Perhaps nothing connected with the orchestra is more completely misunderstood by amateurs than the functions of the conductor. I remember that in the days of a certain distinguished orchestral director there were two of his ardent admirers who always occupied seats in the front row, just a little to his left. There they sat, with rapt expressions on their faces, gazing at the conductor. They never took their eyes off him, and I am morally certain they had finally come to think that the whole of every composition emanated from the swaying end of his baton. They overrated the importance of the conductor, but not so much more than the average concert-goer. The first and radical blunder made by the typical music-lover is in supposing that the work of a conductor is done at the performance. In some mysterious way this man with a stick in his hand is supposed to hypnotize, magnetize, or just vulgarly scare the musicians into playing certain music according to impulses which have just developed in his breast. I have heard people coming out of a concert-room say such things as these:

“I thought Mr. Seidl was very cold to-night, didn’t you?”

“Yes, he was, indeed. That’s why I liked Nikisch so much; he always kept the orchestra on fire.”

There is a substratum of truth in all this kind of talk. A conductor of cold temperament will not give highly colored readings, nor will he excite enthusiasm in his orchestra. A conductor of poetic feeling will conduct poetically and he will make his orchestra play so. But neither of them accomplishes his result suddenly and spontaneously at the performance. All that a conductor does at a performance is to remind his players of what he told them at rehearsal. It could not be otherwise, for the beat of the baton and the utterance of the sound by the instruments is almost simultaneous.

To remind the musicians of what he has already instructed them to do, the conductor employs certain pantomimic motions and facial expressions, some of which have been so generally used that they are conventional, while others are, of course, peculiar to the individual. Everyone knows, for example, that Hans von Bülow was fond of conducting with an eye to effect upon the audience, and that some of his pantomime was comic. In a diminuendo I have seen him stoop lower and lower till he was almost hidden behind the music-stand, and at a sudden forte he would spring up again like a jack-in-the-box. No one can ever forget those spasmodic, but tremendously eloquent, jerks of the chin with its long beard which Dr. Leopold Damrosch used to aim at his men when there was a staccato chord to be played. Who does not recall the eloquent hands of Nikisch and the equally eloquent cuffs of Seidl? Thomas, with his occasional sidewise cant of the head, and Richter, with the apparently increasing confusion of his hair and his beard, also come back to my memories of pictorial peculiarities of conductors.

Besides these peculiarities, conductors have their own habits in the use of the baton, and orchestras must necessarily become accustomed to them in order that they may not be misled at critical moments. For it does, indeed, happen sometimes at the public performances that things go wrong, and then the conductor must contrive to set them straight; and he must do it entirely by his pantomime, for the privilege of the rehearsal, to stop the orchestra and begin again, is no longer his. At the rehearsal he can tell what he desires, but in the concert he must go on. It is at the rehearsal, however, that the real work of the conductor is done. At the performance he must confine himself to beating time, to indicating to those players who have rests when they are to begin again, to a warning look here in case a part is played too loudly, or to an encouraging nod there in case one is not played loudly enough.

I have often heard persons not unfamiliar with concerts declare that a conductor was of no use because the players never looked at him. This is a rather large statement. The players do not look at the conductor all the time, because they are obliged to occupy themselves chiefly with reading music, but they look at him frequently, and they do so invariably at essential places. Furthermore, they always see him out of the corners of their eyes, as the saying goes, while they are reading the pages before them.

The function of a conductor, as it stands to-day, can best be understood by applying to him the definition given at the beginning of this book. The orchestra is an instrument upon which he performs. Hector Berlioz, the famous French composer, said that the only instrument upon which he could play was the orchestra, and in that he resembled Richard Wagner, who was an indifferent pianist, and Anton Seidl, who was a very bad one. The conductor plays upon an orchestra, not by waving a baton and magnetizing his men, but by carefully instructing them at rehearsal as to what he desires them to do, and by going over it and over it again till the execution of his design is perfected. A conductor, then, must come to the rehearsal with a completely prepared plan of interpretation. He must know the score thoroughly. He must have analyzed every measure. He must be in the same position as the skilled theatrical stage-manager who has planned every bit of “stage business” for a new play before he goes to the first rehearsal.

At the rehearsal he must explain his wishes to the men, and play through each movement of a symphony piece-meal before he undertakes to go through it without a stop. A judicious conductor makes no attempt to put a poetic explanation before his orchestra. He works entirely on the technics of the performance, and leaves the temperament and enthusiasm of his men to do the rest. A conductor once went from another city to Boston to conduct an orchestra at the first appearance in this country of an eminent pianist, whose pièce de resistance was to be Liszt’s E flat concerto. At the beginning of the scherzo there are some lightly tripping notes for the triangle, which the player struck too heavily to please the conductor’s fancy. He rapped with his baton to stop the orchestra.

“Sir,” he said, gravely, addressing the triangle player, “those notes should sound like a blue-bell struck by a fairy.”

Whereupon the whole body of instrumentalists burst into uncontrollable laughter. I told this story subsequently to a New York musician, a member of Theodore Thomas’s orchestra, and he looked so amazed that I said:

“But doesn’t Mr. Thomas talk to you at rehearsal?”

“Oh, yes! Oh, certainly!” was the reply.

“Well, what does he say?”

“He says ‘D——n!’”

Richard Wagner, who was nothing if not polemic, wrote a book on conducting, in which there are some pregnant assertions, as there are in all his writings. He says: “The whole duty of a conductor is comprised in his ability always to indicate the right tempo. His choice of tempi will show whether he understands the piece or not. With good players again the true tempo induces correct phrasing and expression, and conversely, with a conductor, the idea of appropriate phrasing and expression will induce the conception of the true tempo.” There is an essential truth in this statement, but its writer did not add those corollaries which are necessary to constitute the whole truth, especially for the amateur. The passage which immediately precedes the above statement explains why Wagner looked upon the tempo as the most important matter for the conductor to decide. He says: “In the days of my youth orchestral pieces at the celebrated Leipsic Gewandhaus concerts were not conducted at all; they were simply played through under the leadership of Concertmeister Mathäi, like overtures and entr’actes at a theatre.” Such performances annoyed and discouraged Wagner; but in 1839 he got a valuable lesson from hearing the Conservatoire orchestra of Paris rehearse a Beethoven symphony under Habeneck. “The scales fell from my eyes,” he says; “I came to understand the value of correct execution, and the secret of a good performance. The orchestra had learned to look for Beethoven’s melody in every bar—that melody which the worthy Leipsic musicians had failed to discover; and the orchestra sang that melody. This was the secret.” A little farther on he says: “The French idea of playing an instrument well is to be able to sing well upon it. And (as already said) that superb orchestra sang the symphony. The possibility of its being well sung implies that the true tempo had been found; and this was the second point which impressed me at the time. Old Habeneck was not the medium of any abstract æsthetical inspiration—he was devoid of genius; but he found the right tempo while persistently fixing the attention of his orchestra upon the Melos[1] of the symphony. The right comprehension of the Melos is the sole guide to the true tempo.”

These words of Wagner’s are excellent, but they may convey an exaggerated conception of the case to an amateur. It is beyond dispute that if the tempo is incorrect, the performance must inevitably be weak or utterly bad; but it does not follow that when the tempo is right, all will be satisfactory. Nevertheless, it is true that the first and most important duty of the conductor is to decide the tempo, and that he can only do by a complete comprehension of the musical character of the composition. In music written since Beethoven’s day the conductor has something to guide him in the matter of tempo, as I shall presently show; but in earlier compositions he will find only such general terms as allegro, adagio, or andante. He will not even discover such attempts at specification as andante con moto, allegro pesante, or presto ma non troppo.

These directions are not sufficiently precise. Wagner himself tells how he wrote “Mässig” (moderate) in the score of “Das Rheingold,” with the result that the drama took three hours under the opera conductor. “To match this,” he adds, “I have been informed that the overture to ‘Tannhäuser,’ which, when I conducted it at Dresden, used to last 12 minutes, now lasts 20.” Wagner notes that Sebastian Bach did not customarily indicate the tempo at all, “which in a truly musical sense is perhaps best.” But to leave all movements without tempo marks would be to assume that all conductors were truly gifted. Since Beethoven’s latter days it has been the custom of composers to indicate the correct tempo by what is known as the metronome mark.

A metronome is an instrument which can be set to tick off with a pendulum any number of beats from forty to two hundred and eight a minute. A composer desiring to indicate a tempo uses a formula like this: M. M.

= 78.

The letters M. M. mean Maelzel’s Metronome (the instrument). The note (in this case a minim) means that the beats of the pendulum are to be regarded as representing minims, crotchets, or quavers, as the case may be. The figure indicates the number of beats per minute. In the above formula the composition would probably be one written in two-fourth time, that is, with one minim to a bar, and the metronome mark would indicate that seventy-eight minims, and hence in this case seventy-eight bars, were to be played each minute.

A metronome mark must not be understood as requiring a rigid adherence to its prescription in every bar of a movement. It is simply a method of expressing the general rate of progress. A conductor could not count every bar by the metronome without abandoning all attempts at accelerandi or ritardandi, and generally reducing his performance to a mathematical state of rectangularity. All flexibility, elegance, and nuance would disappear from such a rendering.

For dance-music played at a ball, strict adherence to the metronome mark throughout a composition would be admissible; and it would be really desirable in the case of a military march, in which the tactics prescribe the cadence as one hundred and twenty steps a minute; but it is not to be tolerated in artistic concert music. The metronome mark establishes the general movement, and that is all.

Any music-lover who desires to find out the right tempo of a metronomed composition can do so by using a watch with a second hand. If he times the number of measures to be played in five or ten seconds, he can get at the tempo. Similarly, he can “hold the watch” on a conductor in the performance of any piece with an established tempo. Here again, however, he must beware of exaggerated accuracy.

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.