Of course there are conductors who learn the content of a score quickly from listening to the orchestra as they rehearse. But, it matters not how clever the conductor is, his orchestra always senses when it is being used as the means of their leader’s learning the score and their respect for him is lowered. There is a fable of a young conductor who wished to impress himself on his men by a display of sharp hearing. He secretly wrote in a false F♯ in the second bassoon part of a particularly loud and boisterous passage. At the rehearsal in the midst of the orchestral rumpus he suddenly stopped the orchestra and cried out impatiently, “F sharp, F sharp in the second bassoon is wrong,” only to be answered by the first player, “Beg pardon, Sir, the second bassoon is absent today.”
To play a full score accurately and fluently on the piano, is an art in itself and in the course of musical history we hear of only a few musicians who really could do this. Saint-Saëns, Liszt, and Von Buelow were said to be proficient in this difficult art, and undoubtedly their marvelous piano technique was a most important factor in their prima-vista score transcriptions. To fluently play a printed pianoforte arrangement of a Beethoven Symphony takes as much technique as to play one of his sonatas. We must not forget the comparative simplicity of even a Wagner score when compared with such a work as Varese’s “L’Amériques” or “The Rites of Spring” by Stravinsky, and it is just likely that any of the three masters just mentioned would have great difficulty in reading Honegger’s “Pacific 231” at the piano.
For the average conductor then, the piano does not become the supreme channel for expressing the score, but is used merely as an aid to his mental and spiritual master of its intricacies.
There still remains for discussion one phase in the work of score preparation, and that is—memory. Just as among concert players the old custom of playing from the printed page has given way to the one of playing and singing everything from memory, so have modern conductors taken to dispensing with their scores in performance.
The increased amount of preparatory work involved in memorizing a score certainly gives one an increased insight into the composition and to be freed from the necessity of reading the printed page gives a much greater authority and command in the whole attitude of the conductor at the performance. We never read of any great military commander leading his troops to battle with his eyes glued on the map, and we have all heard of the conductors who have their heads in the score when they should have the score in their heads. Arturo Toscanini memorizes every detail of the score before the first rehearsal and conducts even the rehearsals from memory. This, of course, is such miraculous achievement in the mastery of the purely technical that it ceases to be technique and becomes an integral part of the conductor’s being.
The improved gramophone with the new process records of the great orchestral, choral and operatic masterworks can be put to splendid use by the student of conducting. Score in hand, these records should be listened to until completely absorbed and then they should be conducted. The operatic arias are particularly good practice for practising the art of conducting accompaniments.
In concluding this chapter the following paragraph from Adrian Boult’s “Handbook on the Technique of Conducting” is most fitting. He says, “In conducting there is a double mental process. There is the process of thinking ahead and preparing the orchestra for what is to come, that is to say, of driving it like a locomotive. There is also the process of listening and noting difficulties and points that must be altered, in fact of watching the music, as a guard watches his train. At rehearsal the second of these is the more important. Occasionally one must take hold and drive one’s forces to the top of a climax, just as a boat’s crew on the day before the race does one minute of its hardest racing, but takes it pretty easy otherwise. The main thing at a rehearsal is to watch results and to act on them. At a performance it is the other way about—the conductor must take the lead. It is then too late to alter things like faulty balance or wrong expression, but the structure and balance of the work as a whole and the right spirit are the two things of paramount importance.”
CHAPTER VII
The Technic of the Baton
in Choral Conducting
There seems to be in the minds of some musicians an idea that a vast difference exists between chorus conducting and orchestra conducting. In fact, it is a very common fact that there are many fine musicians who obtain excellent results from their choruses but who are completely at a loss when it comes to conducting even the orchestral accompaniment of the choral works they are presenting. The tales told by sophisticated orchestral players on their return from music festivals in the provinces about the antics of many choral conductors would be funny if they were not tragic.