# The Arts/Volume 1/Issue 2/A Great Conductor

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A GREAT CONDUCTOR
By Daniel Gregory Mason
EXACTLY what is the function of the orchestral conductor? In what way and in what degree does he contribute to the effect of the music? Is he, as some purists hold, a mere link in transmission, a passive medium between us and the composer? Or is he, as others think, one who re-creates what the composer has created, by an artistic activity no less subtle, delicate, and indispensable? Or is he, finally, according to the third and highly popular view of the "prima-donna conductor," a virtuoso performer in his own right, one for whom the composition is no more than the tight rope on which he dances, the dead letter which may be galvanized into life, or, as it is called, "interpreted" in any one of half a dozen ways, of which no one can be authoritative, but the preference is usually given to what is called the most "original"? Such questions as these, academic as they may be when discussed in drawing-rooms for the sake of discussion, become highly practical and pressing when a conductor, coming to New York with a body of musicians as yet hardly equal, despite its remarkable improvement within a year, to two of our resident orchestras, succeeds, as Mr. Ossip Gabrilowitsch did on the evening of December 8th, not only in dispelling that pall of boredom which usually envelopes our audiences nowadays—inevitable if unconscious response to the mechanization and routine mediocrity of most of our home-made orchestral music—but roused his hearers to such intent and enthusiastic delight that they listened to Brahms's First Symphony in a silence almost breathless—the silence that means even more than the repeated recalls and "Bravos" at the end. What was this magic, and why does it so seldom visit our auditoriums? It is all very well to say "Personal magnetism," which indeed Mr. Gabrilowitsch has in a measure equalled by only one other conductor in this country, but that explains nothing. Music is not an exact science and can never be described in quantitative terms; hence all discussion about it suffers from an inexpugnable vagueness and inconclusiveness, and ends too often in resort to the old tag of "De gustibus non disputandum;" nevertheless we can get a little nearer the mark than "personal magnetism."
First of all, it is evident that the passive medium theory is quite in error. If all we demanded of a conductor was to play loud when the score says loud, and soft (more or less) when it says soft, and the like, some of our conductors, successful enough with composers like Wagner and Tschaikowsky, who depend largely on massive climaxes and richly sensuous sonorities, would not fail so lamentably as they do with that other class, of whom Mozart may be taken as the supreme type, who demand clarity, eloquence, and persuasive beauty in the delivery of each phrase and in the modelling of the piece as a whole. The truth is, then, that the greater the music the less can the conductor depend on sensationalism or on the luscious tone-color of a fine orchestra, the more is he required to conform to our second definition, and to re-create, as we said, what the composer has created, by an artistic activity no less subtle and delicate.
Now, because such artistic power is rare even among well-known conductors, and also because response to it is confined to a sensitive group in the public which, however numerous in a city like New York, must still remain a minority in comparison with the thousands who respond to sensationalism and luxury, our whole musical life has been organized on the sensationalism-luxury basis, our criticism is permeated with it, and we have come to look upon emotional and spiritual eloquence as abnormal, almost undesirable. We are like the tailless foxes in ​the proverb, who despised tails. We try to solace ourselves for the perfunctory and uninspiring performances of the classics given by our two best-known orchestras by luxuriating in their ministration to the ear; and indeed they are splendid instruments: the Philharmonic has always been one of our best orchestras, and it may be doubted whether the wood-wind section of the New York Symphony is equalled by any other in the country. The speech may be empty, but the voice is sweet.
The brief career of the National Symphony Orchestra in New York is from this point of view most instructive. This began as a rather crude group of players, weak in the strings and coarse in the brass, but it was conducted by Mr. Bodanzky, whose love and understanding of the classics made his readings always interesting and often eloquent. What happened? Of course many of the critics talked insistently of the tonal limitations, and wanted to know why we needed another orchestra, whether there were not enough concerts already, and so on. Even today, when the quality of the players shows surprising improvement, the echoes of such criticism still reverberate. But those who love the soul of music better than its body quickly recognized that here was something appealing and persuasive, something that let a breath of fresh air into the stuffy atmosphere of our musical world, and rejoiced in such occasions as Mr. Bodanzky's performances of Elgar's First Symphony and Vincent d'Indy's "Jour d'Eté." The National Symphony Orchestra has been a yeast that has already leavened the lump of orchestral music in New York.
And so, to return to Mr. Gabrilowitsch, when he brought to us the other night his Detroit Symphony Orchestra, which, like the National, has improved surprisingly in a year, we were prepared for and little surprised by the comments of the sensationalism-luxury group. It may be that the oboe was a bit thin in the upper register, that the heavy brass was not always so mellifluous as the horns (said to have been taken over in a body from the Boston Symphony Orchestra). What does it all matter? When, starving in the wilderness of this world for the sustenance of thought and feeling, you suddenly hear human, sympathetic, intelligible speech, you do not criticise the voice which utters it. When the other night Mr. Gabrilowitsch gave us the Brahms Symphony with a justice of rhythmic, dynamic and tonal shading that fitted it like a glove, or rather like its own skin; when he set it on its feet, solidly and simply, in the splendid symmetry of its proportions, in its fine restraint and balance; when he made us hold our breath with its mystery, thrill with its nobility, melt with its poetry and tenderness—when he thus gave us the soul of this great, manly music of Brahms, we quite forgot about its body; we snapped our fingers at sonoritics; we simply listened spellbound to the beauty of that utterance. It was Brahms himself, the whole of Brahms (how grotesque it made that myth of his "dryness" seem!), and nothing but Brahms.
"Nothing but Brahms": therewith by implication we discard our third definition of the conductor's function, which makes of his "interpretation" something personal, peculiar to himself, and in the last analysis artificial. Matthew Arnold speaks somewhere of the use of certain lines from great poets as touchstones for the detection of the presence or absence of the poetic quality in the work of others. In similar fashion the self-effacement, the perfect transparency, the loyalty of an artist like Gabrilowitsch to his composer must reveal by comparison a something inferior and essentially inartistic in those conductors who try to color all they do with their own personality, who are always searching out "interpretations" instead of letting a work speak for itself. Even so great a conductor as Mr. Stokowski cannot, one fears, always be exonerated from this intrusion of personality where it does not belong, a tendency which in such a man as Nikisch becomes positively diseased. In tech​nical skill Mr. Stokowski probably excels Mr. Gabrilowitsch, who sometimes over-gesticulates; but Mr. Stokowski frequently verges perilously close to the exotic, the precious, the exaggerated, while one element of Mr. Gabrilowitsch's irresistible appeal is his complete candor and simplicity. Few if any other of our conductors, indeed, meet the demands as he does of the second of our definitions, while remaining so free from the limitations and the excesses suggested by the first and third. He is at the pole from the time-beaters, and while his regard for tone-quality as a means is evidenced by the remarkable gain in all his choirs since a year ago, he never makes luxury for the ear an end in itself. On the other hand, his remarkable plasticity of rhythm, his unfailing sense for the right adjustment of dynamics, in a word, his intuitive "musicalness," are never marred by the obtrusion of eccentricities or the exploitation of personality, but are dedicated to the realization of the composer's expression with the devotion of the true artist. In short, Ossip Gabrilowitsch may be ranked as a great conductor.