On the Internet you can read many more classical music jokes about conductors than about violas. So says the British teacher Mark Wigglesworth, who counts almost half a million in his book The silent musician. Why you have to conduct the orchestra (Editorial Alliance, 2021). A claim to the podium and the baton in the classical music scene. But also a self-critical reflection of his most recognizable figure, associated with both power and mystery.
Wigglesworth jokes about the famous stereotype of the director as a spoiled megalomaniac. Someone who does not produce any sound, but who “proceeds to perform exaggerated gestures in front of the orchestra, conjuring a cauldron of magical sounds with a kind of wand, and who then accepts the subsequent applause of the audience while, with self-proclaimed modesty, he makes a recognition of the people who have actually played the music.”
That power and glamor associated with the baton has once again awakened the interest of cinema this year. If it arrived in theaters in January Tarby Todd Field, with Cate Blanchett turned into an egomaniacal and fictitious conductor, the French film was released in May Teacher(s)by Bruno Chiche, and has just arrived on Netflix on biopic dedicated to Leonard Bernstein that Bradley Cooper directed and starred in. In fact, this attraction of cinema to the podium will continue, in 2024, with the Romanian film The Yellow Tie, of Serge Celibidachi, where we will see John Malkovich become Celibidache.
The phenomen is not new. There have been films starring orchestra conductors practically since the dawn of the seventh art. This is the case of the silent film Hearts and flowers (1919), but also the sound ones Broken hearts (1935) and unfaithfully yours (1948), where Charles Boyer and Rex Harrison play two leading men of the baton. Romantic dramas that continue with love interlude (1957) and You'll come back to me (1960), where we see, respectively, Rossano Brazzi rehearsing the first symphonyby Brahms, and Yul Brynner's symphonic poem The preludes, by Liszt. And with A grave at dawn (1967), the figure of the orchestral director was incorporated into the war drama by Charlton Heston.
More examples follow, although few as popular as date with venus (1991), the film by István Szabó where Niels Arestrup directs a production of Tannhäuser with Glenn Close as a Wagnerian diva. But there are few biopics of real orchestra conductors. Perhaps the two most famous are The young Toscanini (1988) and The Furtwängler case (2001). In the first, Franco Zeffirelli emulates the Brazilian debut of the Italian director, directing Aida, with the image of Elizabeth Taylor and the voice of soprano Aprile Millo. And in the second, Szabó faces the denazification process of the German director, with Stellan Skarsgård directing the Fifth Symphonyby Beethovenalthough we listen to Daniel Barenboim and the Staatskapelle Berlin emulating the unmistakable rubato by Furtwängler.
Actors who conduct orchestras
But both in Tar like in Teacher, the examples filmed with music have been conducted by the actors themselves in front of real orchestras. A novelty indicated in the booklets of both soundtracks published by Deutsche Grammophon. To do this, both Cate Blanchett and Bradley Cooper have been advised by professional directors. The Australian actress prepared these sequences with her compatriot Natalie Murray Beale and the American actor had the help of Yannick Nézet-Seguin.
Both cases raise the level of so many actors of the past who have represented scenes directing with generally unusual gestures. But Blanchett and Cooper forget the fundamental thing. The Australian exaggerates every movement from the podium, rehearsing the Fifth Symphony, by Mahler, but never connects with the musicians of the Dresdner Philharmonie. And the same could be said of Cooper imitating every gesture of Leonard Bernstein in the famous film, from 1973, from the final climax of the second symphonyby Mahler, in Ely Cathedral. Wigglesworth reveals the key in his book: the physical relationship between the orchestra and the conductor. And he rounds off his explanation of music and corporeality using a famous quote from Nietzsche: if we listen to music with our muscles, the conductor creates it with his movements.
Cooper goes further than Blanchett in tackling a difficult six-minute musical sequence conducting in concert. But it does not activate what we hear and the result has nothing to do with the original, even though the London Symphony is one of the most virtuoso and flexible orchestras on the planet. The American actor composes a poor caricature of Bernstein's direction with gestures and movements more typical of a sketch humorous by José Mota. We don't see any of that overflowing joy that she had lenny making music and the London orchestra comes to the fore led by Carmine Lauri as concertmasterwho raises his violin to play the final chord of the symphony.
This exaggerated imitation and characterization prevents Cooper from building a remotely credible character, unlike Carrey Mulligan with Felicia Montealegre. And the imbalances between rigor and fantasy, in Teacher, weigh down any biographical consideration of Bernstein related to music. We see this in the opening sequence, with his famous Carnegie Hall debut in November 1943, where almost nothing of what we know is used. For example, since he could not rehearse, and had not been able to prepare the plays he had to direct, he chose to visit the director he was going to replace, the legendary Bruno Walter, who received him at his hotel covered in blankets due to the flu, although with strength. enough to review with him the fundamentals of the program for that concert. And he also doesn't use the famous story of the Carnegie Hall pharmacist who gave him some pills when he saw him so pale, one to calm him down and another to give him energy.
As to Teacher(s)the French film by Chiche, is a free adaptation of Footerby Joseph Cedar. The competition between a father and a son moves from the study of the Talmud to the orchestral direction with a good acting cast, but with a result that is nothing more than mere entertainment. The directorial work is once again a simple decoration that culminates in a peculiar directing sequence with two batons that is portrayed on the film's poster. Finally, next year it will be released The Yellow Tiea biopic about Sergiu Celibidache that his son Serge Ioan Celebidachi filmed between last June and August. A film starring John Malkovich, which represents the Romanian conductor in his old age, and which includes the recreation of a 1989 concert with the Munich Philharmonic, at the Palatului Hall in Bucharest, where Malkovich conducted several fragments of a Bruckner Symphony. We will see if this film avoids transforming the fascination with another great orchestral figure into a new caricature.
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