What is a great conductor?

Well, let’s define great. For me a great conductor is one who like the older Hollywood directors could do anything: a Western, a musical, a noir, a cloak-and-dagger and a melodrama with the same ease and the same professionalism. How many conductors could do this? Well, it's an area not surprisingly occupied by a great number of names – but surprisingly not numbered with the “Great”: Kletzki, Kurtz, Galliera, Ackerman, Monteux, Leinsdorf, Ormandy, Rodzinski and Beinum – to name but very few of them. These are my heroes.

Of the conductors categorized under “Great” most were great in something, not everything. Some area of the repertory only. Take Toscanini. Beethoven, Brahms, Respighi, Mendelssohn, Mussorgsky and Wagner bleeding-chunks. Verdi and Puccini. OK. Of course you cant’ say “and that was all” – for that was quite a lot. Take Klemperer. Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann, Mozart, Wagner, Mahler, Bruckner. Not the best for all, not always, but music making that was never indifferent. Take Furtwangler. Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, Wagner. And backwards again. Each has his fervent admirers and his equally fervent detractors; less famous men had fewer of both.

So the crux of the matter is simply the definition of greatness – and there lies the rub. A matter of priorities and a matter of values.

Some will call “great” a conductor who makes interesting, even enjoyable, second rate works. Such is the domain of sir Thomas Beecham. Of course the English wouldn’t agree. For them sir Thomas is the peer of Toscanini, Furtwangler and who else. Only – we can’t tell. We don’t have his central European repertoire, his Wagner, his Schubert-Schumann-Wagner. He didn’t put them on record, if he ever grappled with them. Talk of overpraised men. But – Great? Depends on the nationality of the audience I am afraid.

Others will call “great” a conductor who devotes all his energy to propagate the new, the experimental, the researching, the ground breaking. There, first and foremost, you have Mitropoulos, but also Rosbaud, Scherchen, Monteux, Markevitch, Maderna, Boulez, Gielen, Rowicki, Zagrosek, Bertini.

And then there’s the “great” conductor who’s acting great… E. g. Karajan. “Der Mann K.” as Furtwangler referred to him in horror, didn’t revolutionize anything; he played everything because he was selling everything, like a Mercedes is the car to get over a certain income level. But then so did Ormandy, who never enjoyed such adulation or publicity and – although unacknowledged by the critics, at least in Europe – practically did a much better show of it. Karajan almost wrecked the Philharmonia. He definitely destroyed the Berliners. And became rich by spinning a web all over the World (bar the USA, where he wasn’t welcome by the pre-and post-WW II refugees) which secured him royalties from everything he’d be involved in. Having been advertised as Das Wunder Karajan when he was spotted by Walter Legge, he later perpetuated the blurb single handed. The only Wunder about him was his egotism, his despotism, his deep rooted Nazism and his insensitive music making. Few were his peers in that. (Ever wondered why a man who played literally everything, never played Mahler?)

Stokowski has been an early prototype of that kind – but there the analogy ends. If the man was conceited at a certain stage of his long career, it was about his ability as an orchestra builder and a genial interpreter of music he liked, which he was. After all he lived in the Americas when music wasn’t yet such a hot potato as was elsewhere and during a time when there were too many other great musicians active around (Walter, Mitropoulos, Szell, Reiner, Munch, Ormandy); so his tendency to over hyped greatness was kept in relative check. Lenny did better. His times offered more for the act. The old-school Great had passed away, Karajan secure in his Prussian citadel didn’t care: he had written off Vienna and the old capital returned the feeling. New York had gently ousted Lenny and the Wiener Philharmoniker waited him to make their peace with God for their collective Nazi past (some say and present) through the mediation of a Jew. Whilst his ample New York recorded output can be called serviceable, the recordings that followed with the Viennese is mostly suspicious. But who cared? He was Lenny, so full of love for all, so full of New World simplicity and outgoingness. And after all he sweated so profusely, it couldn’t but be great. He was (and he remained) at his best on TV.

There is another category. The “Kapellmeisters”. Bohm, Krips, Keilberth, Krauss, Konwitschny, Sanderling, Swarowsky, and scores of others, musicians who uphold a great tradition, who don’t “take chances” (i.e. impose their ego on the music) and who trust the Urtext to give to the public the shivers by the means of its musical content. You can never go wrong with them and oftener than not you discover that force allargandos and accelerandos aren’t the only recipe to keep the public sitting at the edge of the chair. Over-interpretation is as bad as indifference and routine. Stressing the obvious is a mortal sin in performing arts. And the once snubbed “Kapellmeisters” are very useful today in reminding us that whatever needed be stressed in a musical text, it was stressed by the composer.

In Art being smart never pays much dividends.

You also have the “mavericks”. Those individualistic interpreters who manage to turn their huge egos to an equivalent of the creative artist and get away with it – often with honors. Mengelberg, Koussevitzky, Stokowski and Knappertschbusch (in his gemutlich Viennese manner), were important, imposing personalities that overrode the text and imprinted their will on it, at all times convincingly. (Karajan may have been the wrong kind of the species.)

Then there is a way you can tell the great from the less great: they have a sound of their own which you can tell no matter what orchestra they lead. But orchestras have their sound too – big and small, good and not always good . We’ll come to that later.