HANG ALL THE CONDUCTORS!

In previous screeds of this series, I have pointed out the obvious—that the so-called genius of conductors is, in reality, a genius for posturing and sham.

I recommend to all a video called "The Art of Conducting" which shows the celebrated conductors of the previous century (that's the 20th, geezers) in action. Some, it must be admitted, are most impressive. Billy Furtwängler stops the orchestra and rehearses a passage over and over. "No! The crescendo begins on the third beat!" They play it again and he stops and scolds, "No, you are still doing it wrong!" Finally they play it to his satisfaction, and he nods in approval. The common wisdom about Furtwängler is that he was vague and imprecise, but in reality he was deliberate and thorough.

But most of the conductors in the documentary have neither the time nor the patience to preside over such detailed and meticulous rehearsals. Toscanini was given free reign and plenty of rehearsal time, but he would conduct a few bars, stop, shout some obscenity in Italian, then sing the phrase as he wanted the musicians to play it. Unfortunately, old Arturo's voice always came out in a hoarse croak which sounded nothing like the music, so how could the poor musicians tell what he wanted? Most often they couldn't tell, and that only resulted in more cursing and croaking. "Basta!"

Leonard Bernstein is shown dropping his arms and whining, "Aw, cumon people! You've got to play with more emotion!" What, precisely, does that mean? Practically speaking, it meant that the musicians would have to wrinkle their brows as they played.

In the interview with Tommy Beecham, he says that his technique is to run through each piece twice. That's it. That's the secret of his genius.

But most of those men led orchestras before the days of union scale and time-and-one-half pay for overtime. Attend an open rehearsal of a modern major symphony orchestra, and chances are that the conductor will simply run through a few difficult passages, not the whole work. He may make a comment or two—usually for the brass not to play so loud—and that's all.

Yet the modern classical audience harbors a fantasy: if a maestro is a genius, he brings with him some mystical element that transforms the work into high art. In "The Art of Conducting" a tympani player is interviewed, and he tells the story of how some lesser deity was leading the Berlin Philharmonic in rehearsal, and when Furtwängler walked in at the back of the hall, the orchestra automatically and instantly sounded much better. Just by his unobserved presence, Furtwängler improved their sound. Just by touching the hem of his garment, they were healed.

It takes no great insight to realize that the whole mythos is so much bunkum, and more nonsense that encumbers classical music. Why have a conductor in the first place? Mozart led the orchestra while seated at the keyboard in the premiere of each of his 27 piano concertos. Beethoven conducted his symphonies, but he was so deaf as to be oblivious of what the orchestra was doing, and they wisely ignored him. The only reason conductors became a fixture in the first place is that the grand works of Berlioz called for such huge ensembles that they needed a central dispatcher and timekeeper.

No conductor will admit it, but it's perfectly possible for an orchestra to perform adequately and even brilliantly with no conductor. In Moscow in 1922, a group of musicians took the concept of communism to heart and formed Persimfans, an orchestra without a conductor or leader. The arrangement worked well, and even Prokofiev was surprised to find that they could perform his unsettled rhythms perfectly. Persimfans lasted a decade, but then Stalin felt threatened by the example of such a democratic institution, and he dispersed the ensemble to various labor camps.

Today, I consider the recordings of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra to be the finest available. When I worked in a record shop and a customer asked for the ever-popular "Four Seasons" by Vivaldi, I'd always recommend the Deutsche Grammophon CD (39933) with Gil Shazam and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra.

The 26 members of the Orpheus ensemble never use a conductor, nor does anyone take a leading role. Each member has a right to express an opinion during rehearsal. To prepare a piece, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra takes twice as long as most orchestras, but the rehearsal time is not more expensive for there is no fee for a star conductor.

The Orpheus group was organized by a cellist, Julius Fifer, who said that some conductors disgusted him so much that after playing under an odious one, he would "have to go home and play scales to cleanse my ears of the experience." He got together with other musicians in New York City, and their concerts were an immediate success. They've been together in one form or another for thirty years. I would say that the one thing that distinguishes their playing is that there seems to be more risk taking. Their recording of the "Passacaglia" movement of Respighi's Ancient Airs and Dances sounds full of raw passion because there is more crescendo and more sforzando than a musician would dare attempt under a conductor.

Well, then, what about it? Do I advocate ridding classical music of those showboating frauds, the conductors? Messieurs Mazel, Rattle, Barenboim, Mehta, et al. will be relieved to learn that I do not, and for two important reasons.

One is that most musicians are not the type or caliber to participate in a leaderless ensemble like the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, because most musicians are nincompoops. Perhaps a childhood spent practicing scales has stunted their development, but most musicians I've met have the emotional level of an average twelve-year-old. Other than being able to play their instrument miraculously, they're idiots.

I realize that, considering where these words are appearing, I run a grave risk of offending certain people and alienating readers (some of whom may be women in estrus), but I only call your attention to the fact that, in the noble effort to be tolerant, modern society has sometimes deliberately ignored the genuine wisdom of the ages. For centuries, musicians were looked down upon as being foolish, irresponsible, commonly drunkards, and the dregs of humanity on the debased level of pharmaceutical peddlers and attorneys (two other occupations that have recently acquired a curious and unwarranted respectability). No father concerned for his daughter's welfare would ever have allowed her to be courted by a musician, and any that came sniffing around would be chased off with a bullwhip. The dubious mentality of musicians was common knowledge in all societies, and evidence to it frequently manifests itself today.

Musicians frequently demand pay increases until their orchestra goes bankrupt and they are out of a job. Their character defect is why famous classical musicians often allow themselves to be associated with criminal politicians and murderous dictators. Opera divas are famous for throwing tantrums and behaving in a highly petulant and erratic manner.

Similarly, when any famous classical vocalist decides to make some money and issues a crossover album of music other than the classics, does he or she choose the finest songs of the day? Topical songs about the important events of our time, or groundbreaking poetry like that of Bob Dylan? Does the typical classical artist's crossover album flirt with the frontiers of music? Does it go far beyond Pink Floyd and past Portishead? Does it show what can be done to make pop music worthy of serious intellectual attention?

Absolutely not. The typical crossover album by a classical artist consists of the worst, most insipid, puerile, kitsch imaginable. It is usually music that anyone's senile grandmother would nod her head to and say, Oh, dotsa nice! If they attempt jazz, it invariably sounds so hackneyed and square, that it makes me ashamed to be a white man. And this is true not just of vocalists. In the late '60s, during the short-lived art-rock fad, musicians from symphony orchestras all over America formed sophisticated rock groups that called attention to their symphonic roots and academy training. Young members of the New York Philharmonic produced the New York Rock & Roll Ensemble; the youth faction of the Detroit Symphony produced Metamorphosis. Every one of these efforts—at least those that I was unable to avoid hearing—produced music of the most fatuous, banal, soggy and tepid quality imaginable.

That is what classical musicians really prefer. (It must be remembered that the original hostility to the music of Wagner and Tchaikovsky came not from audiences, but from the musicians performing the new music.) And when my job at the record shop gave me the honor of waiting on one of this area's most accomplished musicians, and one day he called for a popular CD, what did he request? A clever song like "The End of the World As We Know It" by REM? Superb musicianship such as the amazing Blue Oyster Cult or Steve Vai? Experimental sounds from Foetus or Massive Attack? No, what this classical virtuoso chose instead was Barry Manilow.

It thus becomes obvious that a symphony orchestra, consisting largely of dolts, needs a stern master—otherwise they'll all start playing like Barry Manilow. As with any group of 12-year-olds, they need discipline, and that's precisely why the greatest conductors were miserable tyrants. The finest recordings made by the Chicago Symphony were done under that sadistic martinet, Fritz Reiner. After his death, they had a series of humane conductors, and the orchestra became sloppy and lackadaisical until the arrival of "The Screaming Skull"—Georg Solti—who terrorized them into shape once again.

The orchestra is made better not by any artistic insight on the part of the conductor—as noted above, there rarely is any—but by the fact that the tyrant has terrified them into concentrating. The conductor might just as well be replaced by a squad of armed thugs who would take anyone who played on a rest or failed to count their measures out for a beating.

The other reason for the necessity of a maestro would, however, preclude hired goons. Classical audiences, although somewhat more intelligent than the drunken kids at a rock concert, generally have no idea of what classical music is all about. Long ago, when music education was part of the curriculum of every school, and in the days when everyone could play an instrument, the general public could appreciate music in depth. This was also before radio and recorded music made it profitable to market only the Lowest Common Denominator and thus degrade public tastes. But today, anything complex goes right over the heads of most of the audience. The most revered pieces today are those with big, simple melodies: the "Ode to Joy" of Beethoven's Ninth, the last movement of Brahms' First, Tchaikovsky's "Pathétique," the "Halleluia Chorus" (but not the rest of The Messiah), "The New World Symphony," and of course, above all, "The Carmina Banana."

Rather than complex music, what the modern classical audience desires from a concert is an uplifting experience. They have a need to feel as though they are present at a transcendental event and that they have witnessed genius in action. Of course, they couldn't actually tell if the parts had mistakenly been switched, and that the cellist was reading the oboe part, but what does matter to them is the conductor's reputation. If he's a genius—and the last certified genius was von Karajan—then he's as infallible as the pope, and the audience will then be uplifted.

The best example of this was Arturo Toscanini, a mediocre conductor but one with a personality that made him marketable as USDA-prime genius. In the 1930s, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) was threatened by a Congressional inquiry into broadcast standards, so it assembled a symphony orchestra and hired Toscanini to conduct it. Much of the Toscanini legend was the result of NBC's publicity department which, as with all press agents, would concoct nonsense stories and feed them to the newspapers—"World's Largest Drum Rushed to New York for Toscanini Concert."

The public, as usual, bought it all, and I often dealt with customers who demanded Toscanini's recordings because they believed them to be perfect in every way. The idea that Toscanini was faithful to every note in the score is still believed today, even after evidence has surfaced that he rewrote much of the music. Complaints about Toscanini's conducting were voiced by composers such as Ravel and Shostakovich—"Hearing it made me very angry. Everything is wrong.....It's a sloppy hack job"—but the public instead chose to believe the NBC publicity machine. No one attended a concert to hear Brahms; they all went to witness the mercurial genius of Toscanini.

A modern-day equivalent is the phenomenon of Benjamin Zander. He's a complete fraud and a terrible conductor, but he has a brilliant publicist. In the late '90s, it was impossible to open the Arts section of the New York Times or any music magazine without seeing the name of Zander and reading one of his self-serving pronouncements. A Public Broadcasting System (PBS) documentary showed him coaching a violinist, telling her to "Play like a cat" (whatever that means). On a news program on Natural Public Radio, Zander declared that he had been studying the original manuscript of Stravinsky's Le Sacre du printemps, and now only he, Maestro Benjamin Zander, knew the correct tempo for the finale. Everyone else, he announced, played it much too slow.

I heard this while driving to work at the record shop and groaned, for I knew it would be a rough night. Sure enough, customers kept coming in asking for the Zander performance of The Rite of Spring. I tried to dissuade them, but all were adamant. They had just heard this self-proclaimed genius on the radio, and they wanted no truck with the performance by a mere mortal that I was attempting to fob off on them.

In desperation, I began opening CDs, and in front of several customers I demonstrated that not only was Zander's tempo not faster than anyone else's (except for the recording conducted by Stravinsky himself), but it was actually slower than most. (Fastest was Igor Markevitch.)

Despite this, the Zander recording sold well. Classic CD Magazine voted it as amongst the five best available CDs of the work. It was also chosen by The New York Times as one of the ten outstanding musical events of 1992, and, together with Zander's recording of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9, received special recommendations in the 1994 Penguin Classic CD Guide. (For a while, I made plans to murder any customer who came into the store and leafed through our sale copy of the Penguin Guide, then expressed outrage that we didn't stock the recommended British import. That book is complete bunkum, written to allay, in the words of Billy Furtwängler, "the intellectual half-man's fear of... being duped.")

The moral of the story is that people apparently aren't really interested simply in classical music's being played well; what they crave instead is a paladin, a savior, a genius of the first magnitude whom they can worship. Whatever Dr. Zander's shortcomings as a musician, he has done something far more important. He has hoodwinked people into thinking that he is a genius, and if they believe this, he could have the music played backwards or beat the wrong time and it wouldn't detract from the audience's need to witness greatness no matter how counterfeit.

Of course, what has crippled classical music is that most of today's self-proclaimed "geniuses" have no interest in music as a career and instead become management consultants specializing in corporate turnarounds or else go into talk radio. And with no genius available to interpret the work of Beethoven, how can we possibly know what it's supposed to sound like?

That is why conductors are absolutely essential to classical music. With them, the music is really insignificant, but people will keep attending concerts and keep the classical tradition alive, because they are awaiting the appearance of another von Karajan, another Toscanini, another man who can improve the sound of the orchestra merely by stepping into the room, a genius, a prophet, a redeemer, a messiah, a führer. They are people with a basic and congenital need to be bamboozled.