Where are the badass warrior-conductors, now that we need them?

Self-appointed “progressives” are messing with classical music.

Fritz Reiner, warrior-conductor

Part one: Nihilism on the march

As a compulsive classical music collector, I eagerly awaited the arrival of my 14-CD box titled «Fritz Reiner: The Complete Columbia Album Collection». The CD’s contain 160-plus tracks of symphonic and vocal music, nearly all recorded in the 1940’s by one of the toughest and smartest conductors in gramophone history. The orchestra in most of these recordings is the Pittsburgh Symphony. Under Reiner’s direction it grew from a fine provincial band into a great American ensemble.

The refurbished sound, despite its antique provenance, is an easy match for today’s digital productions. Reiner and his producers knew how to align their massive orchestral and choral forces for a striking clarity of sound. Even though the recordings were made eight decades ago, with everything in a single channel, the aural image is complete and free of surface-noise. It’s marvelous listening.

The CD presentation highlights another side of Reiner’s personality. The booklet has seven full-page photos of the conductor. In each photo he appears alone, correctly dressed, unsmiling, with little charm or accessibility. It’s a profile that Reiner’s orchestra players and the music press of the day well knew. (The above photo is from the website of the Chicago Symphony.)

Born in 1888 and raised in Hungary, Fritz Reiner was a man of his time. One could say that Reiner and his fellow conductors treated their music as war by other means. Those ‘warrior-conductors’ demanded the best possible work from their players, not stopping until they got the sound they knew their players could produce.

Reiner’s American career included the directorship of three Midwestern orchestras and the Metropolitan Opera. Under his baton, players were highly stressed. Many thrived, while many others were driven to quit. But audiences were invariably well served. Nearly a century later, the recorded sound of Reiner’s orchestras continues to give listeners a world of delight.

Classical music is a conservative, largely gracious discipline. In its own steady way it attracts followers who will do the work of extending the tradition. Whether as performing artists, as patrons or simply as spectators, everyone plays an indispensable role. The classical-music world has tended to live in its own space. On occasion political leaders like Stalin have barged into that space and tried to exercise dominion there. But on average the modes of political influence have been foreign to music.

Today the exception is becoming the rule. Self-appointed “progressives,” exclusively concerned with politics, have been fouling classical music.

& & &

The early 1900’s saw a large migration of musicians to the New World, parallel with the larger migration of peoples. Fritz Reiner took part in this exodus along with many others who established themselves on American shores.

For Reiner and other orchestra directors born in the 1880’s and ’90’s, the model warrior-conductor was Arturo Toscanini. That great Italian, born in 1867, established himself as an outstanding conductor at age 19. In the course of a dazzling career, Toscanini set the pattern for conductors 20 or 25 years his junior. They were angry virtuosos who produced marvelous music. They also viewed pedagogy as suspect if it did not include stringent discipline—stringent to the limit—of students who aspired to become their successors.

Reiner and his fellow conductors, without letting go their old-world identities, became U.S. citizens and formed their own musical elite in America. By the time America entered World War II these musicians were enthusiastic supporters of the war effort. They saw America as indispensable to the worldwide struggle against fascism, under which many of them had personally suffered.

Toscanini—as head of the NBC Symphony Orchestra which younger conductors like Artur Rodzinski and Fritz Reiner had helped him create—cemented this European-American alliance by turning the NBC Symphony into one of the world’s leading voices against fascism. A point of pride for Toscanini and NBC was the U.S. premiere of Shostakovich’s vast Seventh Symphony, the “Leningrad,” which paid stirring tribute to the Soviet resistance against invading Nazi armies.

Multiple performances of the Leningrad Symphony on radio and in concert halls throughout America helped cement the U.S.-Soviet alliance that was so crucial to the war. Other Soviet musical compositions, notably Khachaturian’s impassioned Piano Concerto, received many performances to the evident delight of American concertgoers, who thereby expressed their kinship with the Soviet people under attack.

After the global victory over fascism, yet another generation of conductors developed second thoughts about any artistry or pedagogy that reeked of dictatorial impulses. For old battlers like Toscanini and Reiner, whose careers extended well into postwar America, traditional methods would always hold sway. But younger conductors like the Italian Claudio Abbado—born in the ’thirties, educated after the war—viewed the old methods with distaste. Abbado, a leader of the new musical generation, was wont to shake his head and say that high standards of playing were better obtained by other means.

As it happened, Abbado and his companions in the new music elite became easy targets for political activists whose idols were Antonio Gramsci, Herbert Marcuse, and Saul Alinsky. Those philosophers of revolution were teaching their own followers that the pathway to political power began with dominance over cultural institutions.

If the young revolutionaries of the 1950’s and early ‘sixties had had to deal with warrior-conductors like Toscanini and Reiner, they would have hit a brick wall. Instead, a new global culture opened its arms to the forces of protest. In that way, the field of classical music was primed for conquest by political adventurers who called themselves “progressives.” It was a term rather more agreeable than radicals, Marxists or communists.

In recent decades, new waves of insurgents have been wreaking havoc in the lives of classical musicians. The attackers are pursuing goals that have no relation to music. As such, their attacks are nihilistic in nature. In pursuit of nothing, the attacks have inflicted serious damage on musical artists who have done no harm to anyone. What’s more, the attackers have been getting full support from legacy-media outlets that are ready appendages of the so-called progressive cause.

The facts of the case are easily accessible, but few people know them. They deserve to be known.

{end of part one}

David Landau is the author most recently of Brothers from Time to Time, a history of the Castro revolution that The Washington Times called “Cuba’s answer to The Brothers Karamazov.”