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The Maestro Myth
The Maestro Myth
Great Conductors in Pursuit of Power
NORMAN LEBRECHT

Revised and Updated

Citadel Press
Kensington Publishing Corp.
www.kensingtonbooks.com
CITADEL PRESS books are published by

Kensington Publishing Corp.

850 Third Avenue
New York, NY 10022

Copyright© 1991, 2001 by Norman Lebrecht

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by
any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, excepting brief
quotes used in reviews.

First published in Great Britain by Simon&: Schuster LTD in 1991.

First Citadel Press edition published in 1993; revised edition published in 2001.

All Kensington titles, imprints, and distributed lines are available at special
quantity discounts for bulk purchases for sales promotions, premiums, fund
raising, educational, or institutional use. Special book excerpts or customized
printings can also be created to fit specific needs. For details, write or phone
the office of the Kensington special sales manager: Kensington Publishing Corp.,
850 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10022, attn: Special Sales Department,
phone 1-800-221-2647.

Citadel Press logo Reg. U.S. Patent and Trademark Office

Citadel Press is a trademark of Kensington Publishing Corp.

First printing: February 2001

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lebrecht, Norman, 1948-

The maestro myth : great conductors in pursuit of power I Norman
Lebrecht.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-8065-2088-4
"A Citadel Press book."
Includes Bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
1. Conductors (Music) 2. Conducting. I. Title
ML402.L4 1992
784 .2'145-dc20 91-43651
CIP
MN
 Contents

INTRODUCTION The Making of a Myth 1

1 The Tears of a Clown 12
The composer as conductor; the personal tragedy of
Hans von Bulow
2 Honest Hans and the Magician 30
Nikisch and Richter
3 Masters of the House 43
Mahler and Strauss; Walter, Klemperer and Krauss
4 Facing the Dictators 66
Toscanini v Furtwangler; Szell, Reiner and the Soviet system
5 The Karajan Case 98
Karajan, Knappertsbusch and Bohm
6 'A Starving Population and an Absentee Aristocracy' 131
Koussevitsky to Ozawa; Stokowski, showbiz and Previn
7 The Gremlin in the Garden 152
Beecham v Barbirolli; Kubelik; Solti,
Colin Davis and Haitink
8 Collapse of the Conducting Composer 175
Bernstein and Boulez
9 Strange Tales from the Vienna Woods 191
Bernstein, Maazel and Levine
10 Formula Uno 211
Abbado, Muti and Sinopoli, Chailly
11 The Mavericks 229
Horenstein, Celibidache, two Kleibers and Tennstedt
12 Insider Dealing 241
Mehta, Barenboim and the Kosher nostra
13 Left Outside 256
Gays, women, blacks
14 The Search for a Semi-Conductor 270
Marriner, Munrow, Hogwood and early music
15 Where Have All the Conductors Gone? 284
The bare future: Rattle, Salonen and Weiser-Most
16 The Master of Them All? 304
Ronald Wiford and the millionaire conductor
17 Diminuendo 328
18 The State of Conducting, 2000 331

APPENDIX Conductors and Their Careers 338

Notes 352
Acknowledgements 367
Source List and Bibliography 369
Index 379
 INTRODUCTION

The Making of a Myth

EVERY AGE INVENTS heroes. The warrior, the lover and the saintly martyr
captivated medieval minds. Romantics worshipped the poet and explorer;
industrial and political upheavals set the scientist and social reformer on a
pedestal. The advent of mass media enabled idols to be custom-made for
separate consumer groups: pop stars for adolescents, screen goddesses for
the lovelorn, cardboard soap-opera characters for couch potatoes, sports.
champions for the more energetic, terrorist hijackers for the world's
oppressed, pop-philosophers for the chattering classes.
Heroes act as a safety valve in the social pressure-cooker. They allow
small men in spectacles to identify harmlessly with Sylvester Stallone
instead of throwing a punch at the boss, and shy girls to fantasize away their
chastity in the flaunted sexuality of Marilyn Monroe and Madonna. Such
dreams are unrelated to any concrete reality. The once-ubiquitous bedroom-
wall portraits of the South American guerrilla leader, Che Guevara, did not
signify incipient juvenile revolution in suburbia. Guevara as a political force
was a minor irritant to remote regimes. As an icon, however, he vented the
frustrations and yearnings of affluent youngsters in the decadent West.
Such popular heroes are literally mythical, in the sense that they are
either insubstantial or wholly fictitious. Cultural gods are no different. Andy
Warhol and Jeff Koons have demonstrated that an artist need not be
distinctively original in order to be celebrated; the name of Karlheinz
Stockhausen is known to music-lovers who have never heard a note he
composed. Their fame lies less in anything they invent, than in the myth
they represent.
The 'great conductor' is a mythical hero of this kind, artificially created
for a non-musical purpose and sustained by commercial necessity.
'Orchestral conducting as a full-time occupation is an invention-a socio-
logical not an artistic one-of the 20th century,' acknowledged Daniel
Barenboim, an eminent practitioner. 'There is no profession which an
impostor could enter more easily,' wrote the astute and long-suffering
2 THE MAESTRO MYTH

violinist, Carl Flesch. The conductor exists because mankind demands a

visible leader or, at the very least, an identifiable figurehead. His musical
raison d'etre is altogether secondary to that function.
He plays no instrument, produces no noise, yet conveys an image of
music-making that is credible enough to let him take the rewards of applause
away from those who actually created the sound. In musical terms, argued
the polemicist Hans Keller, 'the conductor's existence is, essentially,
superfluous, and you have to attain a high degree of musical stupidity in
order to find watching the beat, or the conductor's inane face for that matter,
easier for the purpose of knowing when and how to play than simply
listening to the music'. That heresy, phrased less politely, can be heard
wherever orchestral players gather to drown their multitude of sorrows. 'Too
many of these guys are masters of the brilliant wave,' grumbled the former
Berlin Philharmonic flautist, James Galway. A bad conductor is the bane of a
musician's daily life; and a good one is not much better. He gives orders that
are redundant and offensive, demands a level of obedience unknown outside
the army and can earn at a concert as much as his entire orchestra is paid.
Yet, when work has to be provided and a season organized, it is the
players themselves who elect conductors and invent them. The myth begins
with their mute submission. Orchestral musicians are a hardened lot who
melt at the wave of a wizard's wand. They would say that Arthur Nikisch had
merely to enter the room for an orchestra to sound better. Musicians talked
of 'this magic thing' that set Arturo Toscanini and Wilhelm Furtwangler
apart from other mortals. Leonard Bernstein, one conceded, 'makes me
remember why I wanted to become a musician'. By some wordless impulse,
an exceptional conductor could change the human chemistry in his orchestra
and audience. The anti-authoritarian philosopher Elias Canetti viewed it as
a manifestation of almost godlike authority:
His eyes hold the whole orchestra. Every player feels that the conductor
sees him personally and, still more, hears him ... He is inside the mind
of every player. He knows not only what each should be doing but what
he is doing. He is the living embodiment of law, both positive and
negative. His hands decree and prohibit .... And since, during the
performance, nothing is supposed to exist except this work, for so long
is the conductor ruler of the world.

To the listener in the stalls, the conductor represents a dual form of

escapism: the longing to lose oneself in music combined with an urge to
sublimate in the actions of that all-powerful figure on the podium. The
conductor is an obvious hero whose gestures are unconsciously imitated
with a finger on the arm of the concert-hall seat or, back home, waving one's
arms before the bathroom mirror to the accompaniment of recorded sound.
 THE MAKING OF A MYTH 3

Replicated on disc and video, the maestro myth evolved into a money-
spinning worldwide cult.
It is a highly refined form of worship. The conductor has never been a
mass-hero, but the idol of an elite. To the average fan on the football terraces
and the single parent subsisting on state support, he signifies, if anything,
an unattainable aura of privilege and fastidiousness. Only Toscanini and
Bernstein were as famous as rock stars, and for reasons that had nothing to
do with their craft. The conductor is not a popular hero but a hero's hero: the
incarnation of power in the eyes of the all-powerful. 'There is no more
obvious expression of power than the performance of a conductor,' noted
Canetti. 'Every detail of his public behaviour throws light on the nature of
power. Someone who knew nothing about power could discover all its
attributes, one after another, by careful observation of a conductor.'
Powerful figures became devoted fans. Margaret Thatcher, the British
prime minister, openly envied the absolutism of Herbert van Karajan.
Richard Nixon, in the toils of Watergate, took time out to send a get-well
card to Leopold Stokowski and bask in the sound of the Philadelphia
Orchestra that he founded. Every notable maestro who set foot in western
Germany while Helmut Schmidt was in power was summoned to dinner at
the Chancellery. Even France, described by its minister of culture as an
unmusical nation, found the attention of its presidents occupied by the
repatriation of Pierre Boulez and the installation of Daniel Barenboim at the
Bastille. Karajan's festivals at Salzburg were a shrine for heads of heavy
German industry. A Japanese electronics magnate became his acolyte. One
of Britain's top defence manufacturers would be flown by company jet to
wherever Riccardo Muti was conducting.
Maestros were showered with baubles and titles. 'People have the desire
to give him gifts,' reported a Bernstein associate. The British establish-
ment, while neglecting composers, bestowed knighthoods on countless
conductors and made Karajan a Doctor at Oxford for no discernible
contribution to scholarship. Bernstein, who did precious little for France,
was awarded the coveted Legion d'Honneur. Loin Maazel, one of the least
diplomatic of musicians, was made Ambassador of Good Will by the United
Nations secretary-general; Riccardo Muti became ambassador-at-large for
the High Commissioner for Refugees, never having seen the perimeter fence
of a refugee camp in his busy life.
These honours may be meaningless, but they are listed religiously in the
conductors' press releases and serve to reinforce their myth. They signalled
a sharing of power and status with the mightiest persons on earth. In
exchange, potentates and presidents hoped to share some of the maestro's
indefinable magic, the legendary aspects of his myth. In addition to sagacity
and an inexplicable skill, conductors were alleged to possess the key to
4 THE MAESTRO MYTH

eternal life and vigour. Pierre Monteux, at eighty, sought a 25-year contract
from the London Symphony Orchestra, renewable by mutual consent.
Stokowski, at 91, signed a ten-year exclusive recording deal with RCA.
Toscanini and Otto Klemperer kept on into their, mid-eighties. The fact that
many others died in early middle age-Gustav Mahler at fifty, the Hungar-
ians Istvan Kertesz and Ferenc Fricsay at 43 and 48, and the founding
fathers Billow and Nikisch in their sixties-did not disturb the myth, nor
did the sight of old Karl Bohm catnapping in his podium while the orchestra
played on regardless. Senior maestros shared with politicians a noted
reluctance to make way for younger men.
Their mystique was further enhanced by rumours of sexual rapacity.
Klemperer was attacked in his podium by a jealous husband and Malcolm
Sargent was forever fondling the wives of colleagues. Nikisch had a
permanent twinkle in his mesmeric eye and Furtwangler was said to take a
different woman to his room before every concert. At the same time, their
communion with the spirit of dead composers endowed maestros with a
priestly aura and their concerts with the solemnity of a convocation. Mixed
together, this cocktail of spiritual power and physical prowess produced a
hero whom music-makers and listeners alike could envy and secretly
emulate. The conductor, a golem created for a specific purpose, responded
readily to their changing tastes. He might seem to live upon Olympus, but
was ever-sensitive to the popular whim and adapted in order to survive.
Each important conductor was identifiably a child of his own time,
conditioned by its social climate and personifying its prevalent ethos.
In a time of territorial expansion, Hans von Billow was the bluff
imperialist, Nikisch and Richter the colonial administrators. Immovable
generals-Stokowski, Koussevitsky-captured the podium during the First
World War. They were followed in the age of dictators by a tyrant, Toscanini,
and a woolly appeaser, Wilhelm Furtwangler. George Szell and Fritz Reiner
were cold warriors for an age of austerity. Herbert von Karajan, moulded by
the Nazis, turned defeat into a personal economic miracle. The libertarian
sixties produced the Bernstein heyday, love and peace and flower-shirts at
rehearsal. The materialist fixations of the next decades yielded offshore
conductors who behaved like takeover merchants and lived like Donald
Trump. 'Those aren't artists,' said an outsider, overhearing the author's
conversation about conductors with a senior Berlin player, 'they're
businessmen.'
The triumph of capitalism has brought conducting to its lowest ebb. A
bare handful of prospects under the age of forty have come forward to take
the helm in the next century, as the profession fails to replenish itself.
'Where have all the conductors gone?' demand banner headlines over
despondent articles.
 THE MAKING OF A MYTH 5

Richard Strauss: the musician as hero

The crisis in conducting is twofold. There is a dearth of fresh talent, and

an alarming superficiality in the state of symphonic interpretation. Brahms,
Bruckner and Mahler are performed more than ever before, with far less
penetration. The crisis does not exist in isolation but originates in the
societies that bred the maestro and his myth. The conductor is no more than
a magnifying mirror of the world in which he lives, homo sapiens writ large.
As such, his development reveals more about the nature of twentieth-century
society and morality than it does about twentieth-century music.

The history of the conducting profession is inseparable from that of the

institutions it directed. Great conductors create great orchestras; feeble
appointments send them into speedy decline. The litmus test of any
maestro's ability is his impact on an established company. A 25-year-old
novice called Simon Rattle transformed a cantankerous and demoralized
ensemble in Birmingham into a standard bearer for the city. Leonard
Slatkin performed a similar feat in St. Louis, Missouri, as did the slow-
burning yet incandescent Mariss Jansons [sic] in Oslo.
6 THE MAESTRO MYTH

Berlin enjoys precedence among orchestras thanks to its extraordinary

succession of Billow, Nikisch, Furtwangler and Karajan. It shares the
summit with the Vienna Philharmonic, the Concertgebouw of Amsterdam,
one at any given time of London's four orchestras, and America's Big Five:
Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Cleveland and the New York Philharmonic.
La Scala held sway consistently in Italian opera under Toscanini, De
Sabata, Serafin and Abbado; Vienna led the way in international opera from
Mahler's directorate through Strauss and Bruno Walter, to Karajan, Maazel
and Abbado. Covent Garden and the Metropolitan Opera in New York make
up the four pillars of the grand operatic establishment.
Other contenders rose and fell with the calibre of their conductor. The
Czech Philharmonic was outstanding under Talich and Kubelik, the BBC
Symphony under Bault and Boulez, Dresden Opera in the era of Fritz Busch
and Minneapolis when Dmitri Mitropoulos was in charge. None held on to
their eminence after the music director's departure. 'There are no bad
orchestras,' said Mahler contentiously, 'only bad conductors.'
The profession was formed in the middle of the last century when
composers abdicated responsibility for directing their scores, which grew
too unwieldy for orchestras to play unguided. Breaking free of the
composer's psychological grip, the emergent conductor made his role first as
a municipal figurehead, then as a national one, and ultimately as a
multinational enterprise in tune with the spirit of the modern age. His ideals
modulated over the course of a dozen decades, from achieving the fleeting
illusion of a perfect performance, to engraving on indelible surfaces a
'definitive' concept for all eternity of how music should be played.
Records and films won the conductor worldwide celebrity, along with the
accolade of greatness. The concept of The Great Conductor is a fiction
perpetrated for the preservation of musical activity in an era of multiple
leisure pursuits. Over the past half century, the number of professional
orchestras around the world has doubled to around five hundred; and the
number of capable conductors has diminished inexorably. Every orchestra
has to sell upwards of thirty thousand seats a season and each needs star
conductors to haul concertgoers away from their hi-fis and television sets
('Stars is a stupid word,' says Georg Solti. 'Stars are just stars because they
are travelling too much'). In the absence of real talent, orchestras fall back
on the hype of competing record companies, each of whom pretends for
commercial reasons to have ten or more conductors of world class.
The players become parties to this deception, much to their individual
chagrin. Their professionalism has risen in inverse proportion to the quality
of conductors they face. Musicians in major orchestras recognize six
maestros at most as being fit to lead them; with the rest, they grit their teeth
and stare fixedly at the score. 'It's very difficult for an orchestral musician
after thirty years of having worked with the greatest to have someone new
 THE MAKING OF A MYTH 7

come along and do a Brahms symphony,' explained an eminent concertmas-

ter. 'Working with a mediocre conductor, I go in thinking: we're faced with
two days of this, and I have to create a nice feeling for the orchestra ... '
Knowing that livelihoods depend on selling tickets, no player is rash enough
to risk a hundred jobs by denigrating conductors.
Orchestras and record labels are only partly to blame for promulgating
the Great Conductor myth. For all the attention they attract, classical record
companies are relatively small and idealistic concerns with a couple of
hundred staff and a turnover in the low millions. Although most are owned
by multinationals, the place of DG or Decca within the mighty Philips
parent, which employs thirty million people around the world, is prestigious
but minuscule. Anxious to find conductors, record executives fall prey to be
manipulated by artists' agents who push forward something that looks like a
maestro in which they have a substantial financial interest of ten to twenty
per cent.
The rise of the all-powerful agent is one of the most worrying aspects of
the conducting crisis, and arguably its major cause. In the past twenty years.
as the quantity and quality of top conductors has declined, maestros have
become infinitely richer and their personal managers much more powerful.*
If an agent controls enough conductors, he can dictate terms to promoters
and record producers, and foist counterfeits on an innocent public. Fake
maestros have begun to abound in the podium, earning their greatest fame
and fortune in Japan where musical discrimination is least refined among
the concertgoing public. Recent developments have proved Abraham
Lincoln wrong: in conducting these days, apparently you can fool all of the
people all of the time.
How, then, does one distinguish genuine talent from a flashy impostor?
Given the nebulous and indeterminate nature of conducting, the art of a
good conductor is impossible to define. Rattle, for example, cannot explain
much of what he does. 'There are some things that one has to glory in their
tenuousness, and music is one of those. If you try to pin it to the wall,
you've had it,' he says. 'It's a strange feeling, everyone should experience
it,' said Riccardo Muti. You give a gesture in the air-and the sound comes
out. .. '
No-one has ever explained how one man with a physical flourish can elicit
an exhilarating response from an orchestra while another, with precisely the
same motions and timing, produces a dull, unexceptional sound. It is not
enough to be a musical genius. Composers from Beethoven onwards have
been humiliated in the podium, and brilliant soloists have slunk back
shamefaced to their instrument. 'What I have above all conductors,'
announced James Galway, embarking hope-filled on a podium career, 'is

*See Chapter 16.

 THE MAESTRO MYTH

that I have played in the best orchestra in the world, the Berlin Phil, under
some of the greatest artists of the century. And I know there are some things
I can do better.' He was proved wrong, and so were many other fine players
who tried in vain to make the transition. The physical act of conducting can
be easily learned; the intangible, spiritual side has to come from somewhere
within. An imposing personality is not enough to impress an orchestra.
Experienced players say they can tell in ten minutes if a newcomer has 'got
it' or not. 'When a new man faces the orchestra, we know whether he is the
master or we, from the way he walks up the steps to the podium and opens
the score-before he even picks up his baton,' wrote the father of Richard
Strauss, a Munich horn player and conductor-baiter.
Historically, what outstanding conductors have had in common is an
acute ear, the charisma to inspire musicians on first acquaintance, the will
to get their own way, high organizational ability, physical and mental fitness,
relentless ambition, a powerful intelligence and a natural sense of order
which enables them to cut through thousands of scattered notes to the
artistic core. This ability to obtain an overview of the score and convey it to
others is the essence of interpretation. Since order is, in Alexander Pope's
phrase, 'heaven's first law', its imposition is perceived as a quasi-divine act
that bestows on the conductor an ethereal glow in the minds of his players.
Not every important conductor possessed all the requisite traits. Many,
past and present, have been poorly read and averagely intelligent-Hans
Richter and Serge Koussevitsky, for example. Some were hopelessly
disorganized, physically weak and lacking all ambition but sufficiently over-
endowed in other characteristics to succeed. The prerequisites of the
profession have changed surprisingly little in a century and a half.
Players knew the moment they put bow to strings when they were joined
by an exceptional communicator. Members of a chamber orchestra which
worked with humdrum directors found themselves playing Mozart for two
weeks in Switzerland with Georg Solti. Not only did their timbre alter
instantly, but players said they retained the Solti sound in their playing for
two months afterwards. Some believe they can still hear Klemperer in the
playing of the Philharmonia, almost twenty years after his death. A visitor
rehearsing Tristan at La Scala asked Victor De Sabata to take the baton
while he tested the sound from the centre of the auditorium. Needless to say,
the sound he heard was totally different from the one he had produced. De
Sabata, without uttering a word, asserted his dominance of the orchestra
just by standing there. That is one mark of a major figure.
Another is his ability to give life to new art. On 19 November 1923, to
mark the jubilee of Buda's union with Pest, the Hungarian composer-
conductor Ernst von Dohnanyi gave three important premieres: his own
Festival Overture, Zoltan Kodaly's exciting Psalmus Hungaricus and, in
between, Bart6k's Dance Suite, which suffered 'a shocking failure'.
 THE MAKING OF A MYTH 9

Dohnanyi 'could not find his way in this music, and so of course the players
could not find theirs either,' wrote the celesta player. Bart6k, on hearing the
chaos, said: 'Well, it seems I cannot orchestrate.'
Soon afterwards, the Czech Philharmonic came to Budapest. In the
interests of neighbourly relations, a recent Hungarian score, Bart6k's Dance
Suite, was programmed by Vaclav Talich. The audience, initially apprehen-
sive, went wild after his performance and forced Talich to repeat the Suite
from start to finish. Bart6k said: 'Well, it might seem that I can
orchestrate.' Talich had played the same score as Dohnanyi, but was clearly
a superior conductor, applying a heightened sensibility to difficult rhythms.
He was trusted blindly by Leos Janacek to improve his scores, and re-
instrumented most of the love tragedy Katya Kabanova. One measure by
which a great conductor can be assessed is in the new music that he brought
into being.*
Some maestros communicated with their eyes, others with their whole
body; some would speak and shout, others said little or nothing. Of Richter
it was held that he had no secret: 'simply, he knew his job, he was a great
economizer of time, and he was a stern disciplinarian'. Musicians in other
orchestras could not understand how Berlin Philharmonic players were able
to decipher Furtwangler's wavery arm motions that gave no literal indication
of the number of beats in a bar. Toscanini, his antipode, had a beat like a
metronome. Both were outstanding conductors, and neither can be
explained in scientific terms. They shared an inexplicable mystique that
reinforced a collective myth.

The sustenance of a myth requires the connivance of compliant writers.

Music critics have contributed significantly, if unwittingly, to the cult of the
Great Conductor, not only by adopting the term as a cliche but by tailoring
their collective attitude and even their vocabulary to strengthen the
mythology. Every critic has his favourite performer, who, likely as not, is
the next-door critic's bete noire. Such partisanship is the spice of musical
literature and the controversy helps hone the critical faculties on both sides.
Towards conductors, however, there is a predisposed sympathy. Tenors
may be safely ridiculed and the pomposity of pianists pricked with a
satirical pin, but maestros as a breed are sacrosanct, their virtues inflated,
their sins concealed. Some writers are evidently overwhelmed by charisma,
others by wealth and power. Toscanini was thirty years dead before anyone
wrote a serious criticism of his conducting. Furtwangler is still revered as a
demi-god. Critics tolerated, even adulated, the bestial behaviour of
Koussevitsky and Szell; they lauded the 'spiritual' qualities of men whose

*Major premieres are listed in the biographical entries in the Appendix, p. 338.
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