A double-bass player I knew, who had played in the NBC Symphony Orchestra under the notoriously tyrannical conductor Arturo Toscanini, never tired of telling nostalgic anecdotes about Toscanini with great affection. One of his favorites, which I heard countless times, was how the maestro—after ranting and raving, and throwing temper tantrums at rehearsals, not to mention occasionally hurling his baton at an erring musician—could be most compassionate when encountering the offending culprit by chance in a backstage corridor. Toscanini would inquire about the health of the musician’s family, the age of his children and their plans for college, and never mention a word about the rehearsal a few minutes earlier, when he shouted “porche miseria!” at the man for misplacing an accent in a Beethoven symphony. Moreover, during arduous tours across the ocean, he would worry about his orchestra players like an overprotective parent, even over a minor case of sea-sickness or upset stomach, and he displayed the same concern for a second-violinist as he did for a soloist.
On the other hand, I know many hopelessly jaded musicians who believe that the only good conductor is a dead conductor. A man with a baton in his hand is an egomaniac, they argue, who delights in torturing musicians with criticism, insults, and long-winded harangues. In their view, conductors rehearse to suppress our personal expressions of musical style, and we must conform only to the authority of the baton. When an orchestra player dares to become creative, God forbid, a conductor will fire him, they say—and all a maestro’s handshakes, hugs, kisses, and chitchat in the corridors are meaningless and insincere. Nothing on this planet can diminish the hatred and fear these musicians feel for the monster on the podium.
Personally, despite 43 seasons in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra under the batons of maestros of every nationality—conductors with a rich variety of talent, baton techniques, waistlines, hygienic habits and hairstyles—I have always kept an open (sometimes vacant) mind about the creature on the podium who, to justify his odd way of making a living, must wave a stick about to convince a mob of competent musicians that he alone is the definitive interpreter of a composer’s intentions.
Any conductor can be categorized as: 1- A monster both on and off the podium. (Quite common and, sadly, usually competent.) 2- A monster on the podium, but a nice person off it. (The subject of this article, and the most competent of all.) 3- A nice person both on and off the podium. (Extremely rare, and mostly incompetent.) 4- A nice person on the podium, but a monster off it. (The most treacherous of all, and the most incompetent.)
Furthermore, I submit that all of the hyperbolic criticism conductors conjure up at rehearsals can be condensed into a few simple descriptions: too loud or too soft, too long or too short, too fast or too slow, too soon or too late, too sharp or too flat, and accent or no accent. And any conductor or music critic with “A Dictionary of Musical Terms in Four Languages” on his desk who scoffs at my words and dubs them simplistic is either a poseur or a former musicology student of Paul Henry Lang. (I bowed out of the Columbia graduate school after a tortuous four-credit course on Handel with Professor Lang, when his homework assignments required reading exclusively in German.)
So the maestro who frowns at a nervous oboist after a somewhat shaky solo, and says, “I want to hear a desert breeze wafting through palm trees, the breath of a sparrow on a blade of grass,” or some such nonsense, and makes the poor devil repeat the solo until he finally cracks with a heart-rending squeak, then shouts invective at him, is not exactly the kind of person we want to chat with at the water cooler. Yet if this same charlatan should approach the wounded oboist backstage and apologize for his insults, while gently patting him on the back as if burping a baby, and reassure him that, after all, anyone can make a mistake, the oboist would surely tell his colleagues that maestro so-and-so is really a decent fellow and not just full of horse manure.
I have observed that this sort of backstage compassion never emanates from young guest conductors with sparse CD listings in the Schwann catalog. Conversely, the more famous and competent the maestro is, the more likely he is to forgive an erring musician. Note that I did not say “forget.” There are a few category-1, legendary conductors (mostly deceased, bald Hungarians) who neither forgave nor forgot any offending musicians or their mistakes. Since it would be churlish of me to name those heartless despots of the podium (not to mention inviting lawsuits from their descendants), I will not descend into the petty maelstrom of malcontent orchestral musicians. Indeed, only the category-2, truly noble baton-wielding souls I have played under will be discussed here.
Fausto Cleva was of the strict Italian, starched-white-collar school of conductors. He appeared to be a frail figure on the podium, but when it came to Bel Canto opera, he was a venerable giant, with a keen ear and an infallible memory. He would not tolerate musical mistakes, either from the orchestra or the singers onstage. If a singer dragged, or held the high note of a cadence too long, he would wave his left hand violently at the culprit, hiss, and whisper “Cammina! Cammina!” (“Go on! Move!!”) He didn’t give a damn if it was Corelli or Tebaldi, for this was a man of total integrity; the musical phrase was all that mattered, and anything that tainted it was sheer sacrilege.
It was the same with the musicians. We received many Toscaninian “porche miserias” from Cleva, and although he never flung a baton at anyone, a musical error instantly transformed his face into a ferocious mask—dark purple, a vein popping out on his forehead, eyes blazing—and if looks could kill, as the saying goes, Cleva could surely have murdered half the Met orchestra in one rehearsal.
I recall an opera broadcast when my stand-partner on the first desk (now deceased, poor fellow) biffed in loudly on his fiddle during a rest. From Cleva came the expected look from hell, as if he’d been stabbed in the heart. I could sense the terror and remorse of my colleague. He was a sensitive man, and had great difficulty holding back tears of embarrassment.
At intermission, he bolted from his chair and said he must go to Cleva and apologize. I told him this might not be advisable, considering the maestro’s current mood, and perhaps it would be wiser to write him a note the next day. Another violinist warned him that he might well be carried out of that dressing room in a pine box, which remark evoked some unkind guffaws from my colleagues. It was too late, however, and all we could do was wait in the corridor like mourners in a funeral parlor waiting for the casket to arrive.
Suddenly, after only a few tense minutes, my stand-partner emerged from the maestro’s dressing room. He was breathless but smiling.
“I can’t believe it,” he began. “I apologized. So Cleva grabs me, gives me a big hug, and says: ‘Ahh, my dear boy, you are only human!’ Can you beat that?”
Karl Boehm was another category-2 maestro. Here was a man whom the Holocaust survivors in the orchestra insisted would have been appointed the music director of every orchestra and opera house on earth if Hitler had won the war. Yet Hugo Burghauser, an elderly contrabassoonist charitably hired by Rudolf Bing after a dramatic escape from the Gestapo, insisted that Boehm had, in fact, rescued many Jewish musicians and their families from the Nazis. Burghauser had been director of the Vienna Opera, where he had hired maestros Boehm, Bruno Walter, and Toscanini for engagements before the war.
Burghauser, whom I sometimes dined with, vowed that although Boehm was a personal friend of Richard Strauss and greatly admired by Hitler, but that Boehm only joined the Nazi Party at a late date, and only to survive—unlike Von Karajan, who was a fanatic Hitlerite and early Party joiner. Moreover, Boehm always paid a nostalgic, tear-jerking homage to his former Vienna Opera House director, embracing him in front of the orchestra unashamedly whenever he came to the Met.
On the podium, Boehm often would lose his temper. His face would turn crimson, and he would tremble with rage over a wrong entrance from the brass, or a sour note from the winds. Whispers of “send him to the Russian Front,” “Uh, oh! Another lampshade coming up!” and “Herr Kapitan, the snorkel is jammed!” would emerge from wiseacres in the rear of the orchestra, fortunately unheard by Boehm. Yet moments later, at intermission, the Fuehrer’s favorite conductor often could be found standing outside his dressing room in the corridor, jacketless, swapping jokes and back-slapping with us like comrades in a beer hall. We began to call him “Uncle Karl,” and incidentally, he is the only Met maestro to grace my walls with a framed inscribed photo, wherein he is grinning benevolently, like a true loving uncle.
Erich Leinsdorf was perhaps the most unpredictable of all. He was a very short, bald man with an incredibly loud voice for his size. During rehearsals of “Tristan” at the Met, his behavior on the podium was despicable, shouting incessantly and insulting everyone.
“Go the hell back to conservatory!” he yelled at an erring wind player. He picked mercilessly on our second-violin section, making us repeat difficult passages, then shouted: “Scandalous!! Go home and practice!!” Or to the cellos: “May I remind you, ladies and gentlemen, that we are in the key of E-flat! Don’t be approximate! I want to hear notes, NOTES, not shmears!!”
If any musicians were seen smiling, or chewing gum, or with their legs crossed, or talking while Leinsdorf was pontificating, they would be tossed out of the pit on their ears (a favorite cliché of Leinsdorf’s, whose sense of humor could be most banal).
One afternoon, I was walking down Fifth Avenue on my way to the dentist, still smarting from the insults and Leinsdorfian shouts at a “Tristan” rehearsal the previous day. I was depressed, and my jaw ached from an abscessed tooth. Suddenly, from behind me, directly in my ear at a deafening volume, boomed the unmistakable voice of my tormentor.
“My dear Dreyer!” Leinsdorf shouted, grabbing my elbow. “May I walk with you?”
I stammered something about being late for my dental appointment, but he was not to be put off.
“I am on my way to Patelson’s,” he said, referring to the music store on West 56th Street, “and you must come with me. We can chat on the way, yes?”
Again I pleaded and apologized, pointing to my swollen jaw.
“My poor man,” he replied, squeezing my elbow. “My heart goes out to you! You know,” he went on, “I once had an abscessed molar, unfortunately just before a performance of ‘Meistersinger’ in Berlin…”
I found myself not hearing a word after that, while my commiserating maestro’s firm grip on my arm pulled me farther and farther from my dental destination. Unable to shake him and his hearty chatter, I was panic-stricken that the dentist might punish my lateness by hastening the anesthesia dose before the extraction. Leinsdorf was unmoved. I was literally dragged into the music store—and while the maestro exchanged niceties with the owner and browsed happily in the orchestral score bins, I fled.
At the “Tristan” rehearsal the next morning, heavily sedated with painkillers, I beheld a madman on the podium. Leinsdorf again began to harass our second-violin section, and we could do no right. Every passage evoked a shout, an insult, a sarcastic remark—and his resonant bellowing rang through the concrete halls of the C-level so loudly that passing stagehands and ballet dancers peered into the rehearsal room to see what was going on. At the coffee break, I was gingerly sipping water from a corridor fountain when I felt a hand on my shoulder.
“My dear fellow,” came a hoarse whisper. “How did it go with your tooth yesterday? Are you in pain? I missed you in Patelson’s, you know. Incidentally, I discovered this rare 1929 Peters edition of…”
My colleagues were wide-eyed, listening to the maestro rambling on in a soft voice about some obscure chamber music piece he found in a bin, though none of us had ever heard of the composer or the piece. Could this be the same man, I marveled, who moments ago had been raging and roaring like a maniac? A brass player, who had suffered his share of castigation from Leinsdorf over the years, approached me and said, rather angrily, “First he gives you ulcers, then he worries about your goddam tooth! What was that all about?”
“After all,” I replied meekly—“he is only human.”
