A note on leadership: the role of music conductors throughout history

We chart the history of the role of a music conductor – which came about in its current avatar only in the 19th century.

Originally, setting the tempo was pretty much all the conductor was there for. Getty Images

Do you know the joke about why they had to bury the conductor six metres into the Earth? It’s because, deep down, he was a nice guy. Ouch. In mankind’s great library of jokes there is an extra-special section dedicated to conductors. And guess what? They don’t tend to come out of it so well.

So spare a thought for the ones we will see this week when BBC Proms Dubai and the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA) Orchestra of China come to town.

Each conductor is different, but some have a fearsome reputation. The composer Gustav Mahler may be known to us today as the great symphonist, but during his lifetime he was ­famous for his podium skills. And while some regarded him with breathless adoration, the musicians that worked under him were noticeably less keen.

As the director of the Vienna Court Opera, it was said he treated his musicians the same way a lion tamer treats his animals. And on his departure in 1907, his goodbye note was torn down from the noticeboard and the fragments strewn across the floor.

It’s not surprising though, as conductors face quite a challenge and it’s not just keeping the ­orchestra in time.

Michael Tilson Thomas, San Francisco Symphony music ­director, says: “Being a conductor is kind of a hybrid profession because, most fundamentally, it is being someone who is a coach, a trainer, an editor, a director.”

It wasn’t always that way, though. Originally, setting the tempo was pretty much all the conductor was there for. In fact, quite often there wasn’t a ­conductor at all.

In the Baroque period of the 17th and 18th centuries, the job was usually left to the harpsichord player or the leader of the first violins. Even in the late 1800s, Wolfgang Amadeus ­Mozart was leading his piano concertos from the keyboard. In fact, it was only in the 19th ­century that the role of conductor, as we understand it today, came into being.

Felix Mendelssohn is reportedly the first to have used a wooden baton. Hector Berlioz is often regarded as the first virtuoso conductor. And the nuance of instrumental sound that Hans von Bülow could extract from the orchestra – revolutionary at the time – is often attributed to his introduction of “sectional” rehearsals; when the orchestra splits up into its instrumental families of violins, woodwind, brass, etc.

Of course, the orchestral music from this time is bigger in complexity and duration. By the time we reach Mahler's Symphony No 8 in 1906 (unsurprisingly known as Symphony of a Thousand), there are 85 minutes of music to deal with, performed by 1,026 ­orchestral players and singers.

It’s easy to see why you need someone at the front to steer the ship. But, music alone is not the sole reason for emergence of the conductor as an art form. The 19th century was the period during which Romanticism reigned supreme; introspection was hot and on-trend.

This is the same century that invented the concept of the superstar virtuoso, like Niccolò Paganini and Franz Liszt (whose fans suffered from “Lisztomania”), and the brooding artistic genius, epitomised by poet Lord Byron and painter J M W Turner.

In this mould the conductor becomes the “maestro”, a lone visionary able to extract new truths from the notes on the page.

In 1955, Charles Munch, the French-German conductor best known as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, reportedly said: “The conductor must breathe life into the score. It is you and you alone who must expose it to the understanding, reveal the hidden jewel to the sun at the most flattering angles.”

Today, this view still holds, pretty much (British conductor Neville Marriner once quipped: “The awful thing about a conductor becoming geriatric is that you seem to become more desirable, not less.”). However, some newer ­orchestras, such as ­Spira ­Mirabilis, are fighting the tide by performing without a conductor and making all interpretive ­decisions as a collective.

You only have to listen to the same piece of music performed under two different conductors to see how a singular vision can dramatically change things.

Perhaps actor Clint Eastwood put it the best way when he likened the job of a conductor with that of a film director. During a BBC interview, he said: “If you ever go to a music session, you’ll notice that the musicians can sit down and start playing right away, and everyone knows what to do. Of course they’re reading it, but the conductor can tweak little things, and you can take that back to directing motion pictures.”

• BBC Proms Dubai is at Dubai ­Opera from today until Friday. ­Tickets cost from Dh50, available at www.dubaiopera.com. China’s NCPA Orchestra performs at Emirates Palace Auditorium on Friday and Saturday. Tickets from Dh250, book at www.abudhabifestival.ae