'Maestro': when pretending to conduct an orchestra and conducting an orchestra are the same thing

If Bradley Cooper has updated his resume, he will have already included his role as an orchestra conductor, acquired without having trained as such or appearing on the payroll of any symphony or philharmonic and without even being a musician. But it can boast of such status because it is accredited by none other than Deutsche Grammophon, the most prestigious classical label in the world. On the soundtrack album of Teacherthe film dedicated to the figure of Leonard Bernstein directed by Cooper, the filmmaker appears as director of the Philadelphia Symphony Choir in a chorale of candidand as conductor of the London Symphony in the finale of the symphony Resurrection by Mahler (climax of the film) and in Beethoven's octave. There are real orchestra conductors who will never see his name on a record like this (nor will they direct such important institutions).

To be fair, it must be clarified that Cooper appears as co-director along with Yannik Nézet-Seguin, director – this one – of the New York Metropolitan orchestra and ultimately responsible for the performances of the film. Nézet-Seguin instructed Cooper in the arcana of his art, eliciting from him an interpretation so truthful that he was able to effectively conduct the orchestra. That the protagonist of Teacher figure as director on the album is more than a joke or a funny concession: although Nézet-Seguin gave him instructions through a earpiece and although Cooper was not the master of his movements and applied himself to them in a mimesis that perhaps he did not understand, the orchestra and choir followed him. When Deutsche Grammophon credits him as a conductor, he is simply describing the reality of that recording.

From a musical point of view this raises some problems with the status of the conductor. That an actor can imitate him to that extent can prove right to the currents that question his relevance. After all, it is a recent institution. Until the 19th century, orchestras (which were also smaller) were directed by the concertmaster or another musician, and in the 60s and 70s, coinciding with anti-authoritarian movements in politics and culture, some groups without a conductor emerged. . Not one hundred members, but much larger than a quartet. They are marginal movements within music and it does not seem that the intrusiveness of Bradley Cooper is going to leave Dudamel or Pappano (or even Nézet-Seguin) without a job, although it would be a beautiful irony for a film that glorifies the genius of the conductor most charismatic of the 20th century would lead to an existential debate about his profession and put it in danger.

The interesting thing here is not how easy or difficult it is to perform on a podium in front of a hundred musicians, but the alterations it causes in the idea we have of what it means to perform and the actor's relationship with his characters. Bradley Cooper's debut as a conductor raises new problems in a foggy debate whose contours are never well defined. If pretending a thing and doing the thing are the same, where is the fiction and where is the truth? What the hell are we seeing and how should the viewer react? If imitation and what is imitated are confused, fiction cannot be an alibi, and the legal notices that preserve the fabrication from the intrusions of third parties and give the creators room to do whatever they want lose their validity. A lawyer with deep fangs can seize on these subtleties to, what do I know, denounce Cooper for professional intrusion or accuse the actors of crimes committed by their characters.

When Robert De Niro played Jake La Motta in Wild bullDid he box or pretend to box? If he boxed, his blows were attacks, but it all depends on what one considers it means to play a role. The critic and film theorist Isaac Butler is not at all clear and believes that things began to get very confused when the famous Actor's Studio method was imposed, whose history, meaning and influence is analyzed in The method: how the 20th century learned the art of interpretation. Published this 2023 in Spain, it is one of the best reflections on the transformation of the profession.

Before this artistic revolution (whose impact Butler compares to dodecaphonism in music or abstraction in painting), things were relatively clear. Diderot, in his famous essay The comedian's paradox, established that the actors would be better the more aware they were that they were acting and the less involved they were in the character. History changed with Stanislavsky, who, to achieve less declamatory and more credible interpretations, patented a technique in which the person and the character were confused. When we see an actor cry, he is really crying, he does not pretend. Through complex and introspective training, the actor works on his emotions to build his character.

Since then, borders have fallen, like the fourth wall and so many other theatrical conventions. It has been unclear for some time what it means to interpret. No matter how much we analyze the work of the method's great actors and their heirs, it is impossible to determine what the hell we are looking at. We know, for example, that Maria Schneider was genuinely terrified—the actress, not the character, who was also terrified—in the sexual assault scene in The last Tango in Paris, which today we consider barbaric and criminal. The history of cinema is saturated with similar, although less brutal, cases that can be considered, being generous, morally ambiguous.

The veristic obsession has often transcended the profession of the actor, and not only because of the postulates of the avant-garde of the type of New Wave. Visconti, for example, filled the closets of the Palermo palace of The Leopardalthough they did not open in any scene, but he believed that the viewer would notice that they were a set if 19th century dresses did not hang inside.

For Butler, we all know what it means to be an actor if we don't look too hard, which can be said about so many other things. For some, the border is marked at the limits of imitation: Bradley Cooper can convincingly imitate the movements of Leonard Bernstein, but not the virtuosity of Glenn Gould or the voice of Plácido Domingo. Not to mention how disturbing it would be if he signed the plans for a real building designed during a Le Corbusier biopic, for example. I would not enter that place calmly, nor would I get on a plane piloted by an actor who plays a pilot, no matter how credible his imitation may be, although perhaps I would live in a country governed by an actor who pretends to be president of the government. The limits, therefore, are not set by fiction, but by the nature of reality and what the public is willing to accept as such.

At the beginning of his career, Robert De Niro had problems with normal characters. He amazed the world with his interpretations of extreme roles, of marginal, psychopathic, violent and lost types, but he did not feel comfortable when the script did not demand a radical metamorphosis and he had to act with discretion and naturalness. In general, the public and critics applaud absolute immersion in characters completely different from the actor's personality and do not celebrate with the same enthusiasm those performances in which this transformative effort is not appreciated and the actor seems like himself, as happens with Woody. Allen or Nanni Moretti. That is to say: we viewers demand the greatest truth in the greatest lie. We want the limits of interpretation to be erased through the most outright imposture, and in this paradox we find actors who become orchestra directors. Rarely have the real and the imaginary been so confused.

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