Martinet

When I took over the chairmanship of the music theory/musicianship department, I inherited a problematic young teacher who had been a last-minute hire due to a colleague’s husband being unexpectedly transferred. A hasty search had thrown up several candidates who were both, to my mind, marginal at best. My department-chair predecessor chose the one he considered the least objectionable.

It was my first substantial chairmanship lesson: never hire anyone about whom you have significant doubts. Muddle through with the position unfilled if you have to. This lesser-of-two-evils chap hammered the lesson home as I began my chairmanship fielding a steady pitter-patter of student complaints. I hunted around for short-term solutions. The long-term solution was obvious. For the time being, I visited his classes, observed, made some suggestions, handed down some orders. One particular issue that bothered me was an impatient, testy, and downright waspish tone he took with his classes, and for no apparent reason. His snappishness was incessant and arbitrary.

In one of our post-session interviews, I brought up the testiness. It’s counter-productive, I told him. You may think you’re establishing your authority but all you’re actually doing is teaching your students how to avoid your verbal darts. Most of the time that means withdrawing instead of participating. Every time you snap at somebody you’re reducing your effectiveness as a teacher by a few percentage points. Lose enough points and you’ll be giving your students a better education by cancelling class.

Another issue was his bait-and-switch approach to questions, challenges, and expectations. He had a habit of changing the rules on students at sight; calling on somebody to sight-sing an assigned passage, he would suddenly change the piece to something unassigned. The student would protest: you asked us to prepare these for today’s class, not those. He would fling back that they needed to be ready for whatever came along; that’s the way a life in music works, you know.

Actually that’s dead wrong; any halfway responsible performing organization knows that scheduling is critical, that musicians need to know when they’re going to rehearse and perform Pieces X and Y, so they can prepare properly. But even more importantly, it is irresponsible for anyone to require a performer to prepare Piece X and then suddenly switch to Piece Y. What did Professor Snap expect his students to do? Have the entire solfège book prepared for every class?

My attempts to mediate weren’t particularly successful. His own musicianship was exceedingly weak—embarrassingly so—and his martinet behavior stemmed from his insecurity about teaching students whose innate gifts were notably superior to his. So I merely instructed him to maintain a more civil tone in class and refrain from bait-and-switch on assignments. Then I got cracking on a full-length search for his replacement.

I flashed back on that first challenge of my chairmanship after having read two biographies of conductor Fritz Reiner, while listening to a goodly portion of his near-legendary series of recordings with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. There’s no question that Fritz Reiner was a superb conductor. There’s also no question that he was a prickly, insecure, defensive, waspish, and often appallingly rude man. That he could be supportive and nurturing is well documented. The inevitable conclusion is that he deliberately chose to be nasty to people, particularly musicians in his orchestras or (far less often) guest soloists. It is an article of unexamined faith that his petty meanness was integral to his ability to supercharge and vitalize an orchestra. Yet meanness is not a de facto requirement; orchestras can be supercharged and vitalized by people who are not martinets. Apologists point to his spectacular reinvigoration of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra as proof. Reiner’s tenure was tantamount to a reign of terror. Although World War II accounts for part of the horrific turnover in the orchestra during Reiner’s era, only two players who started Reiner’s tenure were still there when he left. Thus he didn’t so much reinvigorate the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra as he replaced it with an altogether new orchestra of the same name.

The situation in Chicago was different; the orchestra had no need of rebuilding. Any thoughts to the contrary are instantly banished by the 1950-51 performances on Mercury Living Presence with Rafael Kubelik conducting. Reiner took over an orchestra that was already in fine fettle. Certainly he maintained the Chicago Symphony’s high standards throughout his decade on the podium. But did the orchestra get better? Debatable. Our view of his Chicago tenure is largely filtered through his RCA Victor discography, a radiant golden age of audio. Those big Reiner recordings—Also Sprach Zarathustra, Ein Heldenleben, Scheherazade, Pines of Rome—audiophile treasures one and all, represent a crest of sonic achievement that (to some) still waits to be bettered. (Audiophiliac nostalgia may well exaggerate their virtues.) Given that audiophiles, more than working musicians, tend to be the staunchest advocates of those Reiner recordings, one must allow that Reiner’s posthumous reputation owes at least as much to the superb engineering skills of Richard Mohr and Lewis Layton as to any musical sorcery.

Certainly nobody missed him when he was gone. It ended sourly, and the blame lies squarely with Reiner. Disliked by the orchestra and aloof from the Chicago public, his still-inexplicable decision to torpedo a major European tour—well after it was in final preparation between the CSO and the U.S. State Department—was the final nail in the coffin for not only the board, but also for that doyenne of journalistic vitriol, Claudia Cassidy. Initially supportive, she turned on Reiner with the same snarling ferocity that she had used to vanquish Kubelik from the CSO podium. Cassidy’s vengeance had an Old Testament bling to it, as she smited Reiner with the same searing thunderbolts he had hurled at other musicians. But Cassidy needn’t have bothered. Reiner’s tenure would have ended soon enough on its own.

Despite the RCA legacy, one rather wonders about it all. Had Reiner been less waspish, would he have lost control over the musicians of the CSO? I really doubt that. The CSO was an orchestra of elite virtuosi, the best in the business. Playing fantastically well was what they did, and it didn’t matter whether the guy on the podium was saint or sonofabitch. Consider the Boston Symphony Orchestra, where both Charles Munch and Pierre Monteux maintained cordial and friendly relationships with musicians, audiences, and board alike. The BSO wears a Living Stereo halo that shines just as brightly as Chicago’s; their Daphnis et Chloe, Pathétique, Symphonie fantastique, not to mention their collaborations with Jascha Heifetz and Gary Graffman, also stand tall in audiophile esteem. Boston was every bit as great an orchestra town as Chicago was in those days.

So it’s just possible—in fact, I think more than likely—that Reiner’s CSO was a powerhouse orchestra in spite of him, not because of him. What if Cassidy hadn’t hounded Kubelik out of town? He was a prince among conductors, a musician’s musician, and his synergy with the CSO is on abundant display on those pre-Reiner Mercury Living Presence monos. What about a CSO on Living Stereo with Kubelik at the helm instead of Reiner? Probably the recorded repertory would have been different; less Richard Strauss, more traditional repertoire. That could have been a good thing; those celebrated Reiner/CSO albums are mostly of second- and third-rate music, after all. (The notion of a Chicago without Claudia Cassidy renders up quite a few attractive alternate realities, but that’s a topic for some other article.)

Martinets like Reiner would not be tolerated in a modern-day orchestra, not with the long-overdue empowerment of the musicians over unjust treatment. Nowadays conductors work with their musicians, rather than against them, but that hasn’t resulted in orchestras devolving into cushy clubhouses with low musical standards. In fact, the opposite has occurred: today’s orchestras sustain dizzying standards of technical excellence. The martinet thing is ultimately counter-productive, as I told that misguided young teacher with his insecurity-engendered waspishness. Reiner was what he was and did what he did, but he was the worst possible model for young conductors to emulate. Thankfully, they didn’t. The conductor of the future was to be found in stellar musicians of the Pierre Monteux stripe, cultivated gentlemen who supported their orchestras and worked with their musicians instead of browbeating and belittling them. All of us—musicians, boards, and audiences alike—may be thankful that the Reiners of the podium are a receding memory.

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