A SHORT HISTORY OF CONDUCTING

Abstract

7 4 Y A S H O R T H I S T O R Y O F C O N D U C T I N G J O H N M A U C E R I It didn’t begin in a particularly mysterious way. Any group of musicians – whether they were monks in a ninth-century monastery or instrumentalists hired by an eighteenth-century Hungarian prince – always needed a leader: someone to run a rehearsal , someone everyone looked at to start a piece and perhaps to indicate its ebb and flow. In most cases, it was the composer. The job of the conductor as we know it today came into its own in the middle and late nineteenth century, and not without a certain amount of controversy from those who would have preferred a less overt organizer. Robert Schumann called conducting ‘‘a mania’’ and ‘‘a necessary evil’’ in 1836, and Giuseppe Verdi was horrified to learn that conductors were taking a bow, since he saw them only as necessary functionaries in the performance of his operas. In 1872, he wrote to his publisher, Giulio Ricordi, ‘‘But now it is the style to applaud conductors too, and I deplore it.’’ You can sympathize with Verdi’s point of view. Most of his operas, including Rigoletto and La Traviata, were performed before the era of conductors and before opera houses were redesigned to have orchestra pits. Led by the principal violinist from a position among the orchestra players in front of the stage, the 7 5 R ‘‘leader’’ sometimes had to interrupt his playing to make signals to the singers and musicians using his bow. Toward the end of Verdi’s long career, which extended into the 1890s, a conductor was for the first time taking charge of rehearsals and performances of his Aida, Otello, and Falsta√ at La Scala, while Verdi sat in his seat – or ran down the aisle to protest something he did not like, which apparently was fairly often. That the role of a conductor became essential is inextricably linked to the development of Western music itself and the proliferation of concert halls and opera houses in cities. It was both a practical and a musical solution. The practical one is the development of notation – the indications of how a musical work should be played, written down so that the performer can replicate them without having heard the piece beforehand, and without the presence of the composer in person. It started out as a kind of security device, once the idea of performing a symphony without the composer’s physical presence became the new normal, an impossible task to execute without his or her intentions clearly represented on the pages of the musical score. Remember that the vast majority of music, ever since the very beginnings of humanity’s desire to sing and dance, was passed on and invented by rote and imitation. For example, we have no precise idea of what the music played in Cleopatra’s court sounded like – though we know what instruments were used from the drawings and paintings left behind – since the remnants of its notational system are not understood. Something of the sound probably exists in the current folk music of Egypt, passed down for thousands of years. We can only imagine it, as Verdi did in his score to Aida in 1871, as Alex North did for his score to the film Cleopatra in 1963, and as Samuel Barber did in his 1966 opera Antony and Cleopatra. This is not true of the music of Bach and Mozart, whose music exists and whose notation is understood. Though stylistic details will always be a matter of interpretation, we do know the entire scores of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion and Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Without notation we would have only vague echoes of Bach and Mozart in our current music; we could never have a performance of the repertory we hold so precious today. The notation system that developed over the centuries and is 7 6 M A U C E R I Y currently used worldwide began with the Roman Catholic Church and its desire to...