Putting Conductors In Their Place: Sexual Harassment and the Death of the “Maestro Myth”

[jserraglio]

Putting Conductors In Their Place: Sexual Harassment and the Death of the “Maestro Myth”
by David Hurwitz
CLASSICS TODAY
August 2, 2018

https://www.classicstoday.com/putting-c ... stro-myth/

In the wake of an excellent article by Anne Midgette and Peggy McGlone in The Washington Post on sexual harassment in the classical music business, Holland’s Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra announced that it had terminated the ensemble’s relationship with chief conductor Daniele Gatti. To its credit, the orchestra did not rely solely on allegations detailed in the Post article, dating back to 1996 and 2000, but also on more recent findings regarding Gatti’s interactions with female members of the Concertgebouw. Gatti, for his part, has apologized for his alleged disgusting behavior and promised to mend his ways. Perhaps he is sincere, perhaps not. Immediately after the apology, his Italian lawyer issued a statement in which Gatti denies all accusations and threatens legal action against those participating in the “smear campaign” against him. It will be interesting to see if anyone feels inclined to give him a second chance. Certainly there is no special urgency.

The recent spate of firings and “distancings” in the wake of revelations regarding the revolting behavior of today’s podium “giants”—James Levine, Charles Dutoit, Gatti, and others—offers both challenges and opportunities for the way classical music is packaged and sold in today’s marketplace. The usual paradigm runs something like this: an orchestra hires a new music director, and a phalanx of public relations professionals swings into action, creating a cult of personality around their new, resident “genius”. They tout his (usually it’s a “his”) uniqueness, insight, spiritual otherworldliness, and cultural significance, drumming up as proof the occasional, theoretically profound quotation whose very meaninglessness serves to reinforce the quasi-mystical depth of perception emanating from The Great Man on the Podium.

Everyone involved has a stake in buying into this foolishness: orchestra management, the players, the conductor himself, obviously, and the audience too, which feels gratified to have its patronage rewarded with the privilege of eavesdropping on a sacred ritual, the ineffable communion of souls that constitutes the act of orchestral performance. How, then, do we square this carefully constructed image with the reality that many of these guys are sleazebags with all of the culture and class of a drunken slob at a frat party looking for an easy way to get laid? It’s a real conundrum, one that pits the more difficult to define (and promote) image of the institution against its most visible human avatar.

Orchestras and opera companies may be grand, illustrious, and historically significant, but at the end of the day they remain, comparatively speaking, faceless. Their music directors give them a face. Until relatively recently, this phenomenon expressed itself as a sort of symbiosis. The great conductors of the mid-twentieth century, for example, Szell, Reiner, Ormandy, Karajan, and the like, may have been egomaniacal monsters, but they were also extremely loyal to their musicians, and they crafted their image as a function of the audible musical results that they achieved with their ensembles over time. Today, when conductors jet around the world playing the same stuff everywhere, and a music director rarely commits to more than a limited number of weeks per season even with his own orchestra, they reap the benefits of the music director image-making infrastructure, while delivering none of the results that formerly justified its existence.

In other words, they don’t matter. With a few notable exceptions among recent conductors (Charles Mackerras, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, or Manfred Honeck, for instance) they are all interchangeable and largely indistinguishable. This doesn’t mean that the occasional great interpretation doesn’t happen, or that the standard of performance isn’t very high. But it does mean that none of these supposedly unique geniuses is essential, distinctive, or irreplaceable—precisely the qualities that they use to justify the esteem (and the often outrageous salaries) to which they feel entitled, and on which they build their careers. They still get credit for what they are supposed to be, rather than for what they most often truly are. By dumping the most egregious offenders for their revolting behavior, the result of this strange reality is now becoming evident for all to see.

When George Szell died suddenly in 1970 it precipitated an artistic crisis in Cleveland that took years, decades even, to resolve, and his shadow arguably still hangs over an orchestra that he truly shaped in his own image. With Gatti’s departure, the Concertgebouw management announced that his concerts would be taken over by other hands (no shortage there), and it’s business as usual. The same was true of Levine’s departure from the Met. It was never “Gatti’s Concertgebouw” in the way that it was “Szell’s Clevelanders” or “Ormandy’s Philadelphians”. Today the show goes on, significantly with no noticeable decline or even detectable difference in the quality of the musical results.

It’s difficult to see how this fact is not, on the whole, a good thing. The death or departure of a conductor, no matter how great, ought not to imperil the very existence of the ensemble he once led. The great orchestras and opera houses, along with the high quality of musical results that they routinely achieve and maintain, truly are cultural and historical treasures. They should remain sources of civic pride, and they deserve to be supported and cherished. There will always be conductors with the genius necessary to create performances of unusual distinction, few in number though they may be, and every so often we do find the dedication to a single ensemble over time that offers the possibility of rekindling the spirit that characterized the great musical partnerships of the past. It’s harder now, if only because the orchestras are so much better than most of their conductors that audibly positive results are trickier to assess, but it could happen.

The lesson that I hope our major ensembles begin to take from this is that they need to continue to find ways to bolster their independent identity, while spending less time promoting conductors who are not just empty suits, musically speaking, but who, even if geniuses, may well turn out to have the emotional maturity of horny adolescents. Neither Furtwängler nor Toscanini would have been tolerated in today’s professional climate, especially given the increasing number of female members in our best orchestras. More thorough vetting of prospective candidates for the music director’s job will help, of course. No one could have predicted the climactic shift in attitudes that made any of this possible or necessary, but here we are. Certainly it would be a pity if, having mucked out the stables, we return to the same tired paradigm as before. Either way though, careful development and preservation of a great orchestra’s distinctive, corporate “face” will minimize the need for emergency cosmetic surgery later on.

[John F]

Hurwitz is essentially recycling Norman Lebrecht, down to pinching the title of his most notorious book. Neither of them seems to understand that if a performance achieves greatness rather than mere competence, it's because a true maestro is on the podium. The orchestra can't achieve it on its own.

Of course if you don't set much store by greatness in performance, or can't tell the difference, or perhaps don't believe it exists, then it's easy to dismiss the overriding importance of the conductor. But in that case, perhaps you don't really care about music either.

orchestras are so much better than most of their conductors

The one statement in the entire article that I can agree with. Few of the conductors active today, including the music directors of the major orchestras and opera companies, are exceptions. But how did those orchestras become so good? Through the efforts of their conductors selecting, rehearsing, and leading the players. The most obvious example today is the orchestra of the Metropolitan Opera, a mediocre band in the 1970s which James Levine made into the elite ensemble it now is. Which Hurwitz doesn't feel the need to mention.

Superficialities like Hurwitz's aside, the true dilemma remains what it has always been: that superlative art is often created by humanly imperfect and sometimes despicable artists. (Wagner!) And not just great art; Hollywood's most popular and successful movies were created in a culture of which the casting couch was a widespread and well known part; the public didn't demand the resignation of the studio heads or boycott their products, to the contrary. What has changed, perhaps, is the public's attitude toward this regrettable but apparently inescapable fact. Formerly in awe of such as Caruso and Toscanini, when Leonard Bernstein's debut made the front page of the New York Times, today the general public doesn't much care or even know about art and artists except when they hit the front page for other reasons.

It really is a dilemma - whether you put artistic excellence or moral character first, you lose something highly important. Important, that is, to those who care about art; most of the world doesn't any more.

[maestrob]

JohnF:

I agreed with your posting until your last line, which I found very sad. If the world doesn't much care for classical music, well, that may be true in the U. S. A., but certainly not in Europe, Russia, or even, say, China, where middle-class families are reaching out to Western culture in massive numbers. Hurwitz's great mistake is his projection of the failings of three maestros (Levine, Dutoit & Gatti) onto an entire industry, which is getting along just fine these days, with wunderkinds like Dudamel and Nezet-Seguin poised to replace Levine and Dutoit.

You can, I'm sure, cite attendance figures to back up your point of view, so I'll expect that, but my feelings for the future of Western classical music worldwide are quite positive.

The Maestro Myth is not dead, IMHO.

[John F]

Maybe you're right about the rest of the world, and I wish you were. But it seems to me that if the audience for classical music outside the US remains what it used to be, the major record companies would not be making so few new studio recordings with major conductors, singers, and orchestras, and ceased studio recordings of complete operas altogether.

[Lance]

Maybe you're right about the rest of the world, and I wish you were. But it seems to me that if the audience for classical music outside the US remains what it used to be, the major record companies would not be making so few new studio recordings with major conductors, singers, and orchestras, and ceased studio recordings of complete operas altogether.

When one looks at the quantities of "new" recordings being released today, we are no longer in the heyday of what happened during the LP era. During the electric 78rpm era and tape recording and LPs, companies were releasing glorious accounts of among the most illustrious and competent artists before the public, AND, we had many choices of superlative artists. I still maintain, that as a serious record collector in every sense of the word, people will buy recordings because they know something of the performing artist/singer/conductor/pianist, etc., by going to concerts and thus buying recordings. That generation has, I believe, passed us by. And, hate to say it, unions of musicians have also had an affect on today's music given the costs of recording, renting halls, paying staff and members/conductors. The public can only endure and support so much.

While I certainly recognize the merits of many singers and performers today, only in a very few cases have I acquired any more Beethoven symphonies, concertos, or major works by any composer because I already have enough of what I consider to be the best. After all, how many complete sets of Beethoven symphonies can one study and enjoy? I hate to tell you how many I have, but I do enjoy them all when it is time to select a symphony. Who can play rings around Chopin's music other than Rubinstein, Moravec, and yes, many others. I listen to Lang Lang or Yuja Wang and I hear incredible technique with not much else to take away. And yes, I do acquire some of their recordings anyway. I admire the Stephen Houghs, Hamelins, Volodoses, and a few singers today, but very few conductors. Who can take the place of a Furtwangler, Toscanini, E. Kleiber, Klemperer, Weingartner, Koussevitzky, Monteux, Szell, Mitropouolos, and countless others of yesteryear who introduced us to music, if not by concert-going, then by recordings.

So, I maintain that today's brightest artists will support the artists of their own time because of the familiarity element. At some point, we all have to be largely content with what we learned and have. And yes, I still keep up on performing artists today, but not with the fervor I experienced in years gone by.

Who really does compare to a Gieseking, Rubinstein, Gilels, Richter, Horowitz, Berman, Hofmann, Serkin, Casadesus, Arrau, Casals, Piatigorsky, Heifetz, Moiseiwitsch, Myra Hess ... and on-and-on when it comes to getting to the depth of a performance and conveying it to the audience either live or via recordings.

I honestly believe most of us have come through the heyday of hearing among the greatest musicians of all time, yet taking nothing (much) away from today's celebrated artists. I always wish for their continued success in the art of making music.

[maestrob]

The past has to its credit many great conductors and soloists, no question. However, BBC Magazine reviews 110 new recordings every month, a few of which I acquire and review favorably. While it's totally right and proper to revere and collect those great soloists and conductors that introduced us to great music, I also enjoy being on the lookout for artists of similar depth and flair among today's crowd of great performers. Rubinstein and Toscanini were certainly lionized in their day by the general public, and that particular set of circumstances does not exist now. OTOH, the QUALITY of music-making I'm hearing now from the best performers is fully up to the best of the past, although one has to wade through a great deal of mediocrity to get to it, same as always.

Lang Lang and Yuja Wang are certainly NOT the two artists that I would use as examples of the best we are hearing today in pianists, but how about Benjamin Grosvenor, or Angela Hewitt, just to pick two of my favorites, or conductor Yannick Nezet-Seguin, who excels in repertoire as varied as Rusalka and Bruckner?

As for opera CDs, those have gone away and been replaced by DVDs, many of superb performances that rival the greatest of the past, IMHO.

What has changed is the attitude here in America toward great classical musicians and music in general, but this has not affected the quality of what we're hearing.

In summation, I'm not happy with the future of European classical music in America as our culture is going through a change away from Euro-centrism, but as for the quality of performances and performers, I find much to admire still.

[John F]

While it's totally right and proper to revere and collect those great soloists and conductors that introduced us to great music, I also enjoy being on the lookout for artists of similar depth and flair among today's crowd of great performers.

Who are they? Who are the Toscaninis and Sviatoslav Richters and Rostropoviches and Pavarottis active today? I've continued to go to concerts and opera performances and quite a few have been enjoyable, but performances and performers I'd actually call great have gotten fewer and fewer.

I used to travel to Europe to hear Rostropovich's Shostakovich cycle with the London Symphony Orchestra and Gergiev's Prokofiev cycle (now on Philips) with the same orchestra, and felt it was well worth the trouble and expense. Now there's little incentive to walk across Lincoln Center Plaza for a Met or New York Philharmonic performance. (Maybe it's just as well, as my legs aren't what they used to be.)

You and I know that our criteria and standards of musical performance are very different, I'd say radically so. I'm glad you are finding new recordings that you think are great, even if there's not a chance that I would agree. I guess I'll leave it at that.

[living_stradivarius]

Everyone involved has a stake in buying into this foolishness: orchestra management, the players, the conductor himself, obviously, and the audience too, which feels gratified to have its patronage rewarded with the privilege of eavesdropping on a sacred ritual, the ineffable communion of souls that constitutes the act of orchestral performance. How, then, do we square this carefully constructed image with the reality that many of these guys are sleazebags with all of the culture and class of a drunken slob at a frat party looking for an easy way to get laid? It’s a real conundrum, one that pits the more difficult to define (and promote) image of the institution against its most visible human avatar.

Work life and personal life are two very different things. Hence the phrase "never meet your heroes", which may interestingly be of musical origin.

---Anthony Holden, Of Presidents, Prime Ministers, and Princes: A Decade in Fleet Street (1984) [combined snippets]:

Some years later I had occasion to tell this story [of a newspaper account that rendered "bulges" as "bugles"] to a celebrated concert pianist, having discovered over a private dinner table the unlikely fact that he is an avid collector of newspaper misprints. At his London home he has a whole scrapbooks of them. Delighted though I was to meet the maestro, I did not wish to know this about him. I have never since been able to listen to one of his recitals with quite the same uncomplicated admiration. So I had learnt another useful early lesson: never meet your heroes.---

[living_stradivarius]

You and I know that our criteria and standards of musical performance are very different, I'd say radically so. I'm glad you are finding new recordings that you think are great, even if there's not a chance that I would agree. I guess I'll leave it at that.

Define greatness in fewer than 250 words

[John F]

I can do it in two words: "Wilhelm Furtwängler."

[maestrob]

While it's totally right and proper to revere and collect those great soloists and conductors that introduced us to great music, I also enjoy being on the lookout for artists of similar depth and flair among today's crowd of great performers.

Who are they? Who are the Toscaninis and Sviatoslav Richters and Rostropoviches and Pavarottis active today? I've continued to go to concerts and opera performances and quite a few have been enjoyable, but performances and performers I'd actually call great have gotten fewer and fewer.

I used to travel to Europe to hear Rostropovich's Shostakovich cycle with the London Symphony Orchestra and Gergiev's Prokofiev cycle (now on Philips) with the same orchestra, and felt it was well worth the trouble and expense. Now there's little incentive to walk across Lincoln Center Plaza for a Met or New York Philharmonic performance. (Maybe it's just as well, as my legs aren't what they used to be.)

You and I know that our criteria and standards of musical performance are very different, I'd say radically so. I'm glad you are finding new recordings that you think are great, even if there's not a chance that I would agree. I guess I'll leave it at that.

Renaud Capucon, violin
Yannick Nezet-Seguin, conductor
Boris Giltburg, piano
Diana Damrau, soprano
Dolora Zajcik, mezzo
Jonas Kaufmann, tenor

Just off the top of my head......

Each generation has its own group of great performers, John. That you don't revere the current crop is understandable and regrettable, due to your experiences, some of which I share. I've found that it does no good to live in the past: I prefer to be astonished by the present. Each of the performers I listed above has given me great pleasure, although they are not lionized by society the way you described the previous generation, but that's SOCIETY'S fault, and certainly not due to any lack of greatness in these present day artists.

I guess we'll leave it at that.

[Lance]

No question, there are many very great artists today in front of the public. I wholeheartedly agree with you that it is "society's" fault. As I often say, EVERYTHING is always in a state of change from birth to death. Often I am pleasantly surprised and enjoy what I hear, too.

[living_stradivarius]

I can do it in two words: "Wilhelm Furtwängler."

[jbuck919]

While it's totally right and proper to revere and collect those great soloists and conductors that introduced us to great music, I also enjoy being on the lookout for artists of similar depth and flair among today's crowd of great performers.

Who are they? Who are the Toscaninis and Sviatoslav Richters and Rostropoviches and Pavarottis active today? I've continued to go to concerts and opera performances and quite a few have been enjoyable, but performances and performers I'd actually call great have gotten fewer and fewer.

I used to travel to Europe to hear Rostropovich's Shostakovich cycle with the London Symphony Orchestra and Gergiev's Prokofiev cycle (now on Philips) with the same orchestra, and felt it was well worth the trouble and expense. Now there's little incentive to walk across Lincoln Center Plaza for a Met or New York Philharmonic performance. (Maybe it's just as well, as my legs aren't what they used to be.)

You and I know that our criteria and standards of musical performance are very different, I'd say radically so. I'm glad you are finding new recordings that you think are great, even if there's not a chance that I would agree. I guess I'll leave it at that.

Somewhat irrelevantly, thank you, dear old Mrs. Troidle, for teaching me the correct way to pronounce Casadesus. (It is not at all what you would think just looking at the spelling.) Then, one of the recipients of an honorary degree when I graduated from the P place had his name unforgivably mutilated as Mitislav Rostapovich. Oh my gosh, the things we remember.

[John F]

I've heard about half of maestrob's list of current performers and they're good, but great? Not for me. Like I said, very different standards and criteria. I'm not saying mine are better (whatever I may believe ), only that they're mine.

Fortunately it isn't necessary to live in the past to hear my kind of great performers. Thanks to recordings - and I believe your experience nowadays is mostly if not all from listening to recordings, i.e. documents of the more or less recent past - the past is also the present. Which is hard luck on today's artists, whose recordings are definitely in competition with those of the last 120 years, not to their advantage.

[maestrob]

I've heard about half of maestrob's list of current performers and they're good, but great? Not for me. Like I said, very different standards and criteria. I'm not saying mine are better (whatever I may believe ), only that they're mine.

Fortunately it isn't necessary to live in the past to hear my kind of great performers. Thanks to recordings - and I believe your experience nowadays is mostly if not all from listening to recordings, i.e. documents of the more or less recent past - the past is also the present. Which is hard luck on today's artists, whose recordings are definitely in competition with those of the last 120 years, not to their advantage.

Yes, it's true that my experiences of music since 2002 have been through the microphone, my loss, but surely by now I can tell whether a performance is great in that setting as can you, JohnF. Of course we have different tastes, no two people like exactly the same music, but Fred Jarvis and I came close (He's the now-deceased former Entertainment Director on the board of the NYAC who was on the Board of my Vocal Competition.). Fred also studied with Friedrich Schorr, so he knew music past and present very well. He was also the publisher and arts reviewer of "The Winged Foot," the house organ of the NYAC.

Even without hearing half of my list, you dismiss them as not as good as the greats of the past. That puzzles me: how can you dismiss someone you've not yet heard?

I say that it's your reactions to music that have changed over the years. Being young and impressionable makes us worship great musicians: I still remember some concerts with Ormandy as life-changing experiences (Shostakovich XIII, Mahler X), and I gladly revisit those recordings from time to time. Ormandy's Tchaikovsky Symphonies remain favorites, yet I also appreciate Gergiev's IV & V w/Vienna. Not better, but equal. Jonas Kaufman's recording of Strauss songs is another standout, because it's more complete than the few recorded by Fritz Wunderlich, who understood the passion in those songs. The best Trovatore I have in my collection is a 2011 MET telecast led by Marcello Armaliato, where he gives Dolora Zajcik a high C in one scene.

My approach to evaluating music is both emotional and technical. As an experienced trained musician and voice teacher, I'm lucky enough to be able to appreciate the fine points, the details, but it's the emotional response that I value most. I approach music-making without the blinders of hero-worship: even the greatest artists have their off-days (think Richter's Chopin Scherzi on Eurodisc). In short, I have no heroes, and feel I am able to judge greatness when it happens, whether now or then.

In short, I demand both technical perfection AND emotional response in my listening. You, OTOH, seem to lean more toward emotional response in your preferences. Please correct me if I'm wrong about that. It seems to me that you have bonded with these earlier performances, without leaving room for more recent artists/concerts. I agree that not many of today's performances live up to the greatest of the past, sure. BUT, it was ever thus. There were plenty of duds in the past as well, it's just that our memory dwells on the best experiences we've had, and we've tossed aside the duds.

Well, that's enough for now. De gustibus, etc.