On Toscanini and the Score
Recently, I have been reading with great amusement Howard Taubman's 1951 biography of Arturo Toscanini, entitled simply The Maestro. One of the recurring themes in his account of Toscanini's career is the maestro's propensity for clashing with performers and audiences over matters of artistic integrity and adherence to the printed score. The book is filled with tales of a frustrated--to some, petulant--Toscanini slamming down his baton and walking out in the middle of a performance in response to an unruly crowd demanding an encore of a popular aria or a subpar effort by a performer. Taubman does a fine job of describing these incidents from the perspective of both the frustrated conductor, nearly obsessive in his attention to detail as presented in the score, and an audience that was both relatively well-informed and set in its expectations for the music it consumed. This brought to mind for me a number of rather charged thoughts about the functions of both the conductor and the listening public. Today I will discuss very briefly--for on this topic I could surely prattle on--some perspectives on the conductor's role in art music.
Toscanini was at the head of a generation of conductors for whom the score was sacred and whose sole perceived purpose was to be as faithful as possible to the composer's intent as conveyed in the score alone. Most conductors perceive the score as a blueprint from which we are to recreate the composer's sonic image. This can be done with a great measure of, but never total, accuracy, as the notational tools available to composers are detailed but limited. Composers have become more inventive in this regard over time, making vast improvements in the realm of visual and non-standard notation over the last century. Many of these notational techniques have not been standardized, however, making the conductor or performer's job of accurately executing them more challenging.
These sorts of challenges have taught us the lesson that working with living composers is an absolutely invaluable experience. At the turn of the 20th century, when Toscanini was at La Scala, he had the advantage of being in close contact with the likes of Verdi and Puccini, and this allowed him to forge a very personal link to the creative impulses and motivations behind their works. It also allowed him to question their decisions and make corrections to parts and scores that often were at the time rather inaccurate.
It is only in the last hundred years or so that we have begun a trend of performing the works of long dead masters far more than those of living composers, and when preparing many of these older works we are denied that link to the composer of which Toscanini and others made such great use. We cannot go back and ask Wagner how he came upon the Tristan chord, or why Bach chose one particular chorale harmonization over another. These days, we can only make our most educated guesses based on what we see in the scores of the composer's collected works, the composer's own writings and the often inaccurate historical accounts of the composer's lifetime.
I worry also that with the evolution of mass-produced recordings and more standard, accepted editions of scores, we conductors have perhaps become less inquisitive and more passively accepting of what we see in scores and hear in recordings. Instead of having to build our own conception of a Debussy work from the ground up using only the score, our piano realization skills and our inner ear, we can resort to any of a hundred recordings of that work. This is a dangerous notion. I often say that the most important thing a musician brings to music is her own life and experiences, for these things are what shape how their inner ear perceives a work. I maintain that listening to a particular recording of a work too much before performing that work can cause our own conception of a work to be supplanted by someone else's, which essentially takes our uniqueness out of the equation. A conductor friend of mine, for instance, told me once that for a long time he would not watch films of Karajan working with an ensemble for fear of having his concept of the work overwhelmed by Karajan's. We conductors have a responsibility to the music to not allow these sorts of lapses, but rather to built an interpretation that is inimitably ours.
As scores have become more and more complex over the course of the last century, the problem of complacency has also become more obvious. Textures are often thicker than ever before. Art music's harmonic language is now freer than one and two hundred years ago, as are schemes of rhythmic and instrumental color. As a result, we must be students of the score specifically and music in general even more today than in the past in order to parse through and understand some of these works. As we look into a score, we are first presented with questions: why was it written this particular way and no other? What gives this piece its particular uniqueness and voice? Though our scholarship--our understanding of the medium of music, its history, instruments, balance, form and design, often we can answer these questions on our own. But when we arrive at questions for which we have no solid answer--as we invariably will from time to time--we must whenever possible seek out the composer's advice.
Next to the score, of course, composers are conductors' greatest resources. Not only are they the source of our repertoire, but they are the most authoritative voices on the compositional process and the choices that shaped each of their works. They understand that process from the inside out on a level to which all musicians should strive. Currently, in the wind world, we conductors have the luxury of still being able to consult with the vast majority of our composers. We should therefore encourage them in their creative endeavours and never hesitate to go to them with questions regarding their works. We stand to benefit by bettering our understanding of their music and being able to present more convincing interpretations of their work, and they in turn benefit by the reassurance that their works are receiving the careful artistic consideration and preparation that they deserve. I have never once been rebuffed by a composer for asking an honest question about a puzzling moment in a work. If you are curious about a work, I urge you to try the same--it can open up a whole new understanding of a musical work. I also urge you to take out some of your old scores and plunk through them on the keyboard--you may find things in there that you've never heard on a recording.
I hope you'll tune in next time, when I will discuss my thoughts regarding Taubman's description of audiences of Toscanini's time and how they compare to today's art music listeners.
Toscanini was at the head of a generation of conductors for whom the score was sacred and whose sole perceived purpose was to be as faithful as possible to the composer's intent as conveyed in the score alone. Most conductors perceive the score as a blueprint from which we are to recreate the composer's sonic image. This can be done with a great measure of, but never total, accuracy, as the notational tools available to composers are detailed but limited. Composers have become more inventive in this regard over time, making vast improvements in the realm of visual and non-standard notation over the last century. Many of these notational techniques have not been standardized, however, making the conductor or performer's job of accurately executing them more challenging.
These sorts of challenges have taught us the lesson that working with living composers is an absolutely invaluable experience. At the turn of the 20th century, when Toscanini was at La Scala, he had the advantage of being in close contact with the likes of Verdi and Puccini, and this allowed him to forge a very personal link to the creative impulses and motivations behind their works. It also allowed him to question their decisions and make corrections to parts and scores that often were at the time rather inaccurate.
It is only in the last hundred years or so that we have begun a trend of performing the works of long dead masters far more than those of living composers, and when preparing many of these older works we are denied that link to the composer of which Toscanini and others made such great use. We cannot go back and ask Wagner how he came upon the Tristan chord, or why Bach chose one particular chorale harmonization over another. These days, we can only make our most educated guesses based on what we see in the scores of the composer's collected works, the composer's own writings and the often inaccurate historical accounts of the composer's lifetime.
I worry also that with the evolution of mass-produced recordings and more standard, accepted editions of scores, we conductors have perhaps become less inquisitive and more passively accepting of what we see in scores and hear in recordings. Instead of having to build our own conception of a Debussy work from the ground up using only the score, our piano realization skills and our inner ear, we can resort to any of a hundred recordings of that work. This is a dangerous notion. I often say that the most important thing a musician brings to music is her own life and experiences, for these things are what shape how their inner ear perceives a work. I maintain that listening to a particular recording of a work too much before performing that work can cause our own conception of a work to be supplanted by someone else's, which essentially takes our uniqueness out of the equation. A conductor friend of mine, for instance, told me once that for a long time he would not watch films of Karajan working with an ensemble for fear of having his concept of the work overwhelmed by Karajan's. We conductors have a responsibility to the music to not allow these sorts of lapses, but rather to built an interpretation that is inimitably ours.
As scores have become more and more complex over the course of the last century, the problem of complacency has also become more obvious. Textures are often thicker than ever before. Art music's harmonic language is now freer than one and two hundred years ago, as are schemes of rhythmic and instrumental color. As a result, we must be students of the score specifically and music in general even more today than in the past in order to parse through and understand some of these works. As we look into a score, we are first presented with questions: why was it written this particular way and no other? What gives this piece its particular uniqueness and voice? Though our scholarship--our understanding of the medium of music, its history, instruments, balance, form and design, often we can answer these questions on our own. But when we arrive at questions for which we have no solid answer--as we invariably will from time to time--we must whenever possible seek out the composer's advice.
Next to the score, of course, composers are conductors' greatest resources. Not only are they the source of our repertoire, but they are the most authoritative voices on the compositional process and the choices that shaped each of their works. They understand that process from the inside out on a level to which all musicians should strive. Currently, in the wind world, we conductors have the luxury of still being able to consult with the vast majority of our composers. We should therefore encourage them in their creative endeavours and never hesitate to go to them with questions regarding their works. We stand to benefit by bettering our understanding of their music and being able to present more convincing interpretations of their work, and they in turn benefit by the reassurance that their works are receiving the careful artistic consideration and preparation that they deserve. I have never once been rebuffed by a composer for asking an honest question about a puzzling moment in a work. If you are curious about a work, I urge you to try the same--it can open up a whole new understanding of a musical work. I also urge you to take out some of your old scores and plunk through them on the keyboard--you may find things in there that you've never heard on a recording.
I hope you'll tune in next time, when I will discuss my thoughts regarding Taubman's description of audiences of Toscanini's time and how they compare to today's art music listeners.
posted by Qualario at 10:08 AM
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