The Ignorant Maestro by Itay Talgam

Author:Itay Talgam
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-04-20T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

Play by the Book: Richard Strauss

In an age when politicians rise and fall based on their TV appearances, visual impression seems to be crucial. When I show Strauss conducting to my seminar audiences, they come to instant and almost unanimous conclusions about his leadership style. It makes them laugh. Very few would want him as a colleague, and the few who would take him as their boss can think of only one reason: He is so ineffective, they say, that they would be able to do whatever they wanted without him interfering in any way. So what do our eyes miss here? After all, Strauss’s contemporaries famously claimed that he was a wonderful conductor, but there is no visual evidence to that whatsoever.

Richard Strauss (1864–1949) was certainly one of the towering figures of twentieth-century music, first and foremost as a composer, having created works that are still an essential part of the repertory of any respectable opera house. Works such as Elektra and Salome pushed the boundaries of the art form with new orchestral sound and other bold and unfamiliar aspects.

The composer/conductor’s life, especially his later life, would make for a great opera itself, especially around his complicated relations with the Third Reich.

But if his life and his music were full of drama, his conducting wasn’t. The film fragments we have—and we’re lucky to have them, as they were recorded in early 1940, when the world was on fire—show him nearing his eighties. As the orchestra plays one of Strauss’s own compositions, the conductor’s low eyelids suggest a state of detachment, as if half asleep, only occasionally opening for a short, highly focused look in the direction of one of the sections of the orchestra.

The few gestures that stick out of the continual series of very small and almost monotonous hand movements are all of a reactive nature: Strauss is seemingly startled by a loud, booming timpani, and raises his left hand as if hushing another section of the orchestra. Nothing in his conducting is proactive, anticipating action. He is only holding the orchestra back: “It’s too much already” his gestures seem to say. “Get back inside the box!” Is Strauss’s old age at the time of filming the reason for that complete lack of engagement and enthusiasm? Is it burnout or a leadership style?

The young Strauss himself gave us the answer to this question, writing what he called “The Ten Golden Rules for the Album of a Young Conductor.” The list is written in his half-humorous style, and as is quite often the case with Strauss, one cannot be sure whether he is being serious or sarcastic—I suspect both at once. The list includes the simple rule: “Do not sweat!” as well as the somewhat perplexing instruction never to look at the trombones (and other brass), as “it only encourages them!”

Both rules taken together give us an interesting insight into his attitude both toward himself and toward his musicians. It is not about me, says Strauss: I am

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