Writing & Lectures

Dr Tom Walsh Lecture, Wexford Festival 2015

Good morning. It’s a great privilege and pleasure to be giving the Dr. Tom Walsh Lecture, here at the Wexford Festival that he founded. The Festival remains a glowing star in the firmament, principally in its devotion to the composers first and foremost, who when they sat down to devote weeks and months to hard labour, hoped above all else that they might be creating operas to stimulate thought and for audiences to enjoy. This act itself was and is celebrated here, and audiences eagerly lap up the opportunity to come face to face with many operas which otherwise might be lost in a crowded world. But first I must apologise to those of you who were perhaps expecting to hear the unquenchable John Julius Norwich talk about one of his life-long passions, Venice. I was genuinely flattered and charmed when Maestro David Agler asked me to replace John Julius who unavoidably found that he could not be amongst us this year.

I thought for some time about a possible subject upon which to wax lyrical this morning. One of the primary rules conductors need to grasp in the melee which signals the beginning of a career is not to talk too much. It’s important not to talk at all if one can avoid it. It’s not a matter of the words one might use to describe a feeling about music, but the way one makes music. That’s an interesting linguistic construction in itself; more usually heard as ‘making music together’, a collegiate activity.

You would be forgiven for thinking that conductors, per se, are particularly fond of waxing lyrical. In a way, that lyricism goes withthe job, a job that is fundamentally, putting it politely, to make decisions. That’s it, in a nutshell. From the very beginning of a symphonic rehearsal for example, the conductor, at a primary level, sets the course, having searched in preparation of various kinds for a way of performing a work that first and foremost pleases himself or herself. True, there have been martinets over the course of the age of the conductor, who could not justifiably be said to be purveying lyricism as such. Lyricism implies, at least for me, some not insignificant degree of sensitivity, and the great martinets such as perhaps Fritz Reiner or even George Szell could not be described as particularly sensitive in the conduct of their professional work. Quite the opposite in fact; I think it’s fair to say that they occupied their positions at a time when conducting was principally an exercise of authority over musicians. They demanded, coerced, oversaw and I’m certain they frankly terrified them too.

I’m afraid Arturo Toscanini, a conductor whom I admire almost to a point of reverence, added to this terror in his day, and was notoriously ferocious and to individual players on occasion. He is famously known in one of his rages to have said ‘God tells me how the music should sound, but you stand in the way’.

There is a video clip available that shows Fritz Reiner conducting Strauss, Salome’s dance; his hand is hardly moving but his staring eyes roam slowly around the orchestra like a predator looking for his next meal. But times have changed, society has changed and the lot of an instrumental musician has changed as a result. Quite a bit actually, when one compares the status of a musician hundreds ofyears ago with today’s counterpart. You might recall the model images of an ensemble of musicians wearing monkey masks, at once to establish their demeaned status, but also to mask their individualities. They are just an anonymous troop, without defining character or inclusivity. Times have changed.

Conductors these days too, are, in the main, guests of self-managed orchestras, not slave masters hiring and firing at will or subjugating musicians to mindless servitude.

But, the position of a conductor in the structure is to a great extent hierarchical. How could it not be? Think of the way an orchestra is seated and formed on the concert stage, and in the rehearsal room. The geometry is simple; the orchestra forms half of a miniature solar system, with the podium at its centre.

When thinking about a subject to talk about today, two distinct bells that have sounded from a distance at times in my life came to mind as interesting perhaps for this occasion. The first was rung by Hans Keller, the eminent musicologist, iconoclast and broadcaster, in a well-known radio series. He argued that, and I quote, - “ a phoney profession is one that creates grave problems which it then fails to solve.” - Top of his list was the professional Conductor. His point is a very good one. He justified the baldness of that statement by going on to say that the emergence of the professional conductor made out of a musician’s raison d’etre an unmusical activity. After all, with hardly any time to rehearse whatsoever each week, musicians working with Bach and Haydn in Leipzig and Esterhazy had hand-written parts infresh wet ink put onto their stands and were expected to play the notes, play together and in tune, understand the music and style, and perform it there and then, led by either composer playing the violin, viola or keyboard from within the ensemble. One can tell much about their high standards of training and musicianship by the fact that Bach hardly ever gives any precise indication of how the music must be played. Musicians were trusted.

I’ve been so often asked what a conductor actually does that I’m sure I’ve thought about it too much, trying hard to put the sound of Hans Keller’s jangling bell out of the way, and to find ways of describing every aspect of the activity; the practical or managerial necessities, the techniques, the research and study and so on, and the deep mystery of how it actually works. I’ve also of course had others suggest to me very frequently, what it is that we conductors do or don’t do, not always in the kindest of terms. Actually, everyone seems to have a varying idea of what the conductor does, how it’s done, and what its purpose is, or where indeed did he or she ever come from.

Here are a few of the many proffered observations from outside the musical profession;

The conductor cues the musicians, bringing them in at the right time, and shows them how the music goes.

The conductor rehearses the orchestra to make sure all the notes are right, in tune, and played together correctly according the score.The conductor controls the orchestra, showing all the emotions (and that would be just in case the musicians were emotionally inadequate in some way).

In a performance of an opera the conductor makes sure the orchestra are in time with the singers on stage.

Most of these simplest observations have some semblance of truth, but don’t really do more than scratch the surface. The trouble is that the podium, the raised dais for the great leader is placed in the centre of operations, and so it has become natural now for audiences to see a performance through the conductor and his or her physicality. This can happen in Opera Houses too – the conductor being raised high enough in order that the audience can see the great man, or woman at work, enjoying his ‘living and breathing every note’. Put indelicately, audiences can appear now to be moved, both emotionally and in their judgment, by what a conductor shows them about the music more than the sound the orchestra is making. The deification of the conductor, or rather the reliance upon a glamorous and physically charismatic figurehead has been achieved with the help of audiences, and audience approval of glamour shall we say, has powerful wide ranging commercial effects on a great deal of crucial Arts Business, both orchestral and operatic.

Norman Lebrecht’s book ‘The Maestro Myth’ was a characteristically razor-edged analysis of how the arts and their business has possibly been constructed in such a way in modern times that Maestros havebeen able easily to dominate both musicians and their lives, in addition to standing at the very centre of the arts’ commercial element. Audiences in the main feel they are able to judge a conductor’s performance from observation alone, which actually doesn’t help. Rather, it bolsters the perception that conductors rule, in a world where a bad decision won’t affect things as seriously as political mistakes perhaps within broader autocracies. Audiences without any shadow of doubt prefer the concept of orchestras led by dictatorship, and the glamour attached to visible dictatorship and the enjoyment of that power pleases many. But that isn’t finally how it works at all. I’m afraid we have moved quite a distance away from why music and opera both are so important to us, mostly fascinated by what we see, and not what we hear and how we listen.

I read an article in the latest edition of the Gramophone magazine by Philip Clark and many bells are chiming together currently. Philip Clark conveys a certain dismay and dread and I quote;

‘We live in a culture, I think, where visual stimuli are in the ascendant, sometimes at the cost of sound. Sound is no longer enough. That sound can be judged as sound – that music is a worthy pursuit in and of itself is, in the most extreme cases, being casually dismissed. Classical music now must aspire to offer spectacle – whether a particular piece can take it or not.’

Hence, concert promoters and musicians are constantly under pressure to ‘dress’ their ‘events’, and apply theatrical tricks in order to persuade audiences to enjoy ‘immersive Beethoven’,‘overwhelming Mahler’, ‘turbo-charged Strauss’, or in the words of Classic FM, ‘smooth Classics’. Music itself is becoming incidental to life, just as Television sound tracks are applied as a backwash for Documentary films which can show you Mongolia or Polar Bears on Svalbard while standard pastiche Vaughan Williams is telling your ear that it’s actually the rolling Chiltern Hills. Even news programmes can have not so discreet electronic drum-beats attached, and magazine programmes instead of using full stops and commas, prefer a musical dot as punctuation. Our own British Radio 3 also gets involved with this trend, by adding an adjective to their introductions to a work, and in their back announcements;

‘Here is a thoroughly uplifting performance of Schubert’s Piano Trio etc etc’,

and just in case you weren’t paying enough attention….

’ That was a hugely energetic performance, played with engaging wit’

Hans Keller though was onto these developments a long time ago. His point about the phoney conducting profession was based on the development of music itself. Chamber music, secular as opposed to sacred, was an intimate experience, the early audiences would have been very close indeed to the action, focusing on the individual musicians playing the music, and so it behoved the musician to be the very closely followed conduit for a composer’s work. My own guidingprinciple has always been to try and be just that - the conduit, the link between composer. musician and audience.

Interestingly modern English dictionaries list several uses of the word ‘conductor’ in differing orders.

Some place a conductor as ‘one who manages a conveyance’ top of the list. London cabbies prefer that one, with ‘tour guide’, ‘orchestral conductor’, or ‘lightning rod’ further down. Clearly the word conductor in English for a musician who stands in front of an orchestra is one of our adorable vagaries. Like so much of the English language, the word is straining to release more information than other possible words might, but lends the possibility of interpretation and misunderstanding too.

I’m fascinated though by this very English attempt in contrast with other European titles. In French of course, the title is Chef d’orchestre, head man of the band. No messing there. And in Italian, it is direttore d’orchestra; equally definitive. There is no possibility of avoiding the issue here either. The Italians gave us the word, Maestro. The conductor is Master of all.

In English, much more is possible to take from the word we have assigned. Etymology leads us to the latin ‘conducere’, which means to lead, bring or draw together. Already there is more to think about, more abstract concepts, widening the possibilities of understanding. Not least of course is the distinct qualification of authority as such, to suggest that music, and the making of it when a few or many areinvolved, requires leadership of a kind, but also a sensibility towards individual musicians and their invaluable musicianship.

The conductor Nicholas Braithwaite gave me a very good looking definition; which is that within any group of musicians, all of whom as individuals have their own idea about how to perform a piece of music, the conductor is the individual allowed to carry his own decisions forward in order to gather all together into a collective unity. In effect he is king or queen for a day, invited by the musicians to lead the way with interpretative ideas that he or she brings on that occasion.

Daniel Baremboim has said that a Conductor at his or her best provides ‘consistency’ in musical terms, which is to say, the choice of ideas that combine in the most organic way, matching well with each other, to provide a logical flow.

Beecham of course, only half in jest, suggested that the conductor’s most important responsibility is to make sure everyone begins together and ends together. Beecham wasn’t always kind – he described Herbert Karajan as a musical Malcolm Sargent, and referred to Adrian Boult as “reeking of Horlicks”. But amidst the mainly enjoyable vivacity and wit, there is some truth in the idea of beginnings being absolutely crucial. The beginning of Mahler’s 8th symphony for example needs someone to control it, and most importantly to set the tempo, one hopes correctly, because once that movement is away like a hare from a dog, quite a lot of musicians and singers need to feel they’ve understood the pulse, - the chosen speed.But the main truth in Beecham’s concise remark is a quiet implication, and contains the nugget that is most important of all. Musicians of quality are to be trusted to do what they do best; they can look after themselves once basic parameters are agreed. And Beecham talked about the musicians of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra which he himself formed, with esteem and affection, and not least, pride.

In John Barbirolli’s work too, one can see, hear and sense, that trust and support for musicians playing for him. Barbirolli was a very fine cellist at first, indeed he was a rank and file cellist with the LSO when Elgar’s Cello Concerto was premiered, and again with the LSO he played his first Dream of Gerontius under Edward Elgar’s own baton at the Three Choirs Festival. He made his early reputation as a conductor in many recordings with soloists, and in opera. His accompanying skills were second to none. All who worked with him as soloists spoke of his sensitivity, support and warmth, as well as his heartfelt, natural musicianship. Possibly, when he took over the leadership of the New York Philharmonic from Toscanini, his lack of stern authoritarian instincts and a nature that was collegiate rather than dictatorial did not equip him for the more confrontational atmosphere at that time. But from the moment he formed the Halle in his own model in which music and musicians came first, his own growth as a leader and interpreter of a very wide repertoire from Italian and German Opera to Elgar, and Mahler, Sibelius, his legendary Bruckner and Brahms, was scintillating. I only wish I had been able to witness his work at first hand. Every note under his calm and warmly intense presence breathes a tender love of music and aperformer’s care. Not that those qualities summed it up entirely for him personally. It was glorious John who with such lovely precision and insight to human nature was quoted as saying in his gravelly tobacco-soaked tones

“ conducting is 95% love, and 5% vinegar”.

I like the culinary reference; John Barbirolli loved nothing better after a performance than to gather up soloists, players and friends and take them home where late at night he personally cooked for them.

Now, the elephant in the room remains the question of what is it that the conductor really does, why, and how. And it’s worth a moment to consider how it happened that an individual stood up for the first time from the ranks of players to direct as it were. Remember that Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven were players of exceptional talent, equal to any, and probably better. These five giants for example would have been present at most if not all of the first performances of their works. The composer would have been in charge, and in the firing line. The composer is, and always was the begetter of all things.

But direction of a performance was aided by a swish of a leading violinist’s bow, or a Mozart, Handel or Bach at a keyboard. We know, sadly, that Lully was standing and beating the floor in time, with what appears to have been a rather large conducting staff, when he pierced one of his feet, subsequently dying of gangrene because his love ofdancing led him to ignore treatment for the wound, amputation possibly being the only solution.

There’s no doubt that composers felt the need to stand up in front and physically direct in some way. Music was perhaps becoming more complicated, or it could easily have been true that the tradition of performance being led from an instrument simply evolved into an untramelled physical activity. The very first to begin to develop this physicality in a format we would recognise were naturally composers, notably Carl Maria von Weber and Felix Mendelssohn. The larger staff that caused Lully so much grief was by now a smaller more manageable stick, and it’s clear that when Berlioz and Wagner took to the podium to direct their own works, they were thinking deeply about the mechanics of the exercise as well as the purpose, because they both wrote on the subject of conducting. However, as public concerts burgeoned alongside the state theatres, and more and more major municipal orchestras were established, of course there were many positions to be filled, and much music to be delivered to hungry audiences. The professional conductor was only too happy to oblige. In fact, the professional conductor began to be seen as a community figurehead, symbolising a community’s pride in artistic aspiration, and confirming the glory of any particular city that sought them. This is as true now as it was then.

Wagner, very much in his easy ‘de haut en bas’ mode, had a lot to say in his characteristically pedagogical style about the now routine methods of the legion ‘capellmeisters’ who had taken over direction of musicians and singers from Composers. The term ‘capellmeister’has not quite regained its original gloss since that time. It denotes the secondary tier of conductors beneath the top table where the General Direktor or Musikdirektor presides. His book doesn’t make for happy reading, firstly because it seems clear that the ‘capellmeisters’ were beginning to draw the limelight away from Composers and secondly bad habits were rearing their heads, such as ignoring composers specific markings, with the clear purpose of ‘improving’ composers’ work. Furthermore, there is an implication that laziness was creeping into composers work too, and Wagner goes to great pains in describing how conducting his own works informed him as a composer.

Interestingly, much of his general criticisms could very easily be compared with more recent phases of interpretation, and ideas purporting to be new, as wave after wave of turbo-charged Maestros have searched for their individuality and their own limelight. We’re all told to ‘specialise’ for the betterment of our careers and profile. I think I hear Hans Keller’s bell clanging louder and louder….

For example, Wagner writes about a facile fashion for music to be played faster and faster, speed of course means excitement to many. He particularly blamed Mendelssohn for mindless speed, and Mendelssohn apparently retorted that poor music and poor playing could often be mitigated by fast tempi.

It’s possible to infer that around the turn of the 20th century, the fashion was certainly for faster tempi in general. Recordings of Edward Elgar’s own conducting, and Richard Strauss’ Beethoven andMozart and even his own works, and contemporary anecdotes about Von Bulow certainly demonstrate that point. Wagner berates the speed merchants mercilessly, almost on spiritual grounds. He clearly felt that the ‘soul’ of music demanded time to be allowed to breathe and fill the air with its almost religious karma. He was on solid footing in this regard, with his own music anyway, but certainly learnt a lesson that composers can’t afford to be vague either. His frequent marking ‘mässig’ which actually means ‘moderate’ is open to much discussion these days, and was then. Wagner complains that when he conducted the Tannhauser overture it took him 12 minutes, start to finish. He later finds out that in the same theatre, Dresden, subsequent capellmeisters were making it last 20 minutes. That’s almost unbelievable, but I do believe it. He couldn’t complain though, as ‘massig’ is a negative indication – not too fast, and not too slow.

These contradications opened the door to the necessity to take a view, and lo and behold, the professional conductors made strong headway. Incidentally, both Elgar and Strauss as conductors with their own works give us little to go on. Strauss who really was a fine technical conductor and devoted much of his life to composing and conducting hand in hand, appears cold and almost disinterested when conducting his own works. Elgar similarly, a deeply concentrated composer appears as a conductor to have been slightly more eager to get away early to the races than to rehearse, as the story goes of his recording of the violin concerto with a 16 year old Yehudi Menuhin. Generally speaking, in modern times, listening to composer’s own performances of their work can be confusing to say the least. What is marked in their score is not necessarily the waythey perform it themselves. Would the same have been true with Bach, Mozart, Verdi? That’s an interesting question.

Wagner was one of the last ‘big beasts’ amongst composers of the 19th century with links back to the earliest, Mendelssohn and Weber, to venture into this particular affray. What he notably does not do though, in his rebukes and admonitions, is to discuss the mechanics of conducting. The semaphore. This aspect, the dance to the time of music, is where the mystery lies. At its most sophisticated, among friends as it were, it has no detectable form. Even the greatest of the great musicians amongst conductors like Furtwangler seem to be doing freestyle, with shakes, waves, through them. Bernstein and Baremboim are so confident in themselves and in their musicians that occasionally they stop moving entirely and Baremboim often reaches insouciantly for a pocket-handkerchief in mid-phrase to mop his brow.

Boulez on the other hand who began conducting in some kind of a fury about inaccurate performance of contemporary works, relies heavily on accurate basic semaphore. He’s not so much living and sweating every emotive nuance in the music as controlling the togetherness, and the ebb and flow within a clear cross-hatched framework. Having said that, one of the most beautiful and nuanced performances of Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe in my view was his. I played for him myself, Tambourine in the Rite of Spring and Timpani in Bartok’s Music for Strings Percussion and Celeste, as a member of the National Youth Orchestra. On both occasions he only glanced at me once; and I knew why. Obviously I was tugging at his reins, on thefirst occasion rhythmically, and secondly because I’d tuned my C sharp inaccurately. It mortified me of course, but he was right. Otherwise, his eyes didn’t meet mine. They were alive with thought and discipline.

However, lest too many more video clips of blessedly sensitive toddlers conducting Beethoven 5, seemingly without blemish, appear to be in any way convincing, there are very basic forms to the semaphore, the beat moving in different directions to signify whichever beat of the bar. The semaphore is actually helpful on specific occasions, but it doesn’t get to the nub of conducting, which is to show in one’s every move what is important about the music for the musicians security and to encourage live creativity. You see, I did say there was mystery in this whole subject. The fact remains that a conductor has to develop a way of showing that he or she is palpably in contact with the sound, aware of its every feature, and how it is made. That can’t be taught, no matter how many schools of conducting venture to suggest that it can. It can only be learnt, through experience, sometimes bitter, rather akin to leaping into shark infested waters to learn how to swim. Musicians themselves add to this surrounding mystery. Rarely do they agree about how it actually works, but they do intuit it, through music.

The mystery in the mechanics of conducting is nowhere more obvious than in noting such a plethora of styles. I have a lovely collection of Gustav Mahler silhouettes, showing his conducting style that was obviously demonstrative of his intense, even neurotic and febrile nature. Richard Strauss at the other extreme instructedconductors to keep their left hand in the waistcoat pocket at all times, never to encourage the brass and he remained urbane as always, gently controlling with a small elegant beat.

What kind of semaphore we observe hardly matters a jot. Wagner’s fight was all about whether the Composer is the begetter of all, and whether a piece of music is defined within the score itself. Does the score define a work? Or does performance of the work add something to it. Many have claimed that the composer’s final score is simply a blueprint, helpful, full of pointers, no doubt containing much but not all. All composers need champions of their own, they say, much as the age of Directors in opera suggests. These ‘champion Directors’ believe they can glean so much more from a work than the composer can alone; they can help, contribute, develop, correct, rebalance and even make more relevant to audiences, so that the work can really shine…..

Perhaps Wagner shot himself and most composers in the foot though, because, focusing his primary injunctions towards the need for performers to find the ‘melos’ in all musical works, that is, ‘melody in all its aspects.’ or ‘singing’ in the totality of a work, he neglects to tell us performers very much in detail. For Wagner ‘melos’ summed up the right approach to how to find the appropriate tempo, regardless of what metronome mark or tempo marking is found in the composer’s hand in the score. This focus plays the ball rather firmly back directly into the interpreter’s hands, arming the so called Champion, be it Conductor or Director who too easily begins his or her own progress towards defining a score as a blueprint only.So there we are; the composer easily put back on the perimeter of the playing field, allowing the champions free range on the pitch to do whatever they feel is best for the work.

Beecham, who was one of the most effective champions for Delius’ work in the right sense, not to mention Sibelius, was asked in an interview with Edmund Tracey in 1959 whether he discussed finer details of Delius’ compositions with the composer – they were fairly close friends. Beecham replied characteristically

“good god, no. I tried a couple of times, but Frederick said that he’d forgotten what he meant anyway, and told me to do what I liked”.

He added

“that’s exactly what I do with all composers’ works”….

Beecham did recognise how the modern champion could be of some assistance to a composer like Delius, when he jauntily described his work in this way;

“I found it as alluring as a wayward woman and determined to tame it.”

I know what he meant, having lived with Koanga for quite a long time now. I’d hazard a guess that I also share Beecham’s tender love for Delius’ music.

Hans Keller wasted no words in his broadside at ‘phoney professions’. When he asserted that there are no great conductors but there are great musicians, he was striking at the heart of the matter. Because, in a perfect world, the conductor and orchestra in rehearsal discover what they know about a piece as individuals at first, taking care of the punctuation (what Simon Rattle calls ‘cosmetics’) note lengths, string bowing alternatives, speeds, flow, and consistency. We consider balance between sections – strings, brass, wind, and attempt to agree over the composers specific directions – we question whether they work entirely or not, and even contemplate adding some if the composer either assumed everyone would simply know and declined to help, or when he has been lazy. Performance, as with the greatest chamber music playing is a different dimension altogether, when the orchestra allows the conductor to lead, in exactly the same way as the first violinist leads a string quartet. In performance, the composer’s work takes over – I did say “in a perfect world” – only one chance exists in performance, risks are taken, but all musicians understand the collective aim to play in close collective union.

Opera is however, a different kettle of fish entirely. A veritable crowd of collaborators from different disciplines pile into the boxing ring, not least of which are a cast of singers, all with different ideas, techniques, capabilities, vocal capacities and so on, and the necessityfor all to join in mounting a convincing Drama, or play, through music. Conducting opera can be full of compromise, such are the conflicting demands of all the disciplines involved. I must confess though, that I myself am hopelessly romantic about the concept of Opera, and it can be immensely rewarding, and fizzing with life.

Keller didn’t make any distinction between opera and symphonic conducting. He should have done. True, one man can say of another that he isn’t an opera conductor, and vice versa. There are particular skills and commitments that are necessary for conducting an opera that are not crucial to conducting Brahms Symphonies. Opera skills however lend much to conducting ALL repertoire. One could not say that the skill in conducting a Brahms Symphony informs good opera conducting. It is worth recalling that Strauss, Klemperer, Karajan and Solti all learnt their trade in the Opera House. Solti proclaimed to his dying day that all conductors should begin in an opera house.

Keller did though send his buckshot flying at Directors of Opera, they are second on his list, on the usual grounds that Directors present us with more problems than they solve.

Now I hear that second bell gently tinkling, to which I referred earlier. I was struck by something James Levine wrote following the announcement of the death in 1988 of Jean Pierre Ponelle, the Opera Director, just a year before I was to conduct Turandot at the Royal Opera House in Serban’s peerless production, followed straight away by Ponelle’s Turandot in Lausanne. There were many obituaries published, and a little later James Levine chose to publish his own. They had been close colleagues, working together on severalproductions. Slightly hurt clearly, but also bemused, Levine wondered why he had not been approached at all to comment about his friend who he had engaged so often at the Met. That’s the point. No-one had thought to ask a Conductor about that special and critical relationship between Conductor and Director, nor why he rated him so highly.

Keller talked about a received historical view with which he agreed, that the greatest opera productions were those directed by Gustav Mahler himself, when in charge of the Vienna Opera. There was a stage director to look after technical matters, but the productions were directed by Mahler, as Keller goes on to say, looking after when singers moved and where to, organising placings for ensembles, directing the narrative in fact. It’s undeniable that the last 45 years or so have seen confusingly radical movements in Opera production, and many raised voices on conflicting sides of the didactic barrier existing between rival factions, Managers, Directors, Singers, Conductors and audiences. Most recently, there has been much excitement in a kind of counter revolutionary turn of events. As an example, Bernard Haitink’s Promenade Concert performances, which I saw, and Opera North’s concert performances of the Ring, Esa Pekka Salonen’s concert performances of Tristan, and many other opera performances on the concert platform have seemingly sprung out of the same creative inspiration as Mahlers productions in Vienna over a hundred years ago. Audiences have been more than enthusiastic. I too enjoyed some of these performances very much. This is paradoxically a shame though.

Opera is of course a hopelessly romantic pursuit, romantic in the sense that the hope involved in the cuisine itself is wildly optimistic. Music is abstract – Stravinsky baldly and with his stony and slightly cheeky face declared that music is

“essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature”

He later explained that what he meant was that no verbal descriptions for music are possible nor can direct feelings or words find directly corresponding notes of music to translate them exactly. Music, Stravinsky also said in his elucidation, ‘expresses itself’.

Let’s not just now get into the sandpit in which Richard Strauss had such fun, namely the question of which comes first, the words or the music, but it is a marriage we’re talking about, the spouses being music and words, composer and librettist. Bear in mind at this juncture that on the title page of Le Nozze di Figaro is the composer’s name in bold print. And the opera is known by Mozart’s name, not as da Ponte’s Figaro. Libretto writing is one of the most under rated skills, and often painful to say the least for the librettist. The words are a vehicle for music that has the capacity to suggest several meanings, aspects and the context in which they are used. Melody, length, dynamic, colour – these are all elements music has at its complete disposal to add possibility to the use of a word.

Since the dawn of man, heightened speech and melodic lyrical development have been ingrained in our cultural growth and individuality. Opera grew naturally from folk narrative, the church, and lastly from the drawing rooms of the wealthy. Melody was essential, it is after all the basis of all musical lyricism. Early commissioners and audiences had differing expectations, whether these were entertainment pure and simple, narrative, or mystery. Each group had vested interests, some had messages, some wanted to use it for control, but all knew that it was potent. Today, the same is true.

But the potency of the marriage between music and words became much more important to the composers who took to the form so perceptively, understanding music’s ironic capacity to underline, interpret and elaborate upon a word or sentence, and suggest complexity of character and psychology. Haydn’s operas exist happily in a world where entertainment and pleasure were the primary requirement. His operas are full of beautiful music, of a pastoral nature, and pastel colour emotions and drama.

One of the most successful productions of a Haydn opera I have witnessed, La Fedelta Premiata at Glyndebourne, was in Hugh Casson’s exquisite pastel designs and costumes, John Cox directed, and it was sung, acted and played with such gentle integrity, a true mix of gentle music, pastoral drama and affectingly simple narrative.

Mozart though exploded that world with a stealth bomb, injecting the condition of women, power, prejudice, politics and discussions about real love, deep into the fabric of the music AND the narrative. His audiences knew something was going on beyond their normal safety curtain but did not divine how powerful the operas really were. Mozart’s focus, throughout his operas, is unfailingly on women, their lives, the way they are treated, their emotions and their relationships. Similarly one of his greatest admirers, Richard Strauss was to focus almost entirely on women in the same way, and for the same purpose, to shed light on society, family and human nature.

Take for example Don Giovanni and ponder for a second the decisions the composer makes in choosing key, instrumentation, form, or length of the arias he gives to the troubled women in this great work.

The bewilderingly confusing Donna Anna is given some of the most heartbreakingly powerful and tender music, which makes Lorenzo da Ponte’s simplicity in his poetic lyrics glow. But read his libretti verses without the music, and Mozart’s genius for transformation and suggestion becomes obvious. Donna Anna’s great aria ‘Non mi dir’ portrays a woman hiding her deepest emotions, the truth about which we the audience are and will remain ignorant. She is planted firmly in the middle of a profound scandal, her father dies in a sword fight he could never have won, and her honour and reputation are at stake, and that is the least of it.

Don’t forget that as far as we know, the Don prefers seduction and happy submission; remember the charming serenade, and ‘la ci darem la mano’. When the Don goes hunting, rape is not on his mind.

Let’s be careful – it’s too easy to elaborate on what we think very superficially might be, probably is, definitely must be true becausewe say, of course we know the Don is a rapist, and he is intent on raping Donna Anna when he enters her room at night. But we do not know anything of the kind, nothing in the words or music tells us that. We do know though that the Don is a charmer, and it is seduction and conquest he craves. So we never know whether Donna Anna is entirely blameless or not. Non mi dir the aria tells us of her capacity to show some emotion, in a sweetly innocent manner, with not insignificant grace and simplicity. We also do not know whether she is sincere in what she’s telling Don Ottavio which is to have even more patience in his interminable quest for her hand, nor whether she feels anything genuinely for him. We are told simply that Anna is an adept manipulator of others’ affections, and that she has an agenda, which is to punish Don Giovanni, more likely motivated by the slaying of the Commendatore than anything else. She is a very complicated woman, but Mozart through his achingly telling choices of key, instrumentation and melody construction makes us inescapably sympathetic to her. The key is F major, a key Mozart reserves for transparent simplicity, never for breeding and depth. In Donna Anna’s case, she is rolling out her ability to appear innocent, and the solo woodwinds weave blameless wafts of melody, in the same way Susanna’s ‘deh vieni’ is accompanied by wafty woodwind, in F major, precisely when she is pretending to be gently moved by the wind and air into sensuality, just to tease Figaro. Compare this with the Countess’s just cause, and pain, in aristocratic E Flat major with august clarinets and horns, a key Mozart uses to depict status, depth, respect and true blamelessness. The key to playing Donna Anna on a stage is to play all the subtleties of reserve, pain, strength even when she is ostensibly weeping, control of others, and all thiswith a complete absence of palpable pretence. One of my most important mentors early on at Glyndebourne, the late Martin Isepp passed on what Jani Strasser, his own mentor had laid down;

In Mozart, sing the text perfectly. The music will then look after itself.

In other words, Mozart knows what he’s doing. He thought about the words long before you did, and set them perfectly, knowing how to colour them to his purpose. Do your job and the music will do its job. Neither Don Giovanni nor Leporello as characters are given even the most meagre music or narrative to suggest any depth with which to excite our interest in complexity where they are concerned. They remain catalysts only, parked as they are within the narrow confines of black and white. To some it might be a mystery that with so little to go on, other than insatiable appetites, women food and wine, Don Giovanni remains such a dangerously charming, clever and iconic character in our imagination. But Mozart knew the power this fable would have, especially with the heightened emotional interest and sympathy we develop, for Donna Anna and Don Ottavio, bewildering though that may be. Both of them are complicatedly human through and through, and it is that complexity and subtlety that Mozart wanted to convey.

All of this emerges from the music.So what are the problems Conductors and Directors create that we then fail to solve. As far as conductors are concerned, the problems are all to do with stifling individual musicianship in orchestras andsingers on stage, in order to maintain status and control, and consequently the public’s appetite for that glamorous autocratic rule, can become an addiction to experience it over and over again no doubt with the excuse of love for a particular work whilst most likely comparing one conductor with another.

As far as the Director is concerned, what audiences see and applaud most readily, the set and costume designs for example, has elicited a significant response from Managers and Opera House Directors, placing the Director on a podium to be celebrated just like Conductors. But when preparing an opera production, if the conductor is not there, what happens?

There are many contributing factors to what has certainly been the Age of the Director over the last 60 years. It is a sad truth that from the 1970s onwards, many conductors went awol, and often it was literally absent without leave from any rehearsal that didn’t involve the most crucial musical decisions, such as orchestral rehearsals and stage rehearsals. The reasons were many; too busy on the more lucrative and short-term concert platform, or just not interested enough in lyric drama and care for the work. The vacuum created by one-sided opera planning and production has led to various types of Director’s Opera, such as ‘Concept Opera’, and ‘Regietheater’. The first describes the extracting of a perceived metaphor or statement from the work’s narrative often removing any emotional aspects, andgiving that metaphor pride of place. The second describes a production which may entail some changing of the story or plot, changed chronology, sometimes reordered scenes and events, even text, with the intention of ‘improving’ a work, or heightening its relevance to modern audiences. The result is that the music, that is the vehicle through which the drama actually happens, is made incidental, the composer is once more and very firmly despatched to the pavilion, while the professionals knock off more and more boundaries on a pitch of their own making.

This all has wider implications for the future of Opera, or rather the health of lyric drama.

To some extent, audiences have been complicit, along with many organisations that have succumbed to what I referred to earlier, an emphasis on the visual, and a dilution of music to an incidental mood-changing function. But little did they know that once the cat is out of the bag, both music’s own organic ability to suggest, underline and frame, along with clear narrative could be drowned, or simply ignored. Images from Ruth Berghaus’ work for example in the 70s and 80s still bemuse me entirely. And more recently, John Berry’s time at ENO, whilst praised for innovation by some has exemplified the age of Director’s Opera with not insignificant precision.

Secondly, a generation of contemporary composers have perhaps not been able to grasp the profound disciplines of the great opera composers, Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Puccini, Strauss, Debussy, Britten to name a few, to all of whom music was the foundation of theirdramatic aspirations. Stravinsky enshrined one of the clearest aspects of music’s power when he wrote “The phenomenon of music is given to us with the sole purpose of establishing an order in things, including, and particularly, the co-ordination between man and time” and more succinctly

“Music's exclusive function is to structure the flow of time and keep order in it.”

Most of the burgeoning new music theatre in London today from the hearts and minds of an entirely new generation of composers, singers and directors tends to rely on stage ‘ritual’ rather than narrative, by which I mean static non-dramatic presentations, the music firmly entrenched in atmosphere creation, as mood music, whilst words flow forth but remain frozen and lifeless. This is not surprising, as more and more of what they see in an opera house is driven by the visual and the ritual, rather than the narrative.

Thirdly, we are becoming inured to living with operatic theatre in one of two specific ways. At one extreme the ‘deeply traditional’ form in which the opera is set immutably in for example the Lammermoor Hills of which Donizetti had no idea whatsoever – Lucia diLammermoor, and a Liverpool complete with mountains in the background – Emilia di Liverpool.

The other extreme is represented by Productions that speak of a Director’s imaginative thoughts about some feature of the opera, but not the Opera itself. Most Opera Companies tread the balance between the two as if on eggshells, whilst audiences argue loudly amongst themselves about which is the most desirable.

Lest I leave you with the impression that I somehow represent a luddite faction, and of course as a Conductor we have been losing traction in Opera production for quite a while, I’d close with a gentle credo. I first became devoted to Opera, its hopelessly ambitious aspirations and all, as a repetiteur at Glyndebourne, watching the meticulous detail with which John Cox created complicated but subtle, truthful but questioning, and genuinely accurate plays within Strauss’ wonderful operas, Schweigsame Frau, Rosenkavalier and Arabella, with the fully engaged Bernard Haitink and Andrew Davis conducting. The attention to the text embedded in the music was exemplary, questioning but full of integrity. Strauss would have loved it, seeing the flawed but so sympathetically drawn characters come to life, imbued with the insight and depth that his music pours forth.

Subsequently I came to believe that Mozart, Puccini, Verdi, Britten, Dvorak and many others are as precise in their writing of drama, pure and simple, as Samuel Becket is, in Waiting for Godot, or Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet. There is a world of possibility in the blend of music and the word, and the music enshrined in thescore carries every heartbeat and breath. We, as conductors and directors must see more deeply into what there is before we even dream of enhancing it in our own way; and audiences, for their part must listen more closely and deeply, as sets, costumes, wigs, high note pauses for tenors, virtuosic extravagances, and glamour in all its visual guises are dangerously addictive, and music is never weaker than when it is purely incidental