Conductors: Wcmdmanship

The conductor’s baton is the original magic wand. Give it to a broken-down piano player and presto!—up pops a shaggy-haired genius, a leader of men, God’s gift to music.

Bah! says Gregor Piatigorsky, who in 40 years as one of the world’s great cellists has played under more than 300 conductors—and has yet to meet “one who suffers from an inferiority complex.” In a soon-to-be published book called Cellist, excerpted in last week’s Saturday Review, Piatigorsky writes a delightfully incisive analysis of wandmanship. The conductor’s role, he argues, has grown out of all reasonable proportions. “The focus of attention” he says, “has shifted from prima donna, prima ballerina and the virtuoso to a conductor, who, as a performer, has become all three in one. If he is to be blamed at all, it is not so much for assuming his role, but for demanding and wearing his crown so naturally.”

Piatigorsky notes that many a conductor who seems “desperately in love with music” was not notably enraptured by it when he was an obscure member of the orchestra. The maestro simply develops a keen sense of ownership: “Isn’t my orchestra wonderful? Do you know my Ravel, my Tchaikovsky, my Brahms?” All the same, Piatigorsky asks: “How is it that a man who never conducted or studied conducting is capable of giving an acceptable performance without warning and on the spur of the moment? No one can expect a comparable feat on any instrument.”

Virtually any mediocrity can rise to fame as a maestro, Piatigorsky suggests, provided that he learn to excel as “a charmer, a speaker, an organizer and a bridge player. His own family life must be irreproachably pure, and at times a single mistake like poor concealment of pornographic material in his luggage, or introducing as his wife a lady who wasn’t, has cost a prominent conductor his job.”

Only once did Piatigorsky accept an offer to conduct. “Half dead from rehearsals,” he recalls, he mounted the Denver Symphony podium and to his horror was informed that he first had to conduct the national anthem. “Somewhat bewildered, I gave a sign to the drummer and let him goon for an unreasonably long time. Majestically I raised my hand for a crescendo, and only when it reached its peak did I recall the national anthem.” Returning to his cello, he found it like “a piece of furniture I had never seen before . . . Its import seemed pale in comparison to the reception of my conducting.” Disturbed that “the little baton had such an easy victory over my Stradivari,” he has resisted the spell of the magic wand ever since.