The Passionate Conductor

She feels humble, even embarrassed.

"You’d better go hear Blanche Moyse," said my friend the violinist. "The musicians who play for her say she's fabulous."
Since it’s rare to hear any instrumentalist praise a conductor, I betook myself recently to a comfortable Upper West Side concert hall called Symphony Space to hear the 75-year-old director of the New England Bach Festival make her New York debut conducting nothing less than the Passion According to St. Matthew," one of the most profound and difficult works Bach or anyone else ever wrote.
Because Symphony Space is among other things a neighborhood performing center, and because the New England Bach Festival has at best a regional fame, it was easy to imagine that Mrs. Moyse might at best have been little more than a Vermont piano teacher whose love of music was so irresistible that she inspired everyone around her, even if she didn’t have much conducting technique.

Nothing could be further from the truth. though Mrs. Moyse was in fact trained as a violinist and began conducting only by accident, when problems with her bow arm forced her to stop playing in public. Her musical pedigree is impeccable. She's the daughter-in-law of Marcel Moyse, a French flutist who died last week at 95. His technique and musicianship were so exalted that young flutists pronounced his name with reverence. More than that: After studying the violin in her native Switzerland she lived as a teen-ager in the household of the violinist Adolph Busch. He was one of the greatest chamber music players of his time and the brother of Fritz Busch, who was one of the most important conductors in Europe. There she met the young Rudolph Serkin. who later became both Busch’s son-rn-law and one of the world’s great pianists.
So Mrs. Moyse developed her musicianship among the most cultivated musicians alive at the time and went on to perform professionally all over Europe. Wben she arrived in the U.S. after World War II she became, with Mr. Serkin, one of the six co-founders of the Marlboro Festival, which, to put it mildly, has acquired much more than regional fame. She returns there each year to conduct, and by choice. "I had to have a career on my terms," she told an associate.
Mrs. Moyse spends the rest of her time teaching at Marlboro College and serving as artistic director both of the Brattleboro Music Center, a highly professional comrnunity music school that she founded in 1951, and of course of the month-long Bach Festival, which she founded in 1968. So her Passion was more than competent. As the extraordinary soprano Arleen Auger says (she's Mrs. Moyse’s favorite soloist, and sang that night at Symphony Space), "I’ve sung Bach all over the world, often with people who are considered the best, and in my opinion no one is performing Bach any better than Blanche Moyse is doing it in Brattleboro."

Indeed, no one alive could have conducted a more selfless or assured performance. But that was only the start. It wasn't long before I noticed that the 38 amateur singers whom Mrs. Moyse formed into the Blanche Moyse Chorale did throughout the evening something most professional singers will do at most once or twice in an entire career: They sang directly from their hearts, without hesitation or forethought.
They did more. The "St. Matthew Passion" is, among many other things, a great sacred drama in which the chorus plays several roles: Jesus’s baffled, sometimes anguished disciples; the mob howling for his crucifixion; and even an assembly of faithful modern Christians (in effect, they represent the congregation of Bach’s own church, where the Passion was first performed) reacting with grief, anger or profound awe to each turn of the timeless story.
The Moyse Chorale performed these roles with the precision and power of great actors, and with the humility of believers who know that the story they're telling is more important than they are themselves. Mrs. Moyse’s intentions had become their intentions; they were as much her instrument as her violin ever could have been.
Later I ventured to suggest that her generally excellent professional orchestra couldn’t match the exalted emotional response of her amateur chorus: her answer amazed me. "Thank God you noticed that!" she cried, and at once I understood that she’d trained her chorus to be just as she is herself. She cares more for an ideal than she does for her own glory, and so she wants everyone to know how short her performance falls; she thinks the music is more important than she is herself. When she had to stop performing as a violinist she felt that her life was ended. Now, as a conductor confronting what she calls "the greatest values there are in humanity," she feels "humble," even "embarrassed." She notes, of course, that she could do more with the orchestra if she could rehearse it all year long, the way she rehearses her chorus. And she adds that amateurs can in fact sometimes achieve greater subtlety than professionals simply because they have to work harder. Many professionals, she thinks, wrongly feel no need to be any better than they are.
But that’s another story. She herself is never satisfied. And if her skill, devotion and intensity in shaping Bach’s great religious drama leave her audience in tears, that, she says without a trace of pride, is simply what the "St. Matthew Passion" deserves.

Wall Street Journal, November 5, 1984

Read my 1999 review of Blanche Moyse