MUSIC : Putting Theories Into Practice

All conductors share the same problem. Other musicians can rehearse on their instruments at their leisure. A conductor can’t. He has to have a group of live musicians in front of him, and, especially at the start of his career, he’s strictly a beginner trying to get his ideas across.

Composer Hans Pfitzner gives an idea of how complex the situation is. “Let us imagine that by some magic all the keys of a piano were turned into living beings, with their own will and own abilities,” Pfitzner once wrote.

“Thus the high C-sharp would be gifted and have a beautiful tone; the F-sharp might be stubborn and hostile to the intentions of the fingers; the D unwilling to produce a strong tone, only soft ones; the C absent-minded, not remembering that it should sound together with the E; the F filled with the greatest wish to obey the player. . . .

“Every orchestra, every opera ensemble,” Pfitzner says, “is such a bewitched piano.”

According to this, a conductor needs to be part psychologist and part coach as well as a musician.

“Practice alone will teach him to master” the orchestra, the great conductor Bruno Walter wrote. “Only by practice can he learn.”

But where does a conductor get that practice? In conservatories and music schools, students practice on peer groups. But there are other ways that may serve just as well.

Sir Thomas Beecham and Serge Koussevitzky, two legendary conductors, simply bought their first orchestras. Sir Thomas used his inheritance from his father’s pharmaceutical business (Beecham’s Little Liver Pills); Koussevitzky used his wife’s money.

They both started as amateurs, got better and better and finished in the top ranks. They literally learned on the job.

In the course of a long and distinguished career, Beecham founded no less than six orchestras, including the London Philharmonic in 1932 and the Royal Philharmonic in 1946, pouring enormous financial reserves into each.

But his early efforts with the Beecham Symphony (1909) and the Beecham Opera Company (1915), while extraordinarily adventuresome in terms of repertory, apparently were just awful. (A few recordings of the Beecham Symphony survive to support the description.)

Beecham never did learn to give a strict beat or even a beat at all at times, and his conducting style was considered “utterly unorthodox.” But he mastered an enormous repertory, perhaps the largest of any 20th-Century conductor, and he usually conducted it from memory. He also introduced the British to music by Russian composers, Richard Strauss and Frederick Delius, among others.

Who could resist a man who could talk to his musicians in such orotund pronouncements as this: “At Figure 19, cymbals, a grand smash of your delightful instruments to help in the general welter of sound, if you please.”

Or, when he asked a trombonist: “Are you producing as much sound as possible from that quaint and antique drainage system which you are applying to your face?”

To be sure, Beecham had his caustic side. He told a Nottingham audience once that it looked as if it had lived on grass for three years, and he commented on the bland acting of a tenor singing Tristan by telling him, “Observing your grave, deliberate motions, I was reminded of that estimable quadruped, the hedgehog.”

Yet no British conductor ever has rivaled Beecham’s popularity, and his fame is well deserved. He was regarded as one of the two greatest Mozart conductors of his time. The other was Bruno Walter.

Unlike Beecham, who had sketchy formal musical training, Koussevitzky was educated at the Moscow Philharmonic Music School, where he studied the double bass. (He chose that unwieldy instrument because open-competition scholarships were available for it. He nearly didn’t get the opportunity to audition, though. Because he was Jewish, the 14-year-old Koussevitzky had no legal right even to be in Moscow at that time; a quick conversion to Christianity, overseen by a sympathetic policeman, allowed him to compete for the scholarship.)

After graduating, he went on to play double bass in the Bolshoi Theater Orchestra and also began to give solo recitals in 1896.

But with his marriage to Natalia Uskov, the daughter of a tea merchant, in 1905, he came into great wealth. He used her money to hire orchestras for private weekly rehearsals until he felt ready to appear before an audience. For that important event, he rented the august Berlin Philharmonic in 1908.

Two years later, he formed his own orchestra--the Koussevitzky Symphony--and toured Russia until the revolution broke out, then he went to Paris, where he formed a similar orchestra for concerts in that city, Berlin and Rome.

In 1924, he went to Boston to succeed Pierre Monteux as head of the Boston Symphony and stayed there for 25 years.

At first, Koussevitzky and the Boston players didn’t hit it off, though. He felt intimidated by the players and made many mistakes; they regarded him as unworthy. In a biography that Koussevitzky reportedly tried to suppress, Moses Smith wrote that the musicians tried to make the best of a situation they couldn’t change.

“If Koussevitzky’s cues were inadequate or incorrect,” Smith wrote, the musicians “learned to understand his wishes in spite of his mistakes.

“If his upbeat was uncertain, they learned to watch one another. They worked out a set of signals to ensure their playing together. The orchestra, which followed its leader when he knew how to express his intentions, played like a superb conductorless ensemble when he didn’t. . . . The orchestra learned to interpret his wishes, not his signs.”

Koussevitzky used a pianist to help him practice. He would memorize a score, then have a pianist play it while he conducted an imaginary orchestra.

One of his “rehearsal pianists,” as they were called, was Nicolas Slominsky, the great musicologist, who worked for Koussevitzky for several years in the 1920s. In a lecture at Chapman College in 1985, Slominsky said that he had had to re-bar portions of Stravinsky’s “Le Sacre du Printemps” because the great conductor could not otherwise manage the composer’s shifts in meter. (In 1984, Leonard Bernstein sent Slominsky a note saying he too was using the re-barred score whenever he conducted “Sacre.”)

Despite these apparent disadvantages, Koussevitzky led performances of incandescent fervor, and he made an unparalleled impact on musical life in the United States by regularly conducting contemporary works by Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland, Howard Hanson, Walter Piston and William Schuman, among others, even repeating their works the same season to help audiences understand them.

After the death of his wife, he founded the Koussevitzky Music Foundation to memorialize his wife by commissioning new works. Britten’s “Peter Grimes” and Bartok’s “Concerto for Orchestra” were among works commissioned within the first two years of the foundation’s existence.

Beyond that, Koussevitzky established the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood, Mass., in 1940 to help develop American musical culture. In the first summer alone, Copland and 555Hindemith were among the teachers; Bernstein, Lukas Foss, David Diamond and Irving Fine were among the student composers.

Few conductors left such rich legacies as Beecham and Koussevitzky, who began essentially as inspired amateurs.

Next: Conductors talk about evaluating their work.