What, exactly, does a symphony conductor do?
The simplest answer might be that conductors keep the orchestra together. But that's not always true, because professional musicians can often stay together without anyone conducting. And some conductors simply get in the way. There's even a joke about that. A bad conductor is rehearsing one of the world's great orchestras. He says that the musicians aren't playing well, and one of them yells: "Say that again, and in the concert, we'll follow you!"
But then the strange truth is that even many good conductors don't have a clear beat. That's one lesson you'll learn from two stupendous but frustrating videos from Teldec, "The Art of Conducting: Great Conductors of the Past" and "The Art of Conducting: Legendary Conductors of a Golden Era" (available both on VHS and DVD, for just under $30 each). They're stupendous because they show us, in rare old films, some of the top conductors of the last century; we watch them while we hear the music that they make.

But the videos are frustrating because they don't explain enough. Most crucially, they don't explain enough about who these conductors were. Everyone, I'd guess, will know Arturo Toscanini and Leonard Bernstein (both in "Great Conductors"), and hard-core fans will recognize other titans, especially Wilhelm Furtwangler, music director of the Berlin Philharmonic from 1922 to 1954, whose presence in both videos might reflect the common view that he's the greatest of them all. But even dedicated fans might have trouble placing less monumental figures from the first half of the 20th century (Fritz Busch, or Sir John Barbirolli), and noninitiates surely would appreciate biographies, however brief, of everybody. How did these people get to be conductors? Where did they conduct? What music did each of them do best? We aren't always clearly told.
But we do learn that many of these great conductors didn't beat time too clearly. It's hard, at first, to understand how Serge Koussevitzky could have led the Boston Symphony to such great heights from 1924 to 1949, since all he seems to do (as we see him in the "Great Conductors" video) is jerk his arms spasmodically. Furtwangler starts the prelude to Wagner's "Die Meistersinger" with what looks like sheer confusion. He snaps his hands first up, then down, and then, very quickly, down, up, and down. Which snap tells the Berlin Philharmonic when it should begin? The musicians seem to know, but no outsider could.
In many ways, conducting is a mystery. There's no one way to do it. In a rehearsal shown in "Great Conductors," Leonard Bernstein scolds the London Symphony; he sounds as if he's talking to a group of willful children. In the second video, the Russian Evgeny Mravinsky, supposedly a tyrant, talks to his musicians gently, as if he were their older brother. And in rehearsal with the NBC Symphony, Toscanini throws a tantrum. We can't see it (apparently it wasn't filmed), but we hear it; he sounds lost, as if his rages, which erupted often, were a ritual that he himself no longer understood.

In performance, Bernstein twists as if he were a crazy dancer, acting out the music for the players. The great composer Richard Strauss (caught in "Great Conductors" leading one of his own works) uncorks lively storms of sound, but barely seems to move. Whose way works best? It doesn't seem to matter; what counts, it seems, is some intangible authority. Furtwangler -- or so we're told in "Great Conductors," by a timpanist who worked with him -- simply walked into a concert hall, and musicians rehearsing there with someone else started playing differently. Toscanini, at the end of the overture to Verdi's opera "La Forza del destino," just stops dead, and stands there like an angry statue; the musicians, lacking any other choice, cut their last note off as if they'd all been silenced with a knife.
Charles Munch (who succeeded Koussevitzky at the Boston Symphony) comes to the final chord of Ravel's second "Daphnis and Chloe" suite and opens his arms. He slowly lets them rise above his head; the chord expands and glows. Mravinsky almost stops conducting during a Tchaikovsky symphony; he looks as if he's cradling the music in his arms, and the Leningrad Philharmonic responds with almost overwhelming tenderness.

Watch that moment once again, though, and you'll see the rhythm of that passage somehow pulsing in Mravinsky's body. Watch Koussevitzky carefully, and you feel the rhythm in him, too. To be a great conductor, you have to live the music; your authority is built on something tangible. And that's where the videos especially fall down. They don't show us what conductors need to know -- how to use rehearsal time, for instance, or how to know which moments in a piece need work and which can be left alone.
Good conductors also draw on vast reserves of more specific knowledge. I once watched Christoph von Dohnanyi rehearse the Cleveland Orchestra, while he was its music director. At one point, he taught the cellos, note by note, how to play a melody. But when an oboe note seemed just a little blah, Mr. Dohnanyi worked some magic. He told the oboist to play the note a tiny fraction higher, and suddenly it soared. The best conductors know a thousand things like that; they know not just that something isn't right, but why it isn't right. And this is what these videos completely fail to show us. We're left with just the fascination of all those legendary figures -- and with the arresting sound of the old orchestras, singing to us with a force we almost never hear today.

Wall Street Journal, January 8, 2003