The orchestra and orchestral music

by W. J. Henderson

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.