Maestros and Their Music by John Mauceri

Author:John Mauceri
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2017-11-07T05:00:00+00:00

Vaslav Nijinsky (LEFT) and Maurice Ravel playing Daphnis et Chloé in 1912

Once the dance has been rehearsed in a room and is being accompanied with a live orchestra, a conductor has to watch the incredibly complex series of movements to know if he is providing the right tempo to show the dancers at their best. Some dancers move a little ahead of the beat, while others can be late. A dancer who is ahead of the beat usually makes the audience aware of a lack of synchronicity with the orchestra. Dancing precisely on the beat gives the impression of power, and dancing behind the beat gives the impression of weightlessness.

Ballet conducting has one tremendous advantage over opera conducting in that the conductor’s eyes are at stage level, and so we are looking directly at the part of the body that is providing the most important information—the dancer’s feet. With opera, the singers’ voices and their breathing and support apparatus are five feet above our heads—when they are standing on the flat stage. The closer a singer gets to the edge of the stage, the more our heads turn upward to see their mouths.

A ballet master will insist on certain inflexible tempos for the corps (the company dancers), who will frequently be moving in unison. However, when there is a solo or a pas de deux, the job is enormously complex. Many ballet companies can barely afford a live orchestra, and so orchestra rehearsals are usually woefully insufficient even for the most complex music and choreography. At most rehearsals, the company will dance either to a piano—and the quality of the pianist is crucial in preparing the room work for the orchestral work—or to a recording. The conductor must find a way to imitate the tempos of the recording once there is a live orchestra. This can prove to be a daunting and soul-sucking experience, akin to accompanying a movie and attempting to recreate the precise tempos of the sound track. Unless the conductor is in the room for the creation of the ballet (something that is not practical, since it takes so many hours of repetition to build and teach it), he is presented with a fait accompli.

Ballet and its precious dancers are both heroic and vulnerable. They easily can get hurt when a tempo is not right for them. Anyone brave enough to conduct dance is also a hero, made even more so because so little is understood of everyone’s willingness to create the grand illusion of human beings defying gravity through movement and precisely synchronized sound. Few in the audience have a clue as to how incredibly difficult it is, and when the result is good, it is the dancers who are the center of admiration, affection, and, indeed, adulation. The conductor, always looking uncomfortably inelegant, coming onstage at the end and surrounded by the physical beauty of these superb athlete-artists, usually takes a sweaty bow while pointing into the orchestra pit, as the musicians are packing up their instruments or just walking out.

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