On Producing Young Conductors

by JOHN N. BURK

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CAN orchestral conductors be systematically produced? Sometimes they suddenly and unaccountably bless us with their presence. Toscanini, so the record tells us, stepped up from his place in the cello section in a moment of emergency and became a conductor forthwith. Koussevitzky gave up the double bass and with even less orchestral experience started conducting. Beecham, after taking a few music lessons from unknowns in provincial England, simply decided to conduct and at the age of twenty assembled an amateur orchestra in a suburb called Huyton and went on from there. It should be accepted at the outset that any generalization about conductors will be confounded by gleaming exceptions. But there will never be enough of these rare beings to fulfill the world’s needs, nor America’s. Besides the unaccountables by the grace of God, there must be a far larger number who are no more than highly skilled craftsmen of their profession.

Through the last twenty-five years or so, the symphony orchestras worthy of the name in this country have grown from a small handful to more than five hundred, playing in our large cities and in every sizable community. But, alas, the boon of five hundred orchestras is strictly limited by the ability of their five hundred leaders to build and integrate, to impart zeal to their players, and to increase the number and appetites of their audiences. If as many as five hundred are to flourish, we must have home products to draw upon. It is still a maxim that all the better conductors come from Europe, but it is sheer nonsense to protest that a native-born conductor is pushed aside for a “foreign" one. Any orchestra rightly engages the best man it can find, and a native conductor with real ability will have no trouble whatsoever — he will even have the advantage of a native understanding and a closer rapport.

Our past is quite barren with respect to nativeborn conductors. From Theodore Thomas until the present we have produced no one really outstanding. The reason is very clear and rather painful: there has never existed in this country the one absolute essential for a really useful crop of conductors — namely, the soil of initial experience. It is that period between the emergence of the young man from school, eager but still unready to conquer, and the point where he is adequately equipped to take an important position, to face a good orchestra with inward and outward authority and assurance. We have never had this training ground, this apprenticeship, where — and only where — a novice may learn to handle various forces and ply them at will to the realization of his own considered and matured musical conceptions.

Let us look at the American-born conductors who now preside over the orchestras in our larger cities. Alfred Wallenstein in Los Angeles and Saul Caston in Denver were both orchestral players for years before they progressed to what they are. It is significant that a larger and somewhat younger group (ages thirty-six to forty-five) have had some opportunity, previously nonexistent, actually to study conducting: there are Thor Johnson in Cincinnati, Walter Hendl in Dallas, Victor Alessandro in San Antonio, Richard Korn in Memphis, Richard Bales and Howard Mitchell in Washington, D.C. All are able leaders and our concert world would be better off if there were more of their kind. Leonard Bernstein (thirty-five years old), who has no permanent post and who tends to devote himself to composing, is unclassifiable — one of those brilliant exceptions. Each of these learned his rudiments at the Juilliard, Eastman, Curtis, or Peabody school. Most of them — Bernstein, Hendl, Johnson, Bales, and Korn — drew upon Koussevitzky at Tanglewood. Alessandro and Johnson each briefly attended at Salzburg, where conducting was once taught. I wonder whether every one of these, on first facing his “own" orchestra, did not regret having missed that conductormaking mill which has existed for the last three quarters of a century, and still exists, in Central Europe.

A glance at the formative years as listed in the biographies of a few Central European celebrities will tell a story. Before Bruno Walter became Hofkapellmeister at the Staatsoper in Vienna in 1901, at the age of twenty-five, he had conducted opera in Cologne, Hamburg, Breslau, Pressburg, Riga, and Berlin. When Weingartner became Hofkapellmeister in Berlin at the age of twentyeight, he had been a conductor in Leipzig, Königsberg, Danzig, Hamburg, Mannheim. When Furtwängler became conductor of the Tonkunstler Orchestra of Vienna at the age of thirty-three, he had been through the mill of Zürich, Strasbourg, Lübeck, and Mannheim.

In each case there was progress through a succession of municipal theaters, which are the cherished center of public entertainment in each small town in that part of the world, and the eventual emergence in the capital itself — Berlin or Vienna. These theaters seem designed to give the apprentice conductor every kind of training he will need. The mainstay is opera, from Johann Strauss or Lortzing to Wagner. There is spoken drama, often with incidental music, and by the same orchestra an occasional concert, with or without chorus. Performances are almost daily (an important point).

The young newcomer is set to work as correpetitor, coaching singers, drilling a choral group, rewriting parts, cuing backstage performers, filling in at percussion or his own instrument, whatever it may be. He will have a chance to be a soloist or to lead the orchestra in accompanying a soloist. Throughout he is learning a very considerable repertory from the inside as he watches its preparation. His advancement from the position of adlatus will not long be blocked by personal antagonisms or the rigidities of official seniority, for if the place of Kapellmeister does not fall open to him, there are many more theaters of varying size and importance, up to the Hoftheater of Dresden, Hanover, or Baden. After eight or ten years of constant usefulness in an atmosphere of music-making for the sake of the honest musical results rather than any self-glorification (another important point), his ability to take on an orchestra of his own will be limited only by his inner capacity.

This system breeds mediocrity as well as greatness, greatness being by the nature of things scarce. The very word Kapellmeister brings thoughts of mediocrity. But mediocrity — expert mediocrity — is needed to fill up the smaller corners when there are many corners.

Contrast with this the situation in America. A young man fresh out of school, talented, let us say, and well instructed, faces the cold world with a union card in his pocket and high intentions in his heart. There are many orchestras, to be sure, and of many sorts. If he undertakes a modest one, mostly amateur, he will labor for a month or more over one program, literally teaching the ladies and gentlemen to play their parts. The performance will be painfully uncertain as to pitch, depressingly smeared as to solo passages. He will be teaching incompetents, learning nothing except, perhaps, forbearance, and gaining something far short of a livelihood. If he succeeds in acquiring an orchestra of good professional standards, his situation will be even worse, because he will confront older and more experienced musicians who will be correspondingly resentful at taking orders from him. Where else can he turn? Choral conducting is a thing apart. There are almost no operatic troupes, so abundant in the Old World and most valuable for all-round experience. There are beginnings in some of our universities, particularly those in the West which have good student orchestras and which are building opera departments. Conducting schools, such as the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood, or Pierre Monteux’s school in Hancock, Maine, make a valiant attempt, but a short summer term is not sufficient.

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You might suppose that these uninviting conditions would discourage ambitious youth. But it is not so. There are probably few players in any symphony orchestra who have not cherished the thought, secret or avowed, of one day becoming a conductor. With some it is a consuming ambition. This type will tell any willing ear about his hidden ability and what he could do if only he had a chance. The lust for power gleams in his eye, and the longing to give orders which may not be questioned — the kind of orders he has been taking all his life.

But aside from this, is the goal he hankers after really so desirable? Even the most successful, the most exalted, among conductors is assailed with unpleasant duties. He must goad the slack part of his orchestra by the constant implied threat of dismissal, for a great orchestra must be superhumanly on the qui vive — a condition at odds with human nature. He must ruthlessly dismiss an aging or inadequate player when the performing standards require it; he must hold interminable auditions and never quite know whether the man he is turning down may not be the better one but unnerved by that barbarous ordeal. He must, for reasons of institutional expediency, submit to receptions and handshakings which may be irksome to him.

He must look through literally hundreds of scores submitted by composers mostly unknown, and reject nearly all of them for the double reason that there will be place for very few upon a season’s programs, and that most would not in any case qualify for performance. One which he may accept may come to him as a blurred photograph of manuscript pages. He must spend many hours absorbing its form and mood, building a detailed conception of it even before the parts are put out for rehearsal. The correction of errors in the parts in rehearsal and the smoothing out of passages ineptly written become tedious, mechanical routine. When the strings and winds are rehearsed separately for better detection of wrong notes, the routine is still more mechanical. Rehearsal of a new work may require four or five times as many hours as a symphony by Beethoven or Brahms, where the music and its general style are familiar to all the players, and the conductor’s wishes remembered from previous performances. After the performance a critic, inwardly puzzled after one hearing, may dismiss it with a sentence, while those among the audience who are jarred by an unaccustomed dissonance are apt to be resentful of composer and conductor both.

If a new piece is not repeated at later concerts, the fruitfulness of a hard week’s labor will be more than dubious. But the conductor’s solemn responsibility is to detect in a welter of modernity that score which bears inherent importance and which, ignored or complained of at first, will on the conductor’s insistence and repeated performances be eventually accepted, and at last enjoyed, at its true value.

A full orchestral season is more strenuous for the conductor than for anyone else. While a player is responsible only for what comes out of his own instrument, the conductor is responsible for them all. At each concert he must have every detail at his finger tips as the intricate music unfolds before him. Meanwhile he must convey its inward character — an emotionally exacting task, in which a sort of elusive intuition must guide him. He has many reasons for anxiety: if he is an artist with imagination, he realizes the more keenly the great things that are expected of him; if he is little more than an expert technician (which seems to be the case with most conductors), he must strive to convey a warmth he does not really feel; if he is inexpert, his worries are different but greater, for with one false beat, one false cue, he faces catastrophe. If he undertakes to conduct without a score, his task is fraught with danger and tension. A conductor once confided to me that he spent sleepless nights when, thinking of the opening chords of a score, he could not help following it through mentally, bar by bar, until the end. An exception is Mitropoulos, whose memory is phenomenal. Even in rehearsal he will not open his score when, for example, he gives an instruction on the thirteenth bar after letter Q. Toscanini, as is well known, memorizes because of nearsightedness.

Famous conductors with “personalities” have been compared to great actors, but they have no such opportunity of direct personal expression. A Gielgud or an Evans would hardly be content if he were compelled to turn his back to his audience while relying upon a hundred men to deliver his lines with no immediate control on his part except over pause and stress. Such is the barrier through which a conductor must reach his audience. Let us say that he vividly feels the impulse of a symphony by Brahms which is before him; for the moment, he is possessed by a powerful climax or an incandescent melodic passage. He must communicate this vital musical enthusiasm to his audience, but he must do it via others and, so far as he is concerned, in complete silence. He must not (though he sometimes does) forget himself and hum. This is frustration of a major sort. Small wonder that he will grasp at his only direct means of communication, the visual, and develop what the French call a plastique — an extravagance of gesture really directed to the audience. It is a mannerism as inessential to what is really happening as the “weaving” of certain violinists. Unfortunately, it is distracting to most of us, whose seeing is far more impressionable than our hearing. Intermission chatter overdoes the whole subject and delivers mistaken verdicts about “exhibitionism” or “insincerity.” And why not even these qualities in some degree? A conductor is professionally required to give a sense of conviction at all times, even though his personal sympathies may fall short in a particular score.

Conducting is in many ways a grueling and a thankless task, no pursuit for a reasonable man who would dwell at peace with his fellows. It is also an endlessly rewarding task for a man with an unreasonable urge to produce great music-making at all costs. As for his opportunities — there is no limit to them.

A rich musical milieu is necessary if “great” ones are to appear. Richter or Levi took fire from Wagner by personal association, Walter from Mahler and Bruckner. As music takes an increasing part in the life, affection, and general awareness of our people, a keener awareness will become more deep-seated and instinctive in our conductors. As Toscanini has Verdi in his blood, and the younger Cantelli has Rossini in his blood, as Munch in Alsace, between two cultures, grew up in the gospel of Bach and has an equal affinity with Debussy and Roussel, so Leonard Bernstein, and no doubt others from whom we are still to hear, breathe our native music as second nature, from Broadway to Copland. Favorable conditions, including deliberately nurtured apprenticeships, continue to develop, and will bring results.