Leonard Bernstein. Photo by Jack Mitchell, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
The question always comes, sooner or later, from anyone watching a concert: but what does the conductor actually do? Don’t the musicians already read everything from the part? The short answer is: the conductor lives in a different time. Everything a conductor does happens an instant before the sound.
The fundamental gesture is not the stroke that marks the beat, the ictus, but the one that precedes it: the preparation. It is the breath drawn in the air that tells the orchestra when the downbeat will arrive, and above all how: crisp or soft, heavy or floating. A successful orchestral entrance is a self-fulfilling prophecy: a hundred people have read the same breath and decided to believe in it together. That is why the conductor’s gesture, seen on television, always seems slightly ahead of the music: it is. Whoever conducts lives one movement ahead, like a driver looking fifty metres beyond the bonnet.
The rest of the job divides between rehearsal and concert, and the proportion always surprises: the real work is the rehearsal. There the conductor decides the balance between sections, the tempos, the phrasing, where the orchestra can breathe, who must emerge and who must disappear, and does it with words, by singing, stopping and restarting. The concert is the reminder of those decisions, administered with the hands: the right governs the tempo, the left the colour, the eyes do the rest, and behind the scenes there is almost always someone who knows the opera better than anyone.
The figure, moreover, is young: for centuries orchestras played with nobody on the podium. They were led from the harpsichord or the first violin, and when the beat had to be marked it was done with a staff on the floor, a system that cost Lully literally his life, as we will recount here in a few days. The modern baton establishes itself only in the nineteenth century with Spohr, Mendelssohn and Berlioz, and the conductor as we understand the figure today, absolute interpreter and star, is an invention of the late nineteenth century, consecrated by Toscanini.
The test for your next concert is this: do not watch the hands, watch the orchestra. If the cellos lean forward a moment before an important entrance, if the heads all lift together at the dangerous spots, the conductor is working well, whatever the arms are doing. Conducting is the art of getting a hundred people to the same future at the same moment; the audience hears the result an instant late, and rightly so. That delay is the music.