Show me an orchestra that likes its conductor and I'll show you a lousy conductor.

- Goddard Lieberson (1911-1977), American recording producer

WHEN THE LATE New York Times critic Harold Schonberg started preparing his much-admired 1967 book The Great Conductors, he found that up-to-date secondary literature on the topic hardly existed in English. Even now, the field attracts far less research than one might suppose. We can ascribe part, at any rate, of this neglect to the subject's irksomeness for unreconstructed Marxist deadheads. After all, great conductors are an innately authoritarian breed, never more so than when purporting to be mystical dreamers or (latterly) backslapping democrats.

This fact aggravates the difficulties of pressing them into the service of undergraduate fetishes like "history from below." It also leaves the field wide open for tabloid gossips, tireless in churning out reams of lubricious pseudo-scholarship about whichever maestro they despise most. If the maestro has left caches of idiotically imprudent correspondence, all the better.

Raymond Holden, himself a conductor of note, teaches at London's Royal Academy of Music. This is a case where a book's subtitle reveals much more than its title: Holden's concern lies with specifically Austro-German musicians. Seven of Holden's subjects are familiar to every musical literate: Wagner, Mahler, Richard Strauss, Otto Klemperer, Bruno Walter, Wilhelm Furtwängler, and Herbert von Karajan. The other three remain known primarily to music historians: Hans von Bülow (1830-1894), Liszt's son-in-law and Cosima Wagner's first husband; Arthur Nikisch (1855-1922); and Felix Weingartner (1863-1942). To his credit, Holden avoids all prurience; he also knows performing history backwards, upside-down, and inside-out, so that The Virtuoso Conductors plugs a regrettable gap. Unfortunately too much of its prose is simply dull, and though it greatly surpasses Schonberg's tour d'horizon in its fine detail and scholarly apparatus, it cannot match Schonberg's verve or character delineation.

Moreover, sometimes Holden furnishes opinions without ancillary factual evidence, as in his implied reproach of conductors outside his chosen geographical area: "Unlike the Italian, Russian, British and American schools [of conducting]," Holden writes, "that of Central Europe grew out of the music itself." Yet did not the entire outlook of Toscanini, for example (both lauded and denounced for his textual rigorism), "gr[o]w out of the music itself"? Were Russian, British, and American conductors pushing some non-musical agenda? If so, what? We are not told.

Poor copy-editing periodically trips Holden up, with an incorrect date for Walter's death (he died in 1962, not 1961), and with crucial words or syllables elided: Walter seeks to "adopt some of hero's podium gestures", while Strauss "had not been a particular [sic] effective third conductor." And must we really be informed afresh in every single chapter that Don Giovanni is by Mozart, or the Eroica Symphony by Beethoven?

At least Holden perceives Wagner's revolutionary importance on the rostrum, as elsewhere. Before Wagner, the German-speaking lands' most eminent conductors had been Weber, Mendelssohn, and Louis Spohr. For all three artists, conducting was merely what they did when not playing music or writing it. Spohr's violinistic brilliance attracted comparison with Paganini's; Weber and Mendelssohn ranked with the greatest 19th-century pianists, Mendelssohn being in addition a leading organist. Wagner, by contrast, lacked any marketable aptitude as instrumentalist to fall back on. Thus, for him, the baton constituted not a toy but a way of life. There is a good reason why, when composing the climax to Tannhäuser, he made the protagonist's staff burst symbolically into flower.

Prototypical also was Wagner's itinerant apprenticeship in small opera houses, those training camps for subsequent Central European conductors until almost yesterday. Such men gained their expertise in opera first, and in purely orchestral events second, if at all. Monarchical Germany's abundance of miniature sovereign states assisted music-making no end. The Teutonic conducting tradition showed itself as hospitable as any Habsburg emperor towards outsiders of talent; witness Mahler, born in what is now the Czech Republic; Nikisch from Hungary; and Weingartner from Croatia.

Bülow held the dubious distinction of being the first internationally respected conductor who never achieved any stature as a composer. This whetted his tyranny, as artless and uncalculating a phenomenon as that of Ivan the Terrible, whom in facial terms Bülow somewhat resembled. A Cologne newspaper, conceding Bülow's musical mastery, griped: "Alas, this man does not only perform; he also talks." At times even his formidable command of verbal abuse failed to convey his meaning: confronted with one negligible composer who sought a verdict on a piece he had written, Bülow expressively vomited. Withal, he drove himself 50 times harder than he drove others. In 1876 he recklessly committed himself to give 172 American concerts; he fell so sick that he could manage only 33, and lost a fortune through breaching his contract.

So magnificent a pianist as to make Liszt himself sit up, Bülow had not a selfish or manipulative corpuscle in his whole body. The contrast with Mahler - pianistically insignificant, and engaged in a perpetual moondance of Mahler-worship - is obvious, however notable the resemblances between both conductors' vituperative rehearsal methods. Holden emphasizes a fact which Mahlerian hagiographers studiously suppress: Mahler's mania for rewriting every Mozart opera he conducted, in the apparent belief that Wolfgang Amadeus had nothing to teach him about composition. Naturally Viennese who lamented such high-handedness were, in Mahler's own word, "rabble".

Nikisch preferred persuading orchestral members to bullying them; players welcomed his presence, less because of his musicality than because he kept rehearsals short. Whereas Bülow and Mahler died too soon to leave phonographic evidence of their musical leadership, Nikisch occasionally entered recording studios. The results can please only the ear of faith, ruined as they are by pre-1914 sound quality, which singers and the piano could survive, but which made any orchestra seem like a vaudeville band underneath a blanket.

Weingartner - benefiting from the 1920s' quite spectacular technological improvements - left numerous discs, engineered vividly enough to make perfect musical sense. This alone would justify Weingartner's reputation as the first "modern" conductor; so did his podium style, as crisp and classical as Wagner's, on his own account, was improvisatory and apocalyptic. Crisp and classical by contemporaries' standards, that is, not by ours. Weingartner permitted his string-players to slide between notes in a manner foreign-sounding nowadays, but wholly conventional before World War II.

If Weingartner and Walter evoked Nikisch in their musicianship's unforced humanity, Strauss harked back to Wagner's precursors, in that he treated conducting as rather a sideline. Bülow called Strauss "Richard III', maintaining that after "Richard I" (Wagner), there could be no second. Holden speaks highly of Strauss the recording artist: more highly than do most hearers of Strauss' records. When tackling Mozart or Beethoven, "Richard III" allowed gross orchestral indiscipline, not to mention frenetic speeds that suggested simple eagerness to take the money and run. He polished off Mozart's Symphony No. 40 in fewer than 22 minutes. While he did much better in his own music, even there he could display remarkable slackness, entrusting the first two sides of his 1917 Don Juan recording to his precocious assistant, George Szell.

Like other Strauss scholars - as opposed to politically correct mass-media girly-boys - Holden acquits Strauss of "Nazi" predilections. On this theme he observes with commendable understatement, "the hostile stance of some commentators seems difficult to justify." Holden exhibits an equally judicious approach to the wild, bardic Furtwängler, who stayed (as did Strauss) in Germany during the Third Reich.

In Furtwängler's case this abode may have had some vague connection with the government's confiscating of his passport. Exonerated by a postwar denazification tribunal, Furtwängler accepted a 1948 offer of the Chicago Symphony's permanent conductorship, only to find that though the U.S. Army might have cleared him, the New Class had not. A rent-a-mob campaign (ultimately successful) to keep him out of the States anticipated, in every detail, our own era's Foxman-led strategies against The Passion of the Christ. Permanent honor belongs to those Jewish artists who condemned the anti-Furtwängler hysterics; they included Walter - genuinely grieved by his long-time rival's humiliation - and Yehudi Menuhin.

In 1955, the year after Furtwängler's death, Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic visited America: whereupon marching picketers waved banners adorned with musicologically cerebral slogans like "Tonight at Carnegie Hall The Musical Dictators of the Nazi Régime." Karajan, admittedly, had a NSDAP membership card - as an ambitious 25-year-old in 1933, he could hardly have held prestigious musical posts without one - but his decision to marry a half-Jewish lady, in 1942 at that, suggests a certain subversive streak.

Klemperer, for his part, fled Germany once Hitler took power; still, as early as 1946 - not having a Podhoretz around to teach him that all Teutons are Nazis - he actually returned for a while to German soil. He strove, as he put it, "to heal the wounds." This was by no means the least quixotic episode in a career which began in 1906, ended only in 1971, included being thrashed on stage with a riding-crop by a jealous husband, and transcended not only bouts of manic-depression but a Lucky-Jim-type incident in which he accidentally set alight his own bedclothes. Nevertheless, he once met his match at a New York Philharmonic rehearsal. Accounts vary as to whether he was chastising a specific player or merely delivering a monologue on metaphysics. Anyway, the Italian-born principal oboist Bruno Labate interrupted Klemperer in mid-sentence by shouting: "Klemp, ya talka too much!"

They don't make them like that any more; nor like Karajan, who well before his 30th birthday seems to have directed every opera of the slightest renown. Karajan's death in 1989 really did mark, in a sense altogether different to Fukuyama's, "the end of history." Most younger conductors, whatever their national origin, have been a consistently humdrum lot: Kapellmeisterisch, to use the German pejorative. A particularly depressing syndrome is that of those Central Europeans - Christoph von Dohnányi, Kurt Masur, and Wolfgang Sawallisch are three instances - who do exciting work with Austro-German ensembles, obtain green cards for America, and there sink into directorial torpor. Probably our established musical leaders are third-rate for the same reasons that our established political leaders are (at the kindest possible estimate) third-rate: moral funk, a soul-destroying addiction to consensus, and hallucinogenic egalitarianism. When those old enough to have heard all the 20th century's indisputable conducting giants in live performance are all dead - and they soon will be - then, to quote Holden's justly cheerless words, "Western art music will have lost one of its greatest treasures."

R. J. Stove lives in Melbourne, Australia.

© The American Conservative, 2006