The Art of Conducting Part ii

Lessons on conducting continues with answers to questions by Leon Botstein.

Question: Is there any room for the conductor to insert his or her own artistry? 

Leon Botstein: I think there’s a big misunderstanding. Some people think, well, the composer wrote the music. Well, that’s true. And there’s a score. But depending when the score was written, the number of indications of what to do are very few. So in the 18th and 19th centuries, you know, first of all before conducting was a profession, conducting didn’t exist until somewhere in the mid 19th century in an independent way, the score tells you a minimum number of things. Consider a map, right? You can buy several kinds of map. You can Google several kinds of maps. One kind of map tells you just where everything is, but very little in between. Another map gives a lot of details. Another map tells you where the restaurants are.

 

 

There are all kinds of maps. Some maps can tell you how crowded the roads are. But the map won’t tell you actually how to drive. It may tell you where it’s going, where to go. It doesn’t tell you what to do when it rains. It might tell you when that windy road, you might have elevation, so it might show you that it’s going to be a long time to get from here to there, even though the two places look very close together. The score is a map. It doesn’t tell you how to drive, how well to drive, how to take the turns. It doesn’t tell you how to make the trip. It only tells you where you’re going. So the score is a minimum number of instructions.

Now, Toscanini, after the Second World War invented a marketing ploy. That marketing ploy was I only do what the composer’s intention. Who knows what the composer’s intention? The composer’s dead. First of all, his or her intentions may not be the most important. He may have misunderstood his own music. There are a lot of composers who had strong ideas about their own music, which really were at odds. It’s like writing a book. Is the best interpreter of a novel by Tolstoy Tolstoy himself? No. In fact, it’s much more interesting to hear what other people say about Tolstoy. Tolstoy wrote the book, but he doesn’t own the interpretation.

So the fact is that this hype about doing only what the composer intended is a nonsense because nobody knows what the composer intended. And the composer can change his minds. For example, Beethoven wrote a bunch of symphonies before 1817. In 1817 he fell in love with a gizmo called a metronome. So he said, well, I’m going to put metronome markings on the compositions I wrote ten years ago. Well, he changed his mind. Schumann reedited music he wrote when he was younger and changed his mind about it. So intention is not a stable thing. Maybe he thought this way about it. Later he thought another way. So putting a piece of music on the stage is always about intention of the interpreter. It’s never really about an honest historical representation of what the composer intended. That’s a marketing ploy.