If the metronome mark, for example, is a dotted crotchet equal to 104, as in the allegro of the first movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, and the conductor takes the tempo at 108 or 109, there is no ground for serious complaint. But if he should take it at 134, as I once heard it taken by an eminent conductor, the music-lover has ground for a vigorous protest. The reader might amuse himself and get an immense amount of suggestive information by playing some well-known compositions at exaggerated tempi. He would speedily be convinced that Wagner was right in believing that the chief duty of the conductor was to ascertain the correct tempo.
But Wagner is not quite explicit enough when he says that this is the conductor’s whole duty. The whole duty of the conductor is to regulate every item of the orchestral performance. It must be done according to his design. You may say that this prevents all individual warmth on the part of the players, but it need not do so. The conductor is the stage-manager; the instrumentalists are the actors. They play their parts as the conductor tells them to play them; but that need not prevent them from entering fully into the spirit of the work.
The conductor’s conception of a composition is to be revealed through the performance by means of the distributions of light and shade, the relative importance given to the outer and inner voices of the score, by the placing of the climaxes of force and speed, and by the detailed accentuation of every phrase. It is at the rehearsals that the conductor imparts to the men of his orchestra his wishes in these matters, and causes them to go over and over certain passages till they are played to his satisfaction. He cannot do any of this at a performance. There he can only beat time, and in doing so remind his men, as I have already said, of what he told them at the rehearsals.
The conductor must see to it that significant passages allotted to instruments not playing the leading melody are brought out. Many of the most beautiful effects of orchestral compositions are contrapuntal, and they are too often lost through the incapacity or negligence of conductors. It requires close and sympathetic study of a score to find these bits. Who can ever forget how eloquently they were all made to speak in the Wagner dramas by Anton Seidl, and that, too, without ever overbalancing the voices of the singers? The whole warp and woof of the Wagner scores is polyphonic, the motives cross and recross one another in a never-ceasing double, triple, or quadruple counterpoint; and to give each its proper weight in the scale of force, requires, on the part of a conductor, complete knowledge, perfect appreciation, and absolute command of his forces.
In concluding the discussion of this topic let me add that the conductor is responsible for the general excellence of the work of his orchestra in its fundamental qualities. He must see that the balance of tone is preserved, by preventing one choir from playing too loudly to the detriment of another. He must insist upon proper bowing by the strings and equally proper blowing by the wind. And he must persistently drill his orchestra in precision and unanimity until these things become automatic, like the attack of a good singer. He is one of the princes in the kingdom of music, this man who turns his back upon us all that he may play with his little stick upon this hundred-voiced instrument; and if sometimes we lose ourselves in hysterical wonder at the results which he produces, and come to think that the baton is a magician’s wand, perhaps we are not so much to blame after all.
PART IV
How the Orchestra Grew
XIV
From Peri to Handel
The orchestra of to-day is the outcome of a long series of developments. In a general manner it may be said that the first combinations of instruments were without special purpose. The reader should bear in mind that for several centuries the whole labor of artistic composers was directed toward the production of unaccompanied church music. The centuries preceding the seventeenth produced little, if any, purely instrumental music. There were some compositions for clavichord, one of the precursors of the piano, and many for the organ; but these were wholly modelled on the great contrapuntal choral works of the church. The style was similar, and the method of development of musical ideas was the same.
When these old composers first wrote for small combinations of instruments, they produced works which could be sung just as readily as they could be played; and, indeed, it was not uncommon for them to write over their compositions, “Da cantare e sonare”—“to sing or to play.” When the thing was sung it was “cantata,” and when it was played it was “sonata.” But these early “sonatas” were in no respect like those of Beethoven.