Conductors: The Art of the Little Movement

In conducting, said Richard Strauss, “the first two beats come from God, but then it gets difficult.” Prospective conductors who want to learn the difficult part have been gathering in Vienna for 22 years to study with a bushy-browed, long-winded dogmatist named Hans Swarowsky. The world’s top teacher of the art, Swarowsky, 67, heads the elite conducting classes at the Vienna Music Academy. He offers students the vintage Viennese musical heritage. He also offers a powerful intellect honed on studies in Freudian psychiatry and art history as well as music. And he employs a classroom method—unorthodox, strict and demanding—that has produced such successful practitioners as Los Angeles’ Zubin Mehta, Madrid’s André Vandernoot and La Scala’s Claudio Abbado.

Hysterical Herons. “The trouble with most of today’s conductors,” says Swarowsky, “is that they are not sure of style. A Dürer is not a Rembrandt; a Bruckner symphony is not a Wagner opera. Each style needs its own realization.” To sharpen his students’ sense of style, Swarowsky suppresses their personalities, dismisses their interpretive urges as mere dilettantism. He leads them through rigorous analyses of scores. “You learn,” recalls Mehta, “what the composer is doing and why, and how he entered the composition—through the back door, as it were. We never heard in Swarowsky’s class what another conductor did. That is brainwashing.”

For Swarowsky, conducting is “the art of the little movement,” and the wrist—not the arm—is the key. Since most young conductors tend to weave and wave like hysterical herons, he takes drastic steps to restrict them to wrist movements. In practice sessions with the Academy’s student orchestra, he makes them stand still and beat time only with the right hand, keeping the arm tied to a chair or held out stiffly in front of them. He teaches that the conductor is “a necessary evil” who can be crucial to the preparation and rehearsal of a score but should be as unobtrusive as possible in performance. Frequently he quotes the ironical advice of Strauss, who was his mentor: “Go up to the podium and don’t disturb the orchestra.”

Ignore the Brass. The narrowness of Swarowsky’s regimen is intended as a counterbalance to the beginner’s natural effusiveness and flamboyance. “Once the student has learned the basic techniques,” he explains, “he is free to develop his genius.” But acquiring the basis can be pretty harrowing. Mixed in with such practical counsel as how to wear tails and what to do about loud brass (ignore them or they will play louder), Swarowsky subjects his charges to a withering barrage of criticism. “Stop boxing,” he grumbles, or “Stop moving your fanny; I’m not teaching ballet.” Even a compliment may be prefaced with “That was the worst thing I have seen in my whole life.” Such treatment, says Swarowsky, “strengthens their character and teaches them how to gain the upper hand of the orchestra.”

Swarowsky is scarcely more lovable afterhours. Sometimes he stalks the streets of Vienna, scowling and conducting to himself to avoid greeting passersby. He admits to a great “mania to convince everybody about everything,” and many of his outspoken opinions are less than gracious. His hottest public feud is with gifted Opera Conductor Karl Böhm, who, he thinks, has an “impossible” technique and is too lax with singers. Partly because of these traits, partly because of the didacticism of his approach, Swarowsky has never made great headway as a practicing conductor. It is only when he conducts his classes—scherzo, andante, furioso and rondo—that his true mastery appears.