enlisted both harpsichordist and time-beater, and at the famous London concerts for which the genial master composed some of his best symphonies, he himself sat at the harpsichord, while Salomon, the manager of the entertainments, beat time. That a similar method should have been employed in the performance of vocal works even in the present century is not surprising, but we must bear in mind that it was applied to compositions whose scores contain no clavier parts. At Vienna, in 1808, Haydn’s “Creation” was performed with Kreuzer at the harpsichord and Salieri conducting. In 1815 Beethoven’s “Mount of Olives” was given in the same city with Umlauf at the piano and Wranitzky conducting. At the Berlin Singakadamie Zelter used to beat time while one of his pupils was at the harpsichord. The practice of conducting from the piano, even without the time-beater, clung tenaciously to life, for it is on record that Mendelssohn, at a concert of the London Philharmonic Society in the Argyll Rooms, on May 25, 1829, conducted his symphony in C minor from a piano. It may be as well to note here that the eminent composer, Ludwig Spohr, in 1820 introduced the modern manner of conducting in England. He stood at a desk at the front of the stage and directed with a baton. He describes in his autobiography the general opposition of the Philharmonic musicians which he had to overcome in order to begin this practice. “Henceforth,” he says, “no one was ever again seen seated at the piano during the performance of symphonies and overtures.” He was not informed of Mendelssohn’s piano conducting.

We have now come to the period when the mere time-beater began to give way to the interpreting conductor, the director who invites you to consider his especial “reading” of this or that work and be wise. Before we leave the time-beater, however, let me remind the reader that his function is by no means to be despised, and in the case of some suave and gentle classical works it would be well if he presided over the performances of some of our present orchestras. Berlioz has said: “The talent of the beater of time, without demanding very high musical attainments, is nevertheless sufficiently difficult to obtain; and very few persons really possess it. The signs that a conductor should make—although generally simple—nevertheless become complicated under certain circumstances by the division and even the subdivision of the time of the bar.” Berlioz has given us, in the concluding chapter of his admirable work on orchestration, an essay on the art of the time-beater, which is well worth reading. It is sufficient to say here that the old-fashioned time-beater’s work was complete when he indicated the correct tempo, and plainly marked the beginning and necessary subdivisions of each bar.

When the composer conducted his own works, as was so often the case in the earlier days of symphonic music, there was no need of an interpretative conductor. But when the composer had long passed from the land of the living and the traditions of his readings had become obscured, or when his works were to be introduced in a foreign country—as in the case of Beethoven’s symphonies in France—the interpretative conductor became a necessity. Furthermore, when the art of conducting began to be recognized as a specialty, it was conceded that composers were generally poor conductors of their own works, and the orchestral director became a distinct species. Hector Berlioz, for example, could not play any instrument save the guitar, and Richard Wagner was only a very poor pianist; yet both were admirable conductors.

The interpreting conductor came into existence in the early part of the present century. It cannot be said that any one man was the first representative of the species, but rather that it was one of the first-fruits of the romantic movement, that healthy renaissance of musical emotion. Both German capellmeisters and French directors had occupied themselves wholly with the regulation of the technics of the orchestra, and if the tempo was about right and the instruments kept well together and gave the broader effects of light and shade, they were satisfied. But two or three progressive conductors insisted upon further refinement of orchestral performance.

Johann Karl Stamitz (1719-61), director of the Mannheim orchestra, and François Joseph Gossec (1733-1829), founder of the Concert des Amateurs in Paris, were the two conductors who carried orchestral technics up to the point at which genuine interpretative work became possible by reason of the refinement of the means of expression. It was in studying the means of orchestral expression that these conductors gradually approached the questions of interpretation. As they polished the phrasing of their orchestras, they began to inquire whether they were applying their nuances in the proper places, and so they advanced toward that point at which the interpreting conductor sits down before a score to study out a complete plan of performance deduced from his conception of the intent of the composer. Gossec founded the Concert des Amateurs in 1770 and was himself the conductor. Symphonies by Toeschi, Vanhall, Stamitz and other composers were produced, and the conductor had at any rate to decide the tempo and place the broader dynamic effects according to his own conception, for these matters were not carefully marked in the scores as they are now.

Before Gossec’s death the modern interpretative conductor had made his appearance. Spohr, Mendelssohn, and Weber were early representatives of the species. All three of them occupied at different times posts of the highest importance in the department of conducting. Spohr at Cassel, Mendelssohn in the Leipsic Gewandhaus, and Weber at the Dresden Opera were, without doubt, interpreting conductors. They advanced without hesitation beyond the mere study of orchestral technics to the study of the correct style and feeling in the performance. Spohr was an enthusiast on the subject of Mozart’s music, and he conducted Mozart’s symphonies according to his own ideas. Weber revived old German operas and treated them as he believed their composers would have treated them. Mendelssohn was the resurrector of Bach’s Passion music, which had lain buried for a century, and he was not silent as to his conception of its proper performance.

The most conspicuous figure among the early interpreting conductors was unquestionably François Antoine Habeneck (1781-1849), the founder of the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire. Habeneck was compelled to be an interpreter. He was a conductor pure and simple. He had no gospel of his own to preach, but he aimed at making the symphonies of Beethoven known in France, and he was thus forced to become an interpreter of the mighty Ludwig’s thought. He not only brought the Conservatoire orchestra to a remarkably high point of technical ability, but he conducted Beethoven’s music with a force, a sentiment, a nobility of style that carried conviction with it and compelled Paris to acknowledge the genius of the German master. Berlioz, himself a skilful conductor, has rendered homage to Habeneck’s powers, and there is abundant testimony that he was the Richter or the Gericke (or whom you please) of his day.

The list of conductors of the Leipsic Gewandhaus concerts shows conclusively that, so far as they were concerned, interpretative conducting began with Mendelssohn. His predecessors were merely good leaders; his successors have all been men of talent, such as Ferdinand Hiller, Julius Rietz, Neils Gade, and Karl Reinecke. In France it is easy to follow the succession of great interpretative conductors. Habeneck conducted the concerts of the Conservatoire until 1848. In 1851 Jules Etienne Pasdeloup founded and conducted the first concert of the Société des Jeunes Artistes du Conservatoire. In 1873 Colonne began his career as a conductor, and in the same year Lamoureux made himself a place. These men are admirable representatives of the genus conductor as known in our day.

There is no doubt that the art of interpretative conducting received a strong impulse in Germany from the work of Richard Wagner, who entered upon his career as a director at the Magdeburg Theatre in the autumn of 1834. It was not so much by his individual labors as a conductor that Wagner aided in the development of the interpreting art as by his fiery castigation of the mechanical and slovenly work of careless capellmeisters, and his luminous words upon the right method of directing orchestral performances. In the spread of his doctrines he was mightily aided, first by the admirable conducting of Liszt, and afterward by that of Hans von Bülow, without doubt, one of the best conductors who ever set foot on the platform. His readings of Wagner were, of course, authoritative, and his interpretations of Beethoven carried with them so much conviction that they were regarded as equally so. Dr. Hans Richter, who came into prominence in 1875, carried forward the work, and Germany has since produced a number of the most eminent interpreting conductors. Indeed, there can be no question that the best representatives of the class have been and still are German or Austrian, including Hungarian in the latter.

In the United States all the eminent conductors have been men whose early musical nourishment was obtained in Germany. The conductors of the Philharmonic Society of New York began with Theodore Eisfeld, who came into notice in the season of 1849-50. Subsequently he shared his labors with Carl Bergmann, who became the sole conductor in 1865 and remained in office till the close of the season of 1875-76. Mr. Bergmann was an interpreting conductor and a determined advocate of certain advances in music. Once, when he had been giving his hearers a good deal of Wagner, someone expostulated with him, saying, “But, Mr. Bergmann, the people don’t like Wagner.” “Don’t like Vagner!” answered Bergmann; “den dey must hear him till dey do!”

Copyright by Elliott & Fry.

HANS RICHTER.

Mr. Bergmann’s successor was Leopold Damrosch, who conducted the Philharmonic only a year, but left an imperishable record as the founder of the Oratorio Society and the regenerator of German opera in New York. Of the labors of Theodore Thomas and Anton Seidl it is unnecessary to speak. As interpreting conductors they have not been excelled in America in their especial fields. In Boston, Carl Zerrahn, Georg Henschel, Wilhelm Gericke, Arthur Nikisch, and Emil Paur did notable work as interpreting conductors. The tendency in our day, indeed, has been to do a little too much interpreting, and as a result the conductor has too frequently distracted attention from the music to himself. The public, prone to run after a virtuoso of any kind, has readily bowed the knee at the shrine of the baton-wielder, and we have beheld the curious spectacle of people going not to hear Beethoven or Wagner, but Nikisch or Seidl.

XIII
Functions of the Conductor

Perhaps nothing connected with the orchestra is more completely misunderstood by amateurs than the functions of the conductor. I remember that in the days of a certain distinguished orchestral director there were two of his ardent admirers who always occupied seats in the front row, just a little to his left. There they sat, with rapt expressions on their faces, gazing at the conductor. They never took their eyes off him, and I am morally certain they had finally come to think that the whole of every composition emanated from the swaying end of his baton. They overrated the importance of the conductor, but not so much more than the average concert-goer. The first and radical blunder made by the typical music-lover is in supposing that the work of a conductor is done at the performance. In some mysterious way this man with a stick in his hand is supposed to hypnotize, magnetize, or just vulgarly scare the musicians into playing certain music according to impulses which have just developed in his breast. I have heard people coming out of a concert-room say such things as these:

“I thought Mr. Seidl was very cold to-night, didn’t you?”

“Yes, he was, indeed. That’s why I liked Nikisch so much; he always kept the orchestra on fire.”

There is a substratum of truth in all this kind of talk. A conductor of cold temperament will not give highly colored readings, nor will he excite enthusiasm in his orchestra. A conductor of poetic feeling will conduct poetically and he will make his orchestra play so. But neither of them accomplishes his result suddenly and spontaneously at the performance. All that a conductor does at a performance is to remind his players of what he told them at rehearsal. It could not be otherwise, for the beat of the baton and the utterance of the sound by the instruments is almost simultaneous.

To remind the musicians of what he has already instructed them to do, the conductor employs certain pantomimic motions and facial expressions, some of which have been so generally used that they are conventional, while others are, of course, peculiar to the individual. Everyone knows, for example, that Hans von Bülow was fond of conducting with an eye to effect upon the audience, and that some of his pantomime was comic. In a diminuendo I have seen him stoop lower and lower till he was almost hidden behind the music-stand, and at a sudden forte he would spring up again like a jack-in-the-box. No one can ever forget those spasmodic, but tremendously eloquent, jerks of the chin with its long beard which Dr. Leopold Damrosch used to aim at his men when there was a staccato chord to be played. Who does not recall the eloquent hands of Nikisch and the equally eloquent cuffs of Seidl? Thomas, with his occasional sidewise cant of the head, and Richter, with the apparently increasing confusion of his hair and his beard, also come back to my memories of pictorial peculiarities of conductors.

Besides these peculiarities, conductors have their own habits in the use of the baton, and orchestras must necessarily become accustomed to them in order that they may not be misled at critical moments. For it does, indeed, happen sometimes at the public performances that things go wrong, and then the conductor must contrive to set them straight; and he must do it entirely by his pantomime, for the privilege of the rehearsal, to stop the orchestra and begin again, is no longer his. At the rehearsal he can tell what he desires, but in the concert he must go on. It is at the rehearsal, however, that the real work of the conductor is done. At the performance he must confine himself to beating time, to indicating to those players who have rests when they are to begin again, to a warning look here in case a part is played too loudly, or to an encouraging nod there in case one is not played loudly enough.

I have often heard persons not unfamiliar with concerts declare that a conductor was of no use because the players never looked at him. This is a rather large statement. The players do not look at the conductor all the time, because they are obliged to occupy themselves chiefly with reading music, but they look at him frequently, and they do so invariably at essential places. Furthermore, they always see him out of the corners of their eyes, as the saying goes, while they are reading the pages before them.

The function of a conductor, as it stands to-day, can best be understood by applying to him the definition given at the beginning of this book. The orchestra is an instrument upon which he performs. Hector Berlioz, the famous French composer, said that the only instrument upon which he could play was the orchestra, and in that he resembled Richard Wagner, who was an indifferent pianist, and Anton Seidl, who was a very bad one. The conductor plays upon an orchestra, not by waving a baton and magnetizing his men, but by carefully instructing them at rehearsal as to what he desires them to do, and by going over it and over it again till the execution of his design is perfected. A conductor, then, must come to the rehearsal with a completely prepared plan of interpretation. He must know the score thoroughly. He must have analyzed every measure. He must be in the same position as the skilled theatrical stage-manager who has planned every bit of “stage business” for a new play before he goes to the first rehearsal.

At the rehearsal he must explain his wishes to the men, and play through each movement of a symphony piece-meal before he undertakes to go through it without a stop. A judicious conductor makes no attempt to put a poetic explanation before his orchestra. He works entirely on the technics of the performance, and leaves the temperament and enthusiasm of his men to do the rest. A conductor once went from another city to Boston to conduct an orchestra at the first appearance in this country of an eminent pianist, whose pièce de resistance was to be Liszt’s E flat concerto. At the beginning of the scherzo there are some lightly tripping notes for the triangle, which the player struck too heavily to please the conductor’s fancy. He rapped with his baton to stop the orchestra.

“Sir,” he said, gravely, addressing the triangle player, “those notes should sound like a blue-bell struck by a fairy.”

Whereupon the whole body of instrumentalists burst into uncontrollable laughter. I told this story subsequently to a New York musician, a member of Theodore Thomas’s orchestra, and he looked so amazed that I said:

“But doesn’t Mr. Thomas talk to you at rehearsal?”

“Oh, yes! Oh, certainly!” was the reply.

“Well, what does he say?”

“He says ‘D——n!’”

Richard Wagner, who was nothing if not polemic, wrote a book on conducting, in which there are some pregnant assertions, as there are in all his writings. He says: “The whole duty of a conductor is comprised in his ability always to indicate the right tempo. His choice of tempi will show whether he understands the piece or not. With good players again the true tempo induces correct phrasing and expression, and conversely, with a conductor, the idea of appropriate phrasing and expression will induce the conception of the true tempo.” There is an essential truth in this statement, but its writer did not add those corollaries which are necessary to constitute the whole truth, especially for the amateur. The passage which immediately precedes the above statement explains why Wagner looked upon the tempo as the most important matter for the conductor to decide. He says: “In the days of my youth orchestral pieces at the celebrated Leipsic Gewandhaus concerts were not conducted at all; they were simply played through under the leadership of Concertmeister Mathäi, like overtures and entr’actes at a theatre.” Such performances annoyed and discouraged Wagner; but in 1839 he got a valuable lesson from hearing the Conservatoire orchestra of Paris rehearse a Beethoven symphony under Habeneck. “The scales fell from my eyes,” he says; “I came to understand the value of correct execution, and the secret of a good performance. The orchestra had learned to look for Beethoven’s melody in every bar—that melody which the worthy Leipsic musicians had failed to discover; and the orchestra sang that melody. This was the secret.” A little farther on he says: “The French idea of playing an instrument well is to be able to sing well upon it. And (as already said) that superb orchestra sang the symphony. The possibility of its being well sung implies that the true tempo had been found; and this was the second point which impressed me at the time. Old Habeneck was not the medium of any abstract æsthetical inspiration—he was devoid of genius; but he found the right tempo while persistently fixing the attention of his orchestra upon the Melos[1] of the symphony. The right comprehension of the Melos is the sole guide to the true tempo.”

[1] Melody in all its aspects.

These words of Wagner’s are excellent, but they may convey an exaggerated conception of the case to an amateur. It is beyond dispute that if the tempo is incorrect, the performance must inevitably be weak or utterly bad; but it does not follow that when the tempo is right, all will be satisfactory. Nevertheless, it is true that the first and most important duty of the conductor is to decide the tempo, and that he can only do by a complete comprehension of the musical character of the composition. In music written since Beethoven’s day the conductor has something to guide him in the matter of tempo, as I shall presently show; but in earlier compositions he will find only such general terms as allegro, adagio, or andante. He will not even discover such attempts at specification as andante con moto, allegro pesante, or presto ma non troppo.

These directions are not sufficiently precise. Wagner himself tells how he wrote “Mässig” (moderate) in the score of “Das Rheingold,” with the result that the drama took three hours under the opera conductor. “To match this,” he adds, “I have been informed that the overture to ‘Tannhäuser,’ which, when I conducted it at Dresden, used to last 12 minutes, now lasts 20.” Wagner notes that Sebastian Bach did not customarily indicate the tempo at all, “which in a truly musical sense is perhaps best.” But to leave all movements without tempo marks would be to assume that all conductors were truly gifted. Since Beethoven’s latter days it has been the custom of composers to indicate the correct tempo by what is known as the metronome mark.

A metronome is an instrument which can be set to tick off with a pendulum any number of beats from forty to two hundred and eight a minute. A composer desiring to indicate a tempo uses a formula like this: M. M.

= 78.

The letters M. M. mean Maelzel’s Metronome (the instrument). The note (in this case a minim) means that the beats of the pendulum are to be regarded as representing minims, crotchets, or quavers, as the case may be. The figure indicates the number of beats per minute. In the above formula the composition would probably be one written in two-fourth time, that is, with one minim to a bar, and the metronome mark would indicate that seventy-eight minims, and hence in this case seventy-eight bars, were to be played each minute.

A metronome mark must not be understood as requiring a rigid adherence to its prescription in every bar of a movement. It is simply a method of expressing the general rate of progress. A conductor could not count every bar by the metronome without abandoning all attempts at accelerandi or ritardandi, and generally reducing his performance to a mathematical state of rectangularity. All flexibility, elegance, and nuance would disappear from such a rendering.

For dance-music played at a ball, strict adherence to the metronome mark throughout a composition would be admissible; and it would be really desirable in the case of a military march, in which the tactics prescribe the cadence as one hundred and twenty steps a minute; but it is not to be tolerated in artistic concert music. The metronome mark establishes the general movement, and that is all.

Any music-lover who desires to find out the right tempo of a metronomed composition can do so by using a watch with a second hand. If he times the number of measures to be played in five or ten seconds, he can get at the tempo. Similarly, he can “hold the watch” on a conductor in the performance of any piece with an established tempo. Here again, however, he must beware of exaggerated accuracy.

If the metronome mark, for example, is a dotted crotchet equal to 104, as in the allegro of the first movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, and the conductor takes the tempo at 108 or 109, there is no ground for serious complaint. But if he should take it at 134, as I once heard it taken by an eminent conductor, the music-lover has ground for a vigorous protest. The reader might amuse himself and get an immense amount of suggestive information by playing some well-known compositions at exaggerated tempi. He would speedily be convinced that Wagner was right in believing that the chief duty of the conductor was to ascertain the correct tempo.

But Wagner is not quite explicit enough when he says that this is the conductor’s whole duty. The whole duty of the conductor is to regulate every item of the orchestral performance. It must be done according to his design. You may say that this prevents all individual warmth on the part of the players, but it need not do so. The conductor is the stage-manager; the instrumentalists are the actors. They play their parts as the conductor tells them to play them; but that need not prevent them from entering fully into the spirit of the work.

The conductor’s conception of a composition is to be revealed through the performance by means of the distributions of light and shade, the relative importance given to the outer and inner voices of the score, by the placing of the climaxes of force and speed, and by the detailed accentuation of every phrase. It is at the rehearsals that the conductor imparts to the men of his orchestra his wishes in these matters, and causes them to go over and over certain passages till they are played to his satisfaction. He cannot do any of this at a performance. There he can only beat time, and in doing so remind his men, as I have already said, of what he told them at the rehearsals.

The conductor must see to it that significant passages allotted to instruments not playing the leading melody are brought out. Many of the most beautiful effects of orchestral compositions are contrapuntal, and they are too often lost through the incapacity or negligence of conductors. It requires close and sympathetic study of a score to find these bits. Who can ever forget how eloquently they were all made to speak in the Wagner dramas by Anton Seidl, and that, too, without ever overbalancing the voices of the singers? The whole warp and woof of the Wagner scores is polyphonic, the motives cross and recross one another in a never-ceasing double, triple, or quadruple counterpoint; and to give each its proper weight in the scale of force, requires, on the part of a conductor, complete knowledge, perfect appreciation, and absolute command of his forces.

In concluding the discussion of this topic let me add that the conductor is responsible for the general excellence of the work of his orchestra in its fundamental qualities. He must see that the balance of tone is preserved, by preventing one choir from playing too loudly to the detriment of another. He must insist upon proper bowing by the strings and equally proper blowing by the wind. And he must persistently drill his orchestra in precision and unanimity until these things become automatic, like the attack of a good singer. He is one of the princes in the kingdom of music, this man who turns his back upon us all that he may play with his little stick upon this hundred-voiced instrument; and if sometimes we lose ourselves in hysterical wonder at the results which he produces, and come to think that the baton is a magician’s wand, perhaps we are not so much to blame after all.