Do orchestras really need conductors?

Do you perhaps think it’s necessary to have a conductor in charge of an orchestra? Well, think again, and consider how peculiar it is to have a person who does not play any instrument, or sing, or whistle, to be guiding people who blow their horns, or keep on bowing the strings of violins, cellos, and so on.

Let me take it from the very beginning and say that the orchestra, as we know it today, was born during the second half of the 18th century, and grew to be the size it is now only towards the end of the 19th. Before the 19th century, there was no real conductor. What I mean is that whoever was to some extent responsible for the ensemble enjoyed no special status. Quite often it was a member of the orchestra, the first violin for instance. He (and it always was a “he”) would take on the responsibility of making sure that instruments entered at the right moment and that the tempo was right. Sometimes it was the harpsichord player who took on the job. The harpsichord provided a kind of sonic “glue” if I can put it that way, between the strings and the wind instruments. Quite frequently the composer of the piece himself would be playing the harpsichord, and from that vantage point could keep an eye on the ensemble.

Up to the end of the 18th century, everybody was happy with this arrangement. Consider, however, that in those days performing was not at all motivated, as it is today, by the desire to offer a cultural event in which masterpieces are impeccably presented, in a manner faithful to the supposed intentions of the composer. In other words, the concert was not given to honour the composer, but rather to please the public in any way possible, by giving it the experience of something never heard before. It was the composer’s task to produce music that would please the audience and would also please the performers! Because they were often amateurs who expected to enjoy what they had freely elected to do.

At the beginning of the 19th century, the harpsichord went rapidly out of fashion. The piano was becoming popular but was found unsuitable for replacing the harpsichord in the orchestra. Its sound was much too strong. Also, new compositional techniques meant that it was no longer necessary to have a connecting instrument playing softly in the middle of the texture. The novelty was that, increasingly often, the first violin would get up and stand in front of the other instruments and make gestures to guide the ensemble. Louis Spohr, for example, who was extremely famous at the beginning of the 19th century both as a composer and as a violinist, was in this sense one of the first modern conductors. But it would be quite wrong to imagine him as anything like an authoritarian demigod as Toscanini and Karajan were! Not at all. For the simple reason that most of the musicians playing in the orchestra were rich amateurs who were paying him. It was they who wanted to have a voice in deciding what to play, and to some extent how to play it.

Things began to change dramatically towards the middle of the 19th century when influential figures such as Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner gradually convinced the intellectual aristocracy that art should be respected almost in the manner of a religion and that artists should be put on a pedestal as the priests of such a religion. At this point, it began to make sense to perform music by composers long dead (and long decomposed), who came to be seen as the venerable saints of the new cult, while the conductor, the high priest in charge, assumed the heavy responsibility of ensuring that performances could rightly claim to be high art and were no longer mere entertainment.

It should be borne in mind that, as orchestras became increasingly professionalized and therefore very expensive, the conductor also had the practical responsibility of making sure the performance was prepared in a minimum amount of time, thereby limiting expenses as far as possible.

Is an orchestra with no conductor imaginable today? Well, in the former Soviet Union, in 1922, as part of the drive to create an egalitarian society, one such orchestra was created in Moscow. It was active for about six years. There was a problem, though, because each decision about tempo, dynamics, and so on had to be collectively arrived at. That takes time. To have an opinion, musicians had to be familiar not just with their part but with all the others too, and, in addition, to develop a sense of the overall effect they were aiming at. In the end, they proved they could do it, but the result certainly didn’t have the stamp of an individual personality, as when a conductor calls the shots. The public of those days much-preferred performances that expressed an individual vision, as does the public of today. It’s worth remembering, however, that this is the aesthetic climate we live in, which could change at any point in the future. Nobody knows what the public will be like fifty years from now. It may be the exact opposite of what pleases us today. We do not even know whether fifty years from now orchestras will still exist and, if they do, whether they will be playing Beethoven or Brahms, with or without a conductor. Perhaps the sound engineer will be the one in charge!

Of course, I’ll never find out – I’m too old. But young people alive today will. So, I’ll ask them all a favour: please, write me a letter, c/o Paradise (with a copy addressed to Hell as well, just in case), because I really would love to know how this question will be handled around 2070.