Lead Like A Great Conductor

This is a really fantastic video, and as pithy an explanation of mastering the process of conducting as I've ever come across. Don't let anyone fool you by telling you that conducting is easy. In a sense it is. It's one of the easiest things in the world to do badly. And even after you master it (which I by no means have ever come close to doing) there's no guarantee of great performances. You have an obligation to prepare as much as you can, but there will always be variables that no leader can control.

To be successful at it is like being successful at any other leadership position, only moreso. A conductor is like a boss who looks over your shoulder every minute of your workday and corrects your mistakes in front of all your co-workers. If misunderstandings are unavoidable in any line of work, how much more potential for them is there when you're in a rehearsal process? But like any other leadership job there are three basic ways to go about it: control everything, delegate everything, inspire everyone in a partnership. Even if the third one sounds like the most attractive option, the sad reality remains that people don't always achieve success through inspiring others, painfully hard as they may try to. Some circumstances just can't be helped, and classical musicians invariably rank near the bottom of any survey that asks about job satisfaction, and unfortunately few conductors are both beloved and successful. It's a depressing truth of large-ensemble music-making that orchestras and choruses are based on pre-20th century models of governing, endowing a leader with autocratic power and subjecting themselves to his (almost invariably his) whims. I've played and sung under enough bad and mean conductors that at the same time that I coveted this profession for nearly my whole life, the idea of becoming a conductor made me slightly queasy.

As Itay Talgam implies, the best conductor he shows here is Carlos Kleiber. Indeed, in some ways he's probably the greatest conductor of the twentieth century and should be a role model for anybody who wants to conduct - except in one way which Talgam neglects to mention. Kleiber was as masterful a conductor as Marlon Brando was an actor, or Orson Welles was a film director or Tolstoy was a writer. Superlatives mean very little, but listening to Kleiber conduct Beethoven or Wagner or Strauss can often feel as though you've never understood the music until you've heard him direct it. In the words of one critic, it's an experience like Homer returning to us to recite the Iliad.

But operating at such a high level takes its toll, and as a result Kleiber suffered from concert nerves so profoundly debilitating that he could only conduct a few concerts a year for the last thirty-five years of his life. He canceled more concerts than he conducted, and in the final six years of his life he didn't conduct at all. Like all the aforementioned examples, operating at such an exalted level proved impossible to maintain in a normal career trajectory. He could have had any major position in the world and asked for any salary. But he turned them all down, and rather than settle for an inferior product, he gave up trying when he got less than ideal circumstances. To this day, most music-lovers have never realized what they missed by not hearing the concerts he never gave. Who knows how many more people would have been inspired to love classical music if only he had conducted more?


(The storm movement. From his only ever public performance of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony.)