The art of conducting as we understand it can be said to date back to this triumvirate, von Weber, Spohr and Mendelssohn. Although all creative musicians of the first water (and who until the era of the modern travelling virtuoso was not primarily a creative musician), these men grasped in the greatest measure the tremendous importance of the proper interpretation of a musical composition and through their personal effort and skill as leaders raised the standard of performance wherever they directed. They realized the important difference between merely beating time and giving the living pulse or tempo of a composition.
Although Spohr is remembered today chiefly as a composer of violin concerti and duos that all pupils play, in his own time his prestige was equal to, if not greater than that of Beethoven. A man of inflexible character and peculiar critical methods, he was not in full sympathy with Beethoven and von Weber but on the other hand he vigorously espoused the cause of the new German school, even giving a performance of Wagner’s “Flying Dutchman” at a time when Wagner was not at all popular. Wagner never forgot his indebtedness to Spohr, who was the first German musician to recognize him. It was Spohr who introduced the system of marking the score with letters and numbers to facilitate rehearsing.
It is interesting to read Carl Maria von Weber’s directions for time beating. To quote him: “The beat must not be like a tyrannical mill-hammer but must be to the musical composition what the pulse beat is to the life of a human being. There are no slow tempi in which places do not occur which demand a faster movement in order to eliminate the tendency to drag. On the other hand there is no presto which has not contrasting episodes that must be played much slower to avoid the slighting of the expressive passages.—All accelerandi as well as ritardandi must be made skillfully, that is, gradually.” This is only a small example of the reforms brought about by the composer of “Oberon.”
Mendelssohn might be said to have been a living example of the rather worn expression “a born conductor.” Brought up in the most musical of households he was familiar with the orchestra from childhood and in his life time was equally famous as conductor and composer. Although his conducting was not entirely free from certain traits of superficiality and rigid elegance, Wagner’s biting criticism of him must be taken with a grain of salt.
Other prominent conductors of the romantic period were the composers Meyerbeer and Spontini.
It is possible to reconstruct a picture of Hector Berlioz as conductor from his own words. In his little book on the “Orchestral Conductor” he says: “The orchestral conductor should see and hear; he should be active and vigorous, should know the composition and the nature and compass of the instruments, should be able to read the score, and possess—besides the especial talent of which we shall presently endeavor to explain the constituent qualities—other indefinable gifts, without which an invisible link cannot establish itself between him and those he directs; otherwise the faculty of transmitting to them his feeling is denied him, and power, empire, and guiding influence completely fail him. He is then no longer a conductor, a director, but a simple beater of the time—supposing he knows how to beat it, and divide it, regularly.”
“The performers should feel that he feels, comprehends, and is moved; then his emotion communicates itself to those whom he directs, his inward fire warms them, his electric glow animates them, his force of impulse excites them; he throws around him the vital irradiations of musical art. If he is inert and frozen, on the contrary, he paralyzes all about him, like those floating masses of the polar seas, the approach of which is sensed through the sudden cooling of the atmosphere.”
“His task is a complicated one. He has not only to conduct, in the spirit of the author’s intentions, a work with which the performers have already become acquainted, but he must also introduce new compositions and help the performers to master them. He has to criticise the errors and defects of each during the rehearsals, and to organize the resources at his disposal in such a way as to make the best use he can of them with the utmost promptitude; for, in the majority of European cities nowadays, musical artisanship is so ill distributed, performers so ill paid and the necessity of study so little understood, that economy of time should be reckoned among the most imperative requisites of the orchestral conductor’s art.”
Franz Liszt’s position as composer is too well known to require further elucidation here, but Wagner’s description of his future father-in-law’s conducting is certainly worth quoting. Wagner, passing through Weimar in his flight from the governmental authorities, had an opportunity to attend one of Liszt’s rehearsals of “Tannhäuser.” He tells us: “What I felt when I created this music, he felt in his performance of it; what I wanted to say as I wrote it down, he said in bringing it to performance.” In the directions attached to the scores of his Symphonic Poems, Liszt gives an interesting picture of his ideas on conducting:
“A performance of my orchestral works which measures up to the standard and intentions of the composer and that will give them the proper tone color, rhythm and life, can best be brought about by preliminary sectional rehearsals. With this in mind I respectfully request of the esteemed conductors who intend to perform my symphonic works that they precede the general rehearsal with separate rehearsals for the strings, wood-wind, brass, etc.”