In 1886, as a minor Italian orchestra performed Verdi’s Aida in Rio de Janeiro, the conductor was booed off the stage. A nineteen-year-old cellist rose to the podium and conducted the two-and-a-half-hour opera from memory. His name was Arturo Toscanini—who is important because he represents a clean break from the long-dominant tradition of conductors as composers. As an orchestral player, he went right back to the cello section after returning to Italy to play in Verdi’s Otello, under the composer’s own direction. (Aside from one other 1886 performance, Toscanini conducted very rarely in public until 1896.) He was made artistic director at Milan’s La Scala in 1898. A new type of conductor, he was a prototype with a temper, a volcanic traditionalist with celebrity power, famous for screaming at and humiliating orchestra members. He once ripped off his own shirt during rehearsal because he was so angry. But his fanatically interpretative approach astounded listeners. When Bugs Bunny was faking his way as Stokowski, being genuflected to by all those Hollywood Bowl musicians, they were really treating him like the autocratic Toscanini, whose intensity had become recognized as how conductors behave, at least in the popular imagination.
Though conducting had existed for centuries before Toscanini’s brave steps onto the podium, its origins are shadowy, harking back in part to cheironomy, an ancient set of hand motions that some believe was adapted for directing Gregorian chant around the tenth century. The baton was probably inspired by the violin bow; violinists had been leading ensembles with their bows for decades, doing two jobs at once. The nineteenth-century German composer and violin virtuoso Louis Spohr was among the first musicians to recognize conducting as a full-time position; the profession was further advanced when one of Spohr’s contemporaries, composer Felix Mendelssohn, began resurrecting J. S. Bach’s music for public concerts. In Mendelssohn’s wake, orchestras gradually started appointing conductors, though they often chose well-connected composers.
Toscanini broke that tradition, and his fame spread quickly. In the New World, it was cemented by his tenure at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, which began in 1908. The idea of the conductor as a cultural icon was taking shape at a time when the popular media was making it possible for everyone to hear recorded performances on seventy-eights and in live concert radio broadcasts. This was all still new technology, and Toscanini was at the forefront of it. His “eccentricity” made an impact on new audiences, who came to associate rage with talent, and his strange mixture of desperation and consummate poise meant that performing a Beethoven score was no longer just a pleasant adventure —it was a critical moral quest, demanding total clarity of melodic and harmonic propulsion. Attacking a great orchestra meant nothing to him; the music’s own inner truth was everything.
Nézet-Séguin’s expression is friendly, unaffected yet penetrating, and youthfully energized. Like his rendition of Ravel’s concerto, now as much the conductor’s version as the composer’s, he seems fantastically liberated in person. Toscanini’s blustery artistic sincerity was driven by his idea of revealing what the composer meant, period. Nézet-Séguin maintains that perfect representation is impossible.
“We should know that there is never just one truth,” he says. “I’m sick of the old objective/subjective thing. I project what I know of and get from the score, which is unique to me. Knowing there are multiple sides of a truth should free us.
“Respecting the score is a never-ending quest,” he notes. “Conductors need to conceptualize. A performance should be deeply personal. As a child, I searched for ways to demonstrate my individuality. Now I have learned to seek out what feels right, which is more genuinely personal. So risks are fine,” he concludes. “As long as they’re not forced, they’re worth taking.”
Beyond his risk taking, Nézet-Séguin won’t define himself except as a devotee of Giulini, a composer whose style brimmed with a sumptuous warmth that his student has inherited. The Montrealer has avoided becoming identified too closely with conducting any particular composer so far, though he has recorded the last three of Anton Bruckner’s symphonies, suggesting that a complete cycle of the final symphonies may be in the works. In Nézet-Séguin’s hands, Bruckner’s staid, Christian-tinged romantic symphonies become rollicking adventures, the score less holy text and more treasure map. Nézet-Séguin’s 2008 release of Bruckner’s ninth is like a pirate’s quest for lost gold. The rendition is wondrously boyish, with an erotic radiance unique to the conductor. He explores the limits of interpretation in a way that reveals new avenues for conductors to pursue, teasing out a wholly personal conception of the piece, enlivening it, and transcending the inhibiting veneration for classical material that often makes it stuffy. His charm and vitality do the work of Toscanini’s fury; no artistic compromise is audible in Nézet-Séguin’s performance.
It wasn’t idle praise when German critic Klaus Geitel of the Berliner Morgenpost announced, “The musical world has a new hero,” after hearing Nézet-Séguin last November. It’s important to remember that in Europe classical music is still a part of everyday life, and that no amount of mere novelty will impress a Berlin audience. But with today’s composers having completely fallen off the mainstream radar outside of Europe, bringing freshness to the orchestral canon has become critical to the survival of classical music.
While contemporary composition still languishes among avant-garde circles, new, flexible renditions of tried-and-true scores have given classical music its current lease on life. In essence, innovative conductors like Nézet-Séguin are holding up the entire tradition. With a touch of Bugs Bunny’s fearless mischievousness, he represents the beginning of a less dogmatic classical ethos.
He’s not alone: in Venezuela, mop-topped young firebrand Gustavo Dudamel is lighting up world stages with sun-drenched pyrotechnics, renditions packed with a joyous, frenetic sweep we northern types can barely comprehend. He began his tenure as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in October 2009, having exploded onto the world stage with his stellar Deutsche Grammophon recording of Tchaikovsky’s fifth symphony. And Chicoutimi, Quebec, native Jean-Philippe Tremblay is receiving tremendous reviews as his reputation spreads increasingly into the world music press. Conducting L’orchestre de la francophonie canadienne, he embarks on his first tour of Germany this year. Though he’s still less high profile among conductors, it will be interesting to see how critics there react to his more meditative, restrained style.
