The Maestro Myth: Great Conductors in Pursuit of Power

by Norman Lebrecht

In this masterpiece on the masters of music, Lebrecht enthralls readers with his insightful look into the lives and careers of the world's most celebrated conductors. of photos.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, Biography, Classical Music, History

416 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1991

About the author

Norman Lebrecht (born 11 July 1948 in London) is a British commentator on music and cultural affairs and a novelist. He was a columnist for The Daily Telegraph from 1994 until 2002 and assistant editor of the Evening Standard from 2002 until 2009. On BBC Radio 3, he has presented lebrecht.live from 2000 and The Lebrecht Interview from 2006.

He has written twelve books about music, which have been translated into 17 languages. Coming up in 2010 is Why Mahler?, a new interpretation of the most influential composer of modern times. See Books for more details. Also coming back in print is Mahler Remembered (Faber, 1987).

Norman Lebrecht's first novel The Song of Names won a Whitbread Award in 2003. His second, The Game of Opposites, was published in the US by Pantheon Books. A third is in preparation.

A collection of Lebrecht columns will be published this year in China, the first such anthology by any western cultural writer. A Lebrecht conversation appears monthly in The Strad, magazine of the strings professions.

The Lebrecht Interview will return in July 2010 on BBC Radio 3 and there will be further editions of The Record Doctor in New York on WNYC.

A year-long series of events, titled Why Mahler?, will open on London's South Bank in September 2010, curated by Norman Lebrecht.

Other works in progress include a stage play and various radio and television documentaries.

Reviews

[Lobstergirl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Conducting has undergone a massive decline, Lebrecht argues. All the greats are dead, and the generation that followed them didn't measure up. The reason seems to be that the great conductors were made in opera houses: they usually started as répétiteurs (coaching the singers and accompanying them on the piano, which required a high level of musicianship, ability to sight-read complex scores, and the ability to learn complex scores). Then they graduated to conducting the operas, which is vastly more complex than conducting the symphonic repertoire. When conductors used only to orchestral music try to conduct operas, it's a steep learning curve and the results are often subpar, even disastrous.

What's interesting is that over the same period of time (the late 19th century to about 2001, when Lebrecht published this revised edition), orchestras have gotten significantly better, more competent, more professional-sounding. The conservatories now churn out many more graduates, most very highly qualified, than orchestras can absorb, so that auditions have dozens, if not hundreds, of candidates, and most of them can pick from among the best.

But Lebrecht's topic here isn't as much the music as the profession, its economics, its power struggles and politics, its tawdry gossip. He's a self-styled muckraker. We learn that Toscanini and some classmates at conservatory, in a vendetta against a professor's wife, cooked and ate her cat, and that Furtwängler was too hesitant to approach women for sex, so he would send a rear-desk violinist to ask a woman to join him for "a long chat." (He had five children out of wedlock.) Lebrecht is perfectly willing to gossip about Dmitri Mitropoulos's "erotic connection" and affair with his famous student, Leonard Bernstein; but when James Levine was hired by the Munich Philharmonic in 1997 Lebrecht is angered by a "smear campaign about his private life" - which we now know to be more than just smears.

I always appreciate when Lebrecht lays on the snark. "In an era of vocal austerity, [opera conductor James] Levine's little-leaguers filled the gaps adequately." "[Karajan's] eyes were icy blue and his laughter uninfectious." "Enter any record store on a weekday evening and you will find suburban fathers and husbands standing shoulder to shoulder at the racks of new releases, as if at a urinal." (This really dates the book - how does one even "enter" a "record store" anymore?) There were times when I wanted a little less glibness in the writing style. I wish there were more material on Carlos Kleiber (and actually on his father Erich, too). Lebrecht's favorite seems to be Klaus Tennstedt.

What drove me batshit was, first, his nutso system of footnoting, which I've never seen anywhere else. There are no numbers in the text. The notes are at the end of the book and appear as, for example, "p. 52, l.40: BLAUU 123". You have to look up BLAUU in a separate source list/bibliography. Also you have to count down 40 lines from the top of page 52 to see what fact is being referenced. Somehow it was unsurprising that this author would resort to this system of annotation.

Second, the typos in the book have set a new record amongst my readings. I stopped documenting the really small typos, like a forgotten umlaut, missing apostrophe, bad comma, or no space between a period and the first letter of the next sentence. Aside from these, there were 68 typos in the text, the bibliography, and the photo captions. I didn't bother checking the index. After I'd noticed about twenty or so, it occurred to me that they were the kind of errors you get when you have a jpeg of an article, or an image of something handwritten, and you use OCR (optical character recognition) to convert it into text. Things like "Mairaux" for "Malraux", "Webem" for "Webern", "Home" for "Horne", "Cohn" for "Colin", "Tor" for "For", "Mahier" for "Mahler", etc. There were at least a dozen references to "Cohn Davis," and only one for "Sir Colin Davis." There is no Cohn Davis among conductors, but there was certainly a Colin Davis. In the index Cohn Davis gets four lines, Colin Davis, one. There were also lots of simply careless errors such as "Metha" for "Mehta" and "Zimmerman" for "Zimerman." The bottom line, as regular readers of Lebrecht's blog Slippedisc know, is that there is no writer/author/blogger who could give less of a shit.

[Isidore · Rating 1 out of 5]

This cranky, gossipy book is lively reading, but one can't exactly call it a "guilty pleasure", a sort of Hollywood Babylon for classical buffs, since Lebrecht's strident malignancy wears on the nerves, and the experience of reading him is more interesting than pleasant.

One thing's for sure: it's not an objective, scholarly study of the history of conducting. Lebrecht cherry-picks facts to suit his personal fancies––a common failing of amateur historians. He is kind to a few artists, overlooking or softening misdeeds which would arouse his fury if done by others. Conversely, performers he does not like (the vast majority) are shown in the worst possible light. Generally speaking, what Lebrecht wants is melodrama: He wants to see the selfish, ruthless drive to power, the venality, the grubby flaws and personal weaknesses. If he can ferret out a lurid rumour, or a juicy tidbit revealing some unattractive personal foible, it's in here; we hear comparatively little about what made these musicians great.

Lebrecht clearly doesn't think much of conductors as a species. He's shocked because they've been known to act abusively or arrogantly toward their players, or pursue fame and success. But what does he want? That we should do away with them? He knows that conductors came into existence for a reason, there being no other means by which to bring off successful performances of complex orchestral music. Does Lebrecht think they ought to be nicer people? Well, we definitely all ought to be nicer people, and Lebrecht might consider setting an example by dropping the venomous tone characteristic of most of his writing.

If you want to read about the history of conducting, Harold Schonberg's The Great Conductors is a more balanced overview, although it's now badly out of date. Better still, read some of the excellent recent biographies of major conductors: Sachs' Toscanini, Prieberg's Furtwangler, and, particularly, Heyworth's Klemperer, which evokes the world of twentieth-century orchestral performance with infinitely greater accuracy and impartiality than Lebrecht can muster.

[Maximilian Gerboc · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was truly eye-opening. While released in 1991, the trajectory documented and foreseen by Norman Lebrecht of the role of conductor/music director and classical music in general is spot on, and connections through today can easily be made. Capitalism is truly evil, and market economics have wreaked havoc in this artistic sphere. The construct of the conductor as mystic musical priest may have its roots in some sort of the truth, but market forces, really propelled by Herbert von Karajan, created an unholy marriage between art and money, has made monopoly inevitable (especially as seen in the chapter on Ronald Wilford - DAMN), forced a sort of bland middle-of-the-road interpretive style the only commercially successful venture, and has excluded women and people of color from the industry.

There is some hyperbole and a few annoying factual inaccuracies, and the book starts a bit slow. However, these issues don't really affect the overarching story that's being told.

Of particular note - the entire chapter dedicated to Karajan; the guy was a Nazi and never apologized for it. Why don't more people talk about that? Is there so much money still being made on the Karajan-records industry that people turn a blind eye? He also, in his insanely successful, egomaniacal, and fascist need for control and domination, basically ruined the conductor/musician/audience relationship and salted the fields for anyone trying to come up in his shadow.

Additionally, as a Clevelander, there is a cool section on Franz Welser-Möst as one of the very few bright spots among younger conductors.

If you're at all interested in classical music and its history, or the business side the music industry, this is definitely a must read.

[Bookmaniac70 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very good and critical book which unveals the real face of conductors` myth. The writer preserves its professional dignity and avoids gossip but at the same time without losing his bite.The only shortback for me was that the book was written 15 years ago and more many things have changed since.I would be interested in some of his fresh writings.

[Erik · Rating 5 out of 5]

A gossipy presentation of many of the past century's most known conductors. Kind of like a highbrow Page Six.

[Martin Herbordt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gossip, innuendo, and occasional deep insight into the world of large-scale classical musical and its gods – the conductors. Perhaps a hundred are bashed, butchered, and ballyhooed; lionized and libeled; slandered and smeared; cheered, celebrated, and castigated. Some get nearly whole chapters or more – Furtwangler, Toscanini, and Karajan, others barely a paragraph. Some is well thought-out and thorough, e.g., the mind-set and ego of Furtwangler and Toscanini with respect to politics, competition, and art. Some is little more than who slept with whom.
When this book came out nearly thirty years ago it was a massive exposé into the deep and worsening problems with symphonic classical music, both in the concert hall and the recording studio. There are two major points that are inconsistent with one-another. The first is that conductors are ridiculously over-praised, over-worked, over-exposed, and over-paid: the conductor as god (see Leonard Bernstein). This all leads to corruption and reduced quality of the music itself. The second is that many/most of these conductors actually do deserve the acclaim that they get and that the shame of contemporary classical music is that there are not enough Simon Rattles to go around.
The writing style is dense and insider-heavy. For someone who is probably in the 1% of classical music lovers, but not himself a musician, I recognized most of the names but had heard recordings from only a fraction and heard only a few live. The politics of Covent Garden and the London orchestras held no interest. But getting insight into the career trajectories of the real top (those I’ve mentioned above) was fascinating and illuminating, as was the business aspect of classical music, particularly in how it affects guest conducting and programming.

[George · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not awful, not great. The book is nearly 30 years old, so much of it is out of date, but the premise is that the art of conducting is dying out because there is a lack of newcomers to the game and the author lays out the various reasons, including a lack of opportunity in small regional theaters (they don't exist anymore) where the younger generations cut their teeth. The book is a bit gossipy about the older generation of conductors which I enjoyed. There is an entire chapter on gays, women and people of color not being a part of the maestro fraternity and with VERY notable exceptions that is still the case today. The German's who stayed in Nazi Germany during the Third Reich get a bit of a tongue lashing (deservedly) as does the agency model of jet set conductors who are overpaid preening prima donnas. There is a lack of any ideas on how to address the issues so that a new crop of youngsters can come along and take the reins. And a number of the 'younger' conductors cited when this book came out 30 years ago are either gone or approaching retirement, so the lack of new talent is still very noticeable. The book is still worth a look though if you are a fan of classical music.

[Neil Fulwood · Rating 3 out of 5]

Proceeding from the thesis that the maestro is a product of a cult of personality - and quickly abandoning that line of enquiry when the author *does* have to admit that, yes, the great conductors are integral to the sound, performance and reputation of their orchestras - things unfold in typically Lebrecht fashion: he bashes the great, eulogies the mediocre, tosses off sweeping generalisations, repeats himself (sometimes from page to page) and just as frequently contradicts himself. There’s more than a whiff of hypocrisy about the project (he pretends to outrage at the lack of female conductors but references to women orchestral players as “girls”, and gets up in arms at the homophobia directed at gay conductors then refers to a sexual act between two men as “ramming”). He’s at his best when breezily recapping careers in bite-size gossipy fragments, but on far shakier ground when he tries to convince the reader that he’s doing something cerebral.

[Ty Turley Trejo · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a conductor it was fascinating to read about the flawed lives of many of the greats. It underscores just how difficult the job of the music director can be - especially with the pleasing of so many masters. I know this book was intended to dispel the myth of great conductors and the conducting profession but I think it only emboldened it. Especially since he laments at the end the death of the conductor. I've seen exact same ensembles transformed by the mysterious power of a magnetic conductor. No conductor is perfect. But many try very hard to inspire and make an impact. And enjoyable read, especially for the classical music nerd.

[Jann Howell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Outdated now, but an in depth look at how conducting morphed over the years into what we see today. Of particular interest to me was Ronald Wilford who was an agent for well over 800 musicians, 100 of those being conductors. He determined who was hired and fired.
The history and some of the conductors who changed the art form are discussed.

[Joseph · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of information on that much-maligned yet quite mandatory creature, the orchestral conductor. Interesting, thorough, well-researched, compelling reading.

[Haymone Neto · Rating 3 out of 5]

O livro de Lebrecht conta a história da função de regente, das suas origens com Hans Von Bülow, passado pelo apogeu com o império de Herbert Von Karajan, até o declínio com o caso da Ópera Bastilha dirigida por Myung-whun Chung. O problema, pra mim, é que em vários momentos adota um tom de jornalismo de celebridades (para não dizer de fofoca), com várias citações anônimas e uma obsessão por rivalidades, invejas e ciúmes entre os maestros. Mas tem muitos pontos altos também, como a parte em que trata da relação de Karajan com o nazismo, o capítulo sobre os excluídos da regência (negros, homossexuais, mulheres) e a conclusão, que trata do declínio da profissão. A edição da Civilização Brasileira de 2002, fora de catálogo, é bem ruim, tão cheia de erros de digitação que dá a impressão de que não foi revisada.

[Len · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fascinating, if opinionated, study of orchestral conductors from Hans von Bülow and his relationship with Wagner to Simon Rattle, Esa-Pekka Salonen and Franz Welser-Möst. The author is rarely kind to any of them, but some draw his spite more than others. While Herbert von Karajan is a particular target, not only for his Nazi past, Toscanini, Furtwängler, Beecham and Bernstein also gather barbs. In fact, it seems to be Mr Lebrecht's view that very few conductors are worth the money they are paid or the adulation they often receive. The book is well written. However, the author's constant criticism does make one wonder if classical music is a world comprising only of greedy and power-hungry villains. Surely there must be some good guys and gals out there.

[Tyler Knowlton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very influential book on this newer generation of conductors (Salonen, Rattle, and younger). Lebrecht demonstrates a fluid writing style as he decries the greed and damaging behaviors of the past few generations of A-list conductors.

[Jan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lebrecht knows what he is writing about, factually and psychologically. Apparently there are many facts that support his conclusions, be it that he, indeed, shows a tendency to select and use a gossipy tone. JM

[Jordan Kinsey · Rating 1 out of 5]

I misplaced this book before I could finish it, but it was awful.