An innate sense of rhythm must belong to a Conductor. He must have also an appreciation of melody and an intuition that divines the subtle melodies, melodic phrases, and beautiful harmonies that lie hidden in the score. He must also have some of the qualities of a painter to bring out light and shade and varieties of color—glowing hues and delicate tints—from the instruments that are ranged before him ready to obey his magic wand.
PAGE FROM CONDUCTOR’S SCORE
Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony
The Conductor must also have a literary and a poetic sense to understand the romantic and historical subjects, which composers so often select as themes; and he must have imagination to visualize a picture in his own mind before he can make his own Orchestra and his audience follow the music, or the phrases, that go to make up that picture, or that musical impression of a picture.
In a certain sense, the Conductor leads his audience, though most of us are unconscious of his power in this particular. We, to a certain degree, see the musical picture that the Conductor sees; for we have only the threads he gives us—the scarlet and blue and green and purple and lilac and golden threads with which we may weave as we listen the beautiful musical tapestry, the cartoons for which may be said to lie in the pages of the score.
Though it is often said that the “virtuoso-conductor” was practically unknown until the middle of the Nineteenth Century, that statement is far from correct. If you will read again the description of Lully’s Orchestra (pages [162-172]) you will see that he has a splendidly trained body of highly artistic performers. Lully’s methods of polishing his material were not unlike those in use to-day. Corelli, too, must have polished his Orchestra highly; for his violinists all played as one man (see page [180]).
It is a great mistake to condemn performances of the past and to think that because tastes differed from ours that Orchestras were primitive. There was nothing primitive in the cultured days of the Renaissance, nor in those of Louis XIV.