Do conductors have to be cruel to be good?

Playing under the baton of Arturo Toscanini must have felt a bit like fighting in the trenches. There are recordings of him rehearsing in the 1930s or ’40s. The orchestra is bowling along; there’s a low muttering, and then suddenly, out of nothing, the explosion. A scream of rage: a huge, operatic, animalistic roar. There’s a barrage of Italian profanities and what sounds like a fist smashing repeatedly on wood. Bernard Shore, who played under Toscanini in the BBC Symphony Orchestra, witnessed him hurling his baton at a cowering viola section. With the NBC Symphony, Toscanini threw his gold pocket watch to the floor and stamped on it. The players had a whip-round and next morning Toscanini found a cheap nickel timepiece on his music stand, engraved ‘To Maestro, for rehearsal purposes only’.

Ah, the golden age. When conductors were gods, performances were divine revelations and orchestral players were serfs, drilled into machine-like precision. Fritz Reiner, the Hungarian-born music director of the Chicago Symphony from 1953 to 1962, heard his principal trumpet Bud Herseth nail a particularly fearsome octave leap in Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra and instantly stopped the orchestra. ‘Again.’ Herseth hit a perfect high C. ‘Again.’ Once more: perfection. ‘Again’ – until even Reiner, the sadist’s sadist, conceded that Herseth could not be broken. ‘How long can you do this?’ he demanded. Herseth glanced at his watch: ‘Maestro, we’re here until 12.30.’

All as it should be. None of this first names nonsense; none of these youngsters, these tousle-haired scousers, these (the very thought!) women. It wasn’t so long ago, either. Herbert von Karajan and Georg Solti (known to his players as ‘the screaming skull’) were active within living memory. And now the podium tyrant walks again in the person of Lydia Tár – the fictional conductor played by Cate Blanchett in Todd Field’s movie Tár.