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.”